Despite extensive research in museums, archives and libraries across Canada, I was unable to find any verifiable documents confirming the route, the method of travel or the timetable for Lillian Alling’s journey between her December border crossing at Niagara Falls in 1926 and her arrival in Winnipeg the following spring. However, it is possible to piece her route together by examining the usual routes and documented adventures of other foot travellers at that time as well as the legends and stories about Lillian’s own travels. Her route would probably have taken her first to Hamilton, then Toronto, directly north to the mining town of Sudbury and then west on what would later become part of Ontario Highway 17 (and still later the Trans-Canada Highway) to Sault Ste. Marie. As no road over the top of Lake Superior existed at that time, she would have had to follow local roads and the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks to Kenora and thence to Winnipeg. (The road over the top of Lake Superior was not constructed until the late 1950s as a result of the Trans-Canada Highway Act.)
In conversations later in her journey she insisted that she walked the entire distance across Canada, and if she walked approximately eight hours per day through the rough up-and-down terrain of the Canadian Shield, it would have taken her at least two months to walk the 1,300 miles (2,100 kilometres) from Niagara Falls to Winnipeg where, according to one source, she arrived around March 1, 1927.1 Winter, however, was not the best time to be setting out on a journey through Canadian Shield country. Sudbury’s average temperature in January is -13.7oC and in February -12.7oC, while the average snowfall in January is 54 cm and in February 44.8 cm. Sault Ste. Marie averages -10.5oC in January and -19.7oC in February with average snowfall of 81.7 cm in January and 42.8 cm in February. Alternatively, she may have stayed in Niagara Falls or Toronto from December 1926 until the spring of 1927 before embarking on her travels westward. But if then she walked the entire distance from Niagara Falls to Winnipeg, the date for her arrival there would be much later than March 1, and this would also make it impossible for her to arrive in Hazelton, BC, in September—which she did. It is also possible, however, that she used some of the twenty dollars that she had on her person when she crossed the border to take the train at least part of the way west to Winnipeg. However, even at 1927 train fares of approximately two cents per mile, this may have been too much money for her to spend. On the other hand, she may also have accepted rides as it is known that she did so later in her journey.
An extensive article about Lillian Alling written by Richard W. Cooper and published in the magazine Western People in 1985 describes Lillian’s journey west from Winnipeg:
About March 1, 1927, she arrived in Winnipeg. Here she felt the most at home, for many Winnipeg people spoke her language. She stayed until the end of March, working as kitchen help in Child’s Restaurant on Portage Avenue, where she was known as a good worker who kept to herself. She was next seen in Neepawa, Manitoba, where she stopped with a farm family for a few days, helping around the farm in return for food.
The next reasonably accurate report of Lillian Alling came from Kamsack, Saskatchewan. Then there was a definite report of the lone woman hiker in Wakaw, Saskatchewan, where she checked with the RCMP detachment on the shortest route to Alaska. Police records from Wakaw indicate she arrived about the end of April; she had averaged more than 30 kilometres a day on her journey northwest.
On May 2 Alling set out from Wakaw and was not heard of again until she appeared in Grande Prairie, Alberta, on June 15, 1927. A farmer’s wife said the Russian woman was then wearing some new clothing. She worked as household help in a Grande Prairie farm until early in July then again set out on what had now become an obsession. Her farm employer gave her a lift to Pouce Coupe where she crossed into British Columbia.2
Although the travel time and route for Lillian’s journey across the Prairies as given in Cooper’s article are perfectly reasonable, I was unable to confirm any of the details he stated. I made two requests to the RCMP for access to information on her presence in Wakaw that summer and all other points mentioned in Cooper’s article but they turned up nothing, and I found no corroborating information in museums, archives or microfilmed newspapers.
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It is possible that Lillian did walk from Pouce Coupe to Hazelton, but the route was by no means easy at that time. There were no highways in northern BC. Between Grande Prairie and Pouce Coupe there was a country road that farmers and other country folk used to travel between the two provinces. From there old pack trails existed that had evolved from the original First Nations trails. If Lillian made it through the Peace River area, then she could have used the northern fur trade routes to get to Fort St. James, from which pack trails led directly to Hazelton, her next known stop. This route also had the advantage of ferries across the larger lakes.
R.G. Harvey, former deputy minister of Highways for British Columbia and an expert on early travel routes in the province, agrees that “if she came through Pine Pass [which today is the route of the John Hart Highway (#97)] in 1927, she must have used the Indian trail. It was one of the many trails used by the Indians of the Interior to come to the coast to trade buffalo hides for salmon and oolichan [oil]. From there she could either have gone south to Fraser Lake and followed the [Canadian National] railway to Hazelton … or she could have gone north to Germansen Landing and then west by a trail to Hazelton … This trail was built in the 1870s to give access to the Omineca gold field and was a continuance of the old Hudson’s Bay Brigade trail [and was] probably quite usable in 1927.”3 Although Mr. Harvey says that “he would like to think she took the miners’ trail,” the route via Fraser Lake and the railway line seems the most likely one as it is shorter, and she is known to have stopped in the village of Evelyn, just west of Smithers on the Canadian National line.
Alternatively, Cooper may have been misinformed and Lillian may not have gone so far north as Grande Prairie, instead walking along the rail line through Jasper and the Yellowhead Pass. It was a well-maintained line and very popular with tourists by that time. The Omineca Herald of August 5, 1927, reported that “the special summer excursion run by the Canadian National Railways from Vancouver return to Vancouver via Jasper Park and Prince Rupert, passed through here last Sunday morning. It was well patronized.”4 And finally, it is possible that she took the route through Banff and the Kicking Horse Pass, although this would have added many more miles to her journey.
The summer of 1927 was the hottest on record in the Hazelton area,5 but fortunately by September when Lillian would have been tramping through the Bulkley Valley the weather had cooled, temperatures topping out at 25oC. It is here, almost 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometres) from Winnipeg—the last place east of the Bulkley Valley I can verify that she visited—that I was able to pick up Lillian Alling’s trail again. People were becoming curious about the lone woman hiker and extended hospitality to her. Northwest of Smithers, in the farming community of Evelyn, Mollie Rolston, née Owens, was just six years old when Lillian Alling stopped at her family’s home. In an interview with David Gordon Duke, published in the Vancouver Sun on October 13, 2010, she recalled that
A lot of people travelled the railway … We lived right on the railway, and people dropped in because they wanted a meal or place to stay … Of course, in my day six-year-olds didn’t listen to adult conversation.
But Mrs. Rolston did remember Lillian’s appearance on that occasion.
She wasn’t blond. She had a head cloth that she used to protect herself from the insects. She was given clothes by people along the way. She had a very plain face, and she was lucky if she was able to wash herself much. When she came to us, she had long hair and wore ordinary tennis shoes. No doubt she wore out boots as she went, but she was in tennis shoes then. She carried a cardboard box that she had everything in, about the size and shape of a beer case; she had a rope or something around it. And she wore a dress.6
While I was researching her journey, I often wondered if she was ever afraid, and I realized that she probably was. But by the time she got to Hazelton, she had been about nine months on the road, and as her physical abilities became stronger and she honed her bushcraft, fear had most likely turned to confidence. She seemed barely bothered by trials that would challenge even the most seasoned of hikers. She had walked up mountains, through rough terrain where there was no path, through floods, freezing weather and searing hot sun. Canada is a cold and snowy place in the winter, but in the summer the daily temperatures can reach 40oC with no wind. Yet on she walked. She had become a true survivalist in every sense of the word.