Free Lillian Alling by Susan Smith-Josephy Page A

own and outdoors again. To me, she seems to have been a reasonable human being on a very difficult quest.
    *
    Lillian Alling’s tale has been fictionalized a number of times, probably because her spirit resonates with the romantic in all of us. She has been the subject of at least two novels. She inspired Amy Bloom’s
Away,
though the author is skeptical of the real Lillian’s existence, and Canadian writer Sherry Coffey is turning her MFA thesis into a book about her. Additionally, her life has been covered in the graphic novel
Lillian the Legend
by Kerry Byrne and in the play
All the Way to Russia With Love
by Susan M. Fleming, which was staged at the Ottawa Fringe Festival. Ted Eames has written an epic poem about her. A film about Lillian by Daniel Janke of Northern Town Films may be underway. A 1994 French film,
La piste du télégraphe
(The Telegraph Route) was written and directed by Liliane de Kermadec. In October 2010 the Vancouver Opera Company staged the Canadian debut of
Lillian Alling,
the opera, to critical acclaim. Most recently her story has been featured in a short skit by the Dawson Museum in the Yukon as part of their Lillian Alling display.
    I share Lillian Alling’s true story with you now in the hope that you will enjoy reading about her. I also share it in the hope that someone, somewhere, holds the final clue that can help solve the mystery of what happened to Lillian Alling.

Chapter Two: Crossing Canada—Spring 1927

    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