Lillian Alling by Susan Smith-Josephy

Preface

    Lillian Alling was a remarkable woman and her adventures intrigued me from the first moment I heard about her. However, I never meant to write a book about her.
    I first became interested in Lillian when I read a small blurb about her in our local historical society’s newsletter. Her story seemed preposterous: there was no way a woman could have walked from New York to Siberia. So I did some idle research online and found a few websites. Read some library books. Found some mentions of her in anthologies of women adventurers and volumes about eccentrics. I started making photocopies of the articles I found and checked every reference in every article. Soon I had a two-foot-high stack of paper. I also kept a record of everything on my computer. I told friends about my interest in Lillian, and people started emailing me with more articles and names of people to contact. Finally I put up a website, www.lillianalling.ca, to announce my intention of writing a book. This generated more emails and more letters.
    I kept writing to museums, archives and authors who’d written about Lillian and to anyone else who might be interested. I bombarded the local library with inter-library loan requests for related works on the history of the places that she visited and the people with whom she came in contact. I met, via email and letters, people who were experts on trails and trekking, the 1920s, the British Columbia Provincial Police force and so much more. Other writers who had done some research on Lillian mailed me either their manuscripts or their piles of research articles—or both. I contacted descendants of some of the key people whom she had met on her journey, and I was thrilled to learn that they had been told stories about her. These people were kind enough to allow me to interview them, and they supplied photos of the ancestors who had told them the stories. I travelled a portion of Lillian’s route in British Columbia, particularly the Pine Pass area and the road from Hyder and Stewart to Hazelton and Smithers, and took the ferry to Prince Rupert.
    And just as the telegraph and other new technologies helped Lillian to travel such long distances and to have her story precede her wherever she went as she crossed Canada and entered Alaska, even newer technologies helped me to find her again more than eighty years later. While this book represents three years of research and writing, without the Internet, it would have taken many more years and dollars and would not have been as comprehensive. Of course, online research is not a substitute for visiting people and places, but Lillian’s journey was so long ago and crossed such a vast area that corresponding via email with people in the places she travelled through seemed like the obvious choice.
    Sometimes I was lucky enough to find relevant travel journals or newspaper articles that had first-hand information about Lillian and her trek. At other times I followed clues and leads from secondary sources and articles. I figured out her route by going over old documents, and I wrote to small-town museums and archives along that route to see if they had any new information. Often they didn’t. Sometimes they came up trumps, digging into their old files, copying photos for me, and cheering me on through emails and letters.
    Some people have called Lillian Alling crazy, but I came to love Lillian Alling, the eccentric.
    I came to know a woman who had drive and courage and single-mindedness. She was a loner and an independent thinker who didn’t like crowds too much, but preferred the wide-open spaces where she could be free and be herself. She was reserved but readily accepted help and was cooperative with authorities. Although she appears to have had quite a temper when she was under pressure, she seems to have stoically tolerated being cornered by people or forced indoors by the weather or institutionalized because she knew she would soon be on her