One of the two photos of Lillian taken by Marie Murphy in the summer of 1928. Atlin Museum & Archives.
One of the two photos of Lillian taken by Marie Murphy in the summer of 1928. Atlin Museum & Archives.
Most people living in North America today, with the exception of indigenous peoples, are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. Many of us are familiar with the immigrant story: the push away from the old country as the result of economic pressures, social and political oppression or religious persecution and the trip across the Atlantic or Pacific fraught with dangers, discomfort, illness and sometimes death. In this myth, the huge step of leaving one’s homeland then surviving the ordeal of an ocean crossing was rewarded by a tidy reception at some immigration depot like Ellis Island or perhaps Halifax’s Pier 21. Then, once the individual was legitimized in the new country of choice, the heroic story culminated in the struggle to settle, raise a family, adapt and succeed. This is the successful North American dream.
Certainly this immigrant experience is usually painted as positive. But for some people, leaving home and facing the overwhelming challenges of a new country can become an intolerable situation from which they must escape. So what happens to those immigrants who do not succeed on the terms of the new country? What of the newcomers who just do not fit in, who reject the culture and mores of their new land? For them the dream has been rendered meaningless or has turned into a nightmare. They must either endure a life of misery in their adopted country or return home. Between 1908, when US immigration authorities began keeping records on departures, and 1920, three out of every eight immigrants returned home to their native lands. And by the Great Depression of the 1930s, more people were returning home than entering the country.1
From the few words Lillian Alling spoke on that subject, it appears that she had a hard time as an immigrant so she chose to return to Europe. Her drive to return home was not that unusual. It was the length and scope of her journey that were different than most. She chose to walk back to Europe and to minimize her ocean crossing to the 50 miles (80 kilometres) between Alaska and Siberia. Did she really walk from New York to Alaska through Canada and eventually end up in Siberia? Yes, she did. Her story, in fact, spans the globe—from Europe, across the Atlantic, across the whole North American continent and then across the Bering Strait to Asia.
Improvements in transportation and communication made her journey possible. The popularity of motor vehicle travel had necessitated the construction of highways and roads. Railways had been built from coast to coast, and even though she never travelled by train as far as is known, the rail lines provided pathways where roads did not exist. The telegraph, and the telegraph lines in particular, gave her a trail to follow through the wilderness of northern British Columbia. But although it is known that she sometimes accepted a ride and she used boats where necessary, for the most part history has recorded that she made the entire trip using the oldest mode of transport: walking.
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But the story of Lillian Alling’s journey starts and ends with mysteries—both her origins and her fate are unknown. The woman known to history as Lillian Alling crossed from the state of New York into Canada at Niagara Falls, Ontario, on Christmas Eve 1926. She was alone. It was raining that day but mild, the temperature just a little below zero. When the Customs official asked her the routine entry questions, she answered politely in English with an eastern European accent.
“Last place of residence?”
“Rochester, New York.”
“What is your religion?”
“Catholic.”
“Where were you born?”
“Poland.”
According to the border crossing documentation, Lillian also stated that she had lived in Toronto from 1915 to 1921. She said she was thirty years old, married, and a housewife and that she planned to continue being a housewife upon arrival in Canada. Lillian may have meant “housekeeper,” as she was travelling without a husband and had performed domestic work in New York. She said she could speak English and gave her destination as Niagara Falls, Ontario. (She didn’t bother to mention that Niagara Falls was just the first stop on a journey across northern North America that would take her more than 6,000 miles (9,650 kilometres) and last almost three years.) She said she had no known relative or friend as her contact person in Canada. She also gave “none” as the answer to the name of her nearest relative. She was carrying twenty dollars with her.2
Although sometimes on her trek across the continent, Lillian Alling was referred to as Russian, she made it quite clear in her response to the Customs officer at Niagara Falls that she had been born in Poland. Some of the later confusion may have been due to the inability of Canadians to distinguish between a Polish and a Russian accent. However, this confusion also arose because from 1815 to 1919, Poland was divided between Prussia, Russia and Austria-Hungary, which resulted in Polish immigrants to Canada being categorized by early census takers as Russians, Germans or Austrians.
Prior to 1890 most of the Polish immigrants came from the Kashub region in north central Poland, and they settled in Renfrew County, Ontario, but Poles from Galicia, in the South of Poland, arrived in far greater numbers between 1907 and 1914. As a result, most immigrants from eastern or central Europe were referred to as Galicians.3 Many immigrants in this group found urban life more appealing than agricultural labour and moved their whole families to the towns. Thus, if Lillian came from the Kashub region, she might have immigrated with her parents as early as 1896 when she was an infant. However, since she spoke with a Polish accent and she said that she had lived in Toronto from 1915 to 1921 and she had no known relative or friend in Canada, she probably came by herself as a young adult in the later wave of immigration from Galicia.
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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Canadian government kept no official records of people arriving in Canada from Europe. In fact, immigrants were not even required to apply to enter the country. Mary Munk of the Canadian Genealogy Centre, Client Services Division, Library and Archives Canada, explains:
Immigrants from Europe would buy a ticket for a ship sailing to Canada. They would be seen by a medical examiner to make sure they didn’t have any medical conditions such as blindness or tuberculosis. They did not require a visa. If they had a passport, they would have shown it upon boarding, but the Canadian government did not keep their passports.>4
And according to the Library and Archives Canada website:
Passenger lists (RG 76) were the official record of immigration during this period … The [ship’s passenger] lists contain information such as name, age, country of origin, occupation and intended destination. They are arranged by port and date of arrival, with the exception of some years between 1919 and 1924, when an individual Form 30A was used … Many immigrants to Canada came from the United States or sailed from Europe to American ports on their way to Canada. Prior to April 1908, people were able to move freely across the border from the United States into Canada; no record of immigration exists for those individuals.
Not all immigrants crossing the border were registered. Some crossed when the ports were closed or where no port existed. Many families were not registered because one or both parents had been born in Canada or they had lived there before, and they were considered “returning Canadians” rather than immigrants.
No record of a Lillian Alling, born in Poland, has been found on any available passenger list for ships coming from Europe and landing in either Canada or the US between 1896, her birth year, and 1926 when she turned up at the Niagara Falls Customs office. However, passengers from mainland Europe usually made their way to Great Britain where they boarded transatlantic ships at ports such as Liverpool, London and Glasgow to land in New York, Halifax or Quebec City. My searches of various online databases that have passenger lists for ships that left the UK in the appropriate time period reveal some names close to Lillian Alling’s but none are exactly the same.
Alling is not an unusual name. There are Allings in Estonia, England, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria. But it is certainly possible that Alling was not the name by which she was known in Poland; her name may have been anglicized to become Alling, either by her or by someone else, once she was in North America. In Poland her name may have been Oling, Aling, Eling, Ohling, Ehling or Ailing. Alling could also be a derivative of a Jewish name such as Olejnik, Olejnikov, Olejnikovskij, Olejskij, Olekhnovich, Olen, Olender, Olnderov and Olenov. 5 It is also possible that it was her married name or it was not her name at all, and she simply “borrowed” it to hide her real identity.
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Lillian told the Customs officer at Niagara Falls that she had lived in Toronto from 1915 to 1921, but a search of Ontario records revealed nothing conclusive. There were no Allings in the Toronto City directory for 1921 though there is one Lillian E. Allin—with no “g”—living at 1418 Gerard East. The name Lillian Gua appears on the 1911 Canadian census; the handwriting, however, is difficult to read, and although the first name is definitely Lillian, the last name is less certain. She was fourteen years of age, born in September 1896 in either Germany or Poland. She was a lodger and a factory worker. She is listed as a Polish Catholic living on King Street in Beamsville in the Niagara area, close to the southern shore of Lake Ontario. Could this be Lillian Alling? The age and place of birth are right and the town of Beamsville did have woollen mills, fruit-packing plants and a factory for making bushel baskets and trugs for the fruit-packing industry—all of them places where a young non-English-speaking girl could have found work.
When asked for her religion by the Customs officer, Lillian said that she was Catholic, so I thought it was possible she attended a church of that denomination while living in Toronto; St. Stanislaus, the main Polish Catholic Church in Toronto during that time, has no record of anyone named Lillian or a variation thereof for the period between 1914 and 1924.6 As she also told the Customs officer that she was married, I searched Ontario’s marriage records, but turned up nothing. “The Catholic Church in Ontario was the official record keeper for vital statistics, and they took that responsibility very seriously,” said Marc Lerman, director of archives for the Archdiocese of Toronto.7 No record of anyone with the first name Lillian marrying anyone with the last name Alling could be found. I double-checked by using the genealogical database, Ancestry.com, to search for a record of residence or marriage in Ontario, but had no success.
Lillian must have crossed the border into the United States some time between 1921 and 1926, but the government of Canada did not keep records of people leaving the country, including those moving to the United States. In fact, there was a continuous undocumented movement of new immigrants between the United States and Canada as late as 1924.
Lillian told the Customs officer that her last place of residence before returning to Canada was the city of Rochester, which in the early twentieth century was an important centre for the garment industry, especially for the manufacture of men’s clothing. I made a search of the available online databases and contacted various government agencies—both state and federal—for archival information. No records for Lillian were found at the US National Archives and Records Administration.8 Her name did not come up in State Department records because she was not an American citizen. I also checked the US naturalization records and the United States Social Security Indexes9 because in 1922 Congress passed the Married Women’s Act, also known as the Cable Act, which gave each woman a nationality of her own. Thus, whether Lillian was married or not, she could have applied for citizenship. But there is nothing in their records. No listings for an Alling groom and a Lillian bride were found in the New York City records or in those of the city of Rochester.10 I sent a request to the State of New York Department of Health, which is responsible for the vital records in that state, to look for any woman with the first name Lillian marrying any man with the last name Alling for the years 1920-1926. No record was found.11 Searching the US census records for New York State in both 1920 and 1930, I found a number of women named Lillian Alling, but all were born in the United States. Although the Rochester Directories for 1921 through 1926 have a number of Allings, none of these people has the first name Lillian. (The Allings were a prominent family who had a successful paper company in Rochester.) The records from the Church of the Latter Day Saints have nothing on Lillian. I can only hope that in the future more records will be available, and some traces of Lillian will be found in the State of New York.
Next I asked myself why Lillian Alling decided to go home to Poland and why she set out in 1926. To none of the people she met on her travels did she ever give the reason why she wanted to go home through Siberia. In fact, she never gave a reason why she wanted to go home at all.
Improvements in the economic situation in Poland may have influenced her decision to return. It has been estimated that between one-quarter and one-third of all immigrants from Poland who entered Canada in the early twentieth century returned to Poland either before 1914 or after the war was over in 1918.12 Those who returned after World War I did so in the hope that their newly independent republic would provide a brighter economic future, but those returning directly after the armistice were disappointed because war with Russia continued until the end of 1920, and political instability remained until 1926 when Marshal Pilsudski assumed the role of dictator.
It is also possible that she decided to go home because she felt she was no better off in North America. Although most Polish immigrants had come to this country and the United States to escape the hopeless economic situation in their own divided country, the jobs that many of the women among them found on this side of the Atlantic were not much better than slavery. In the 1920s immigrant female workers earned less than male workers doing the same job. They were fined for minor infractions, and employers sometimes made deliberate mistakes on paycheques. In addition, women employees were often charged for supplies; in the case of the garment industry the costs of thread and electricity were deducted from their cheques. Foreign workers, especially those from eastern Europe, were frequently excluded, alienated and insulted by their fellow workers and their employers.13 To escape discrimination on the basis of their ethnic origins, immigrant women often worked in the ghetto sweatshops of their own communities, which did not guarantee good working conditions but gave them the comfort of using their own language and customs. By far the majority of immigrants—85 percent in the case of Polish immigrants—chose to work for employers of their own nationality.14
Lillian may also have worked as a domestic servant while in North America. Irene Woodcock, who met Lillian in the settlement of Kuldo, near Hazelton, BC, in 1927, recalled some sixty years later that Lillian had said,
[S]he’d been brought over as a domestic by a doctor and his wife in New York City, and they didn’t treat her too good. All she did was work, work, work and they never gave her any money, at least, not enough that she could save to get home.15
By using the phrase “she’d been brought over,” Woodcock implied that Lillian’s stint as a domestic had occurred when she first came to North America—that is, before she claimed to have lived in Toronto—and she seems to have also believed that Lillian was only briefly here and had only worked at that one job. Although in some ways domestic workers had a good life compared to those who worked in factories, they often experienced sexual, physical or emotional abuse from their employers. Few of these cases were reported. Many domestic workers were also ill-treated financially; in most cases both the cost of their passage to North America and their living expenses were deducted from wages, and since in many cases their wages equalled their expenses, there was little opportunity to save or to send money home as would have been expected by their families in the old country.
What situation Lillian was leaving one can only guess, but if she was leaving an employer, Christmas Eve would have been a good time to do it. She probably had Christmas Day off from her job, and by leaving on Christmas Eve, she would have ensured no one would miss her until the day after Christmas. In addition, she may have felt that leaving the United States would make it more difficult for her employer to locate her. She may also have been spurred to return to Poland by news from her family there. In an article entitled “The Girl Who Walked Home to Russia” that appeared in The Bedside Coronet in 1962, author Allen Roy Evans wrote that Lillian had received a letter stating that her father, mother and brother had been sent to a Siberian prison camp. Her brother, Gregor, had been a minor government clerk, and as a member of the bourgeoisie, he would have been out of favour with the Soviets.16 Evans produces nothing to corroborate this story, but it makes sense because Lillian always said her destination was Siberia, not Poland. It also has the ring of truth since she did not acknowledge any ties on this side of the Atlantic. Although she told the Customs officer that she was married and that she was a housewife and planned to continue being a housewife upon arriving in Canada, she also listed no relative or friend as her contact person in Canada and answered “none” when asked to name her nearest relative. This would suggest that either there was no husband, or that she had put her marriage behind her, and that all members of her birth family had been left behind in Poland.
But why would Lillian choose to return to Europe by foot, when boat passage was clearly faster and much less arduous? Perhaps she was trying to return home undetected and she felt Siberia offered her an opportuity to slip into the country or maybe she realized she did not have the financial means to return any other way. In 1926 passage on a ship to northern Europe would have cost approximately two hundred dollars. The average annual wage for a woman in the textile industry in 1926 was eight hundred dollars for a ten-hour day: approximately four hundred dollars below the basic standard of living. Domestic workers like Lillian earned even less. Even if Lillian had worked steadily in the three years that it took for her to walk to Siberia, she could not have saved the money to buy a ticket even in steerage.
Evans said in his article that Lillian walked home rather than taking a boat because a waiter in New York stole her savings.17 We know this not to be true because she was carrying twenty dollars when she crossed the border into Canada. The twenty dollars probably represented months of savings and to Lillian it was a meagre but dependable resource for her long journey home.