Lillian Alling (7 page)

However, Lillian did not stop when she reached Hazelton. She walked a further 38 miles (61 kilometres) southeast through the Bulkley Valley to the town of Smithers, arriving there on June 19. It would have been a much shorter trek for her to walk from Hyder to Hazelton, then head directly north, but she had apparently been told by Oakalla Prison authorities to check in with the Provincial Police in Smithers before heading north on the trail again.
⁸
So she had walked the extra day into Smithers. Perhaps her unsuccessful encounter at Hyder, Alaska, had made her realize that, since the inland Canadian route was the only way north, she would have to comply with police requirements along the way.

Constable Andy Fairbairn of the British Columbia Provincial Police had been expecting Lillian, and he confirmed his encounter with her in an interview with
Vancouver Sun
reporter Donald Stainsby in 1963.
¹¹
Fairbairn had quizzed Lillian about her trip.

“Did you bum rides?” he asked her.

“I walked all the way. I tell you the truth,” she said. “I do not tell lies.” And this was partially true: although she had taken a ship to Hyder, she had walked from Hyder to Smithers.

Fairbairn remembered that “her face was smooth and clear, her hair, under the inevitable kerchief, was black and shiny.” He told Stainsby that she must have averaged between 30 and 40 miles (48 and 64 kilometres) a day on her journey. She asked Fairbairn to let her continue on towards Siberia, and the officer realized that with her proven travelling speed—she had left Stewart on June 7 and it was now just June 19—she might barely make it to the Yukon before the weather got bad, but he was still hesitant about giving her permission to continue because she was so ill-equipped.

“What will you eat? You have nothing.” Her packsack seemed woefully small.

“I eat anything,” she replied. “Leaves, berries, grass. Please let me go.”
¹²

Another part of Fairbairn's reluctance stemmed from the fact that an American hiker had attempted to walk the Telegraph Trail but had not made it very far. The
Omineca Herald
of June 20, 1928, reported:

Owen C. Eastman of Salem, Massachusetts, who blew into Hazelton some time ago and posed as a hiker of some ability, en route for Paris, returned to Hazelton on Tuesday [June 19] a wiser boy. He got as far as the fourth cabin on the telegraph line when he decided to retreat.
¹³

Constable Fairbairn finally agreed to let Lillian go further north on the condition that she report in at every cabin on the telegraph line until she reached Telegraph Creek.

”I will,” she said earnestly. “I give my word.”
¹⁴

So Lillian headed west again toward Hazelton, where she would turn north up the Telegraph Trail.

 

• (1)
  “The Gateway to the Mines of the Portland Canal District; the Mountain Anthracite Coal Fields and the Logical Railway Outlet for the Peace River Valley.” Pamphlet issued by the Stewart Advancement League, May 1928.
  
• (2)
  Potterton, L.A.N.
  Northwest Assignment
  . Kelowna, BC: Mosaic Enterprises, 1972, page 9.
  
• (3)
  Peter Caffall-Davis, email correspondence, March 21, 2009.
  
• (4)
  Potterton,
  Northwest Assignment
  , page 10.
  
• (5)
  Ibid., page 9.
  
• (6)
  Excerpt provided October 2006 by Margaret Vandenberg, Terrace, being a verbatim transcript from an eight-page report by T.D. McLean to the Assistant District Engineer, Department of Public Works, Province of BC, file 2-20-0, submitted to the Prince Rupert office on December 30, 1926. “Adopted 5 November 1953 on 104A, as identified on plans 14L23 and 16T293 [dates/titles not cited].” Source: BC place name cards, or correspondence to/from BC's Chief Geographer or BC Geographical Names Office.
  
• (7)
  Interview, George Simpson, September 2009, author's files.
  
• (8)
  By “Telegraph Trail,” we mean from Hazelton to Atlin. By “Telegraph Line,” we mean the entire line from start to finish.
  
• (9)
  Email correspondence from Eric Hallam, president of the British Columbia Provincial Police Veterans Association, March 3, 2008.
  
• (10)
  Ladysmith newspaper obituary, courtesy of Ladysmith Archive.
  
• (11)
  Fairbairn was retired and living in Ladysmith on Vancouver Island when the interview took place.
  
• (12)
  Stainsby, Donald. “She Walked 6,000 Miles to the Top of the World,”
  Vancouver Sun
  , Weekend Magazine, April 27, 1963.
  
• (13)
  Omineca Herald
  , June 20, 1928.
  
• (14)
  Stainsby. “She Walked 6,000 Miles.”
  

After meeting with Fairbairn in Smithers, Lillian immediately began backtracking to Hazelton. Her arrival there was noticed and reported in the June 20 edition of the
Omineca Herald
:

Lillian Alling, an old friend of the police force, blew into Hazelton this week en route to Echo Lake. She is on foot and makes on average of twenty miles a day. Last year she was in Hazelton and after a reasonable stay she was charged with vagrancy and drew a six month term in Okala [
sic
] from the magistrate. Lillie is a small woman, wiry and quite capable of taking care of herself.
¹

The route ahead of her was described by Winfield Woolf, who hiked up the Telegraph Trail a year after Lillian:

The existing gravel road continued thirty-five miles north of Hazelton, then ended in the woods ten miles beyond the last ranch. I soon found myself following a very faint trail over sharp ridges with only the Dominion Telegraph Line overhead to guide me. Nothing in all the forests and mountains surrounding me had been touched by the hand of man except the trail itself and the telegraph line. I knew that six or seven hundred miles of wilderness lay between me and the town of Atlin. Seven-thousand-foot snowy, glacier-laden peaks rose above me.
²

Constable Fairbairn sent a message to Ruxton Cox, the head telegrapher at Hazelton, who then tapped out a message to the linemen in the second, fourth, sixth and eighth cabins—the only cabins that were manned after 1925—to look out for Lillian, who would be walking north along the trail they knew so intimately. As she reached each cabin, the men tapped out a return message to Cox to say that she had come and gone safely.

In northern BC the long days of midsummer would have allowed Lillian to cover great distances in one day, but this trip could not have been easy. Even though the Telegraph Trail from Hazelton to the Yukon border offered an established route, it was really no more than a rough mule trail through hundreds of miles of mountains, valleys and rough terrain. Of course, it was never intended for use as a walking track. It was constructed for the use of the men who repaired the line and for the annual pack trains delivering provisions to the telegraph cabins, although after it was established, certain sections of it were also used by First Nations hunters, trappers and some big-game hunters.
³
Lillian would have had to ford creeks, clamber over rock falls, climb through narrow passes and cross rivers. On a good trail she walked fast, but in these conditions she probably made no more than 10 miles (16 kilometres) a day.

Lillian used up a lot of calories walking eight or more hours a day up and down mountains and fording streams along the way, but even though she must have purchased some supplies in Hazelton, her pack could not hold a month's worth of food. By most accounts she carried no more than the basic fare of bread and tea, though she must have had some way to boil water for her tea and perhaps carried a small pot or kettle in her pack. This meant, of course, that she made herself a fire each night when she was on the trail. There is no evidence that she ever caught fish or small game, though they were plentiful throughout the area and other Telegraph Trail hikers recount fishing, trapping or shooting their food. Instead, Lillian reported eating berries, and fortunately they would have been in abundance in summer and well into the fall. She could have found plenty of huckleberries, bush cranberries, soapberries, bear or thimble berries and saskatoons. It is also known that she accepted meals from people she met on the way, and it is certain she would not have survived without this help.

As she called at each telegraph cabin, she would have begun to understand Constable Fairbairn's request that she report to the men along the line. The food, shelter, company, encouragement and human contact she received at these cabins must have helped to keep her going. In fact, the telegraph men with their wood cookstoves and shelves of foodstuffs would have been critical to her survival.

The telegraph men chatted back and forth over their wire to check in with each other and pass on messages, and they, of course, passed on news of Lillian's condition and her pace as she walked her way north from Hazelton. They began taking turns to meet her on the trail halfway between the cabins. This involvement helped to make Lillian's progress an interesting story not just for the linemen but for the area newspapers as well, because they used the telegraph to send and receive stories. It would have been natural that the
Whitehorse Star
and other area newspapers would pick up the story of the woman who walked the Telegraph Trail. Amazingly, there are no accounts of her complaining even when she was exhausted to the point of collapsing. She apparently accepted the physical and mental hardships without a word of complaint. She kept up with the winter-hardened telegraph operators and linesmen of the Yukon Telegraph, and they must have respected her for that and been spurred on to help her.

By the time she reached Cabin Eight, 150 miles (240 kilometres) from Hazelton, it was the first week in July and she was exhausted, bug-bitten, sunburned and hungry. She had been walking for about two weeks and it had been a struggle even for someone as fit as she was. Greeting her at Cabin Eight were telegrapher Charlie Janze and lineman Jim Christie, who described Lillian as being nearly incoherent upon her arrival.

Vancouver Sun
reporter Donald Stainsby, in his 1963 article about Lillian, wrote:

Janze and Christie were astonished at her appearance. Her dress and blouse were in shreds, her shoes battered. Her smooth complexion, which Fairbairn had noted in Smithers, was now pitted by the bites of mosquitoes, blackflies and other insects. The wind and sun had tanned and roughened it. The way she dropped her knapsack and slumped into a chair told the men how completely exhausted and hungry she was.
⁴

They gave her food, and Janze, who thought her trip was foolhardy, tried to persuade her to stay at the cabin and rest for a few days. Tough though she was, the walk, the environment, the lack of food, and the insects had all taken a toll, and she needed rest in order to survive the next leg of the trip. Janze warned her of the dangers of the high water and creek runoffs that she would be facing on the trail ahead. The conditions were awful and he did not want to see her risking her life, but she was determined to press on, and as was the way of the telegraph men, they were courteous and offered their guest as much assistance as possible. Janze, being the smaller of the two men, fashioned a pair of sturdy trousers for Lillian using an old pair of his own. He also gave her two shirts, a kerchief for her head, a hat, a pair of boots and two pairs of socks to make the boots fit. The men were curious about her, but she did not reveal much.