Whitehorse Star, 1927

The Mystery Woman Lillian Ailing...

Part 1 0f 3

No one took any notice of the young woman who sat in New York's public library day after day. While other people's requests for reference material differed, hers was always the same - maps. She wanted every map to North American they had on file.

It was the first act in one of the most amazing journeys the world has known.

Painstakingly, the woman would run her coarse hands over the pages, copying main features of the landscape on pieces of paper. From the lush green of New York state, she traced a line across to the forests of Minnesota, up into the Canadian Prairies, through the mountains of British Columbia. And then, with a frown, she'd study the bleak route north.

Her dark eyes would narrow as the changing colors on the maps indicated the increasingly rugged terrain. It certainly wouldn't be easy, she must have thought. Yes, she kept tracing the Yukon, across Alaska. Yes, it was the route she would have to take.

Her fingers stopped only when they had reached the shore of the Bering Strait. There only a tantalizing fraction of an inch away, was her goal - Siberia. But that fraction represented 50 miles of frigid water. How was she to traverse that? It was, she resolved, a problem she would solve when she came to it. Now, there were more immediate things to think about.

Pulling her shawl around her frail shoulders and tucking wisps of dark hair into her head scarf, she returned her maps to the desk and left the library for the last time. It was spring in the year 1927.

Soon after, Lillian Ailing walked unnoticed out of New York, a figure less than five feet tall and weighing about 100 pounds, her stride reflecting a degree of determination unsurpassed in human endeavor.

Later, it would become known that she was 25, that she had been in service to a New York family, and that she hated North America. Little else is known about the mystery woman, except she is thought to have been Russian and would tell anyone who asked where she was heading: "I go to Siberia!"

But even in that there is a mystery, for T.E.E. Greenfield, an R.C.M.P. officer who met her on her 6,000 mile (9,700 kilometre) journey, claimed 46 years later that she carried a U.S. landing card showing her place of birth as being Poland and that her real name was Ailing.

One newspaper account said: "Rumor had it that she embarked on her bitter trek after learning that her family had been sent to Siberia for confinement."

Lillian would say only that she decided on her long hike when she discovered the boat fare to the Soviet Union was so expensive. Nothing is recorded of her journey across the continent except that she walked through Chicago, St. Paul, up into Winnipeg and across to Vancouver.

From the records, we pick up her tail in central B.C. at lonely Cabin 2 on the Yukon Telegraph Line.

It was Sept. 10, 1927. Bill Blackstock was startled to hear a knock on the door of his isolated telegraph outpost, and amazed to see the ragged little figure standing outside, her brown skirt in tatters, her shirt torn and her running shoes flapping from wear. Who was she? Where had she come from? What was she doing here dressed in rags, and with winter approaching?

His little visitor gave him no answers. "I go to Siberia", she kept repeating. The telegrapher, one of many spaced between 30 and 50 kilometers apart to repair the 1,600 kilometre communications link that angled north eastward through the wilderness from Hazelton to Dawson City, sent a message to the police telling them of his surprise visitor.

Constable George Wyman hiked the 33 kilometers from Hazelton out to the cabin and later recorded his meeting with Lillian. "I was so surprised to see that woman there," he said. "She was so scantily clad and had no firearms or anything to see her through that country. She was thin as a wisp and had a knapsack with a half-dozen sandwiches in it, some tea and some other odds-and-ends, a comb and personal effects but no make-up."

"I had a time getting her name; she wasn't going to say anything to anybody. But I finally got it, and when she said she was going to Siberia I couldn't say anything. I thought she was out of her mind."

Lillian, although she spoke excellent English, would say little to anyone, except that she had left New York in the spring and was determined to reach Siberia. Wyman estimated she must have walked almost 50 kilometers a day, even through the roughest mountain terrain.

"But you can't go on because winter will be here soon," he reasoned. "You have no idea what the country's like up there. You'll have to cross the Summit in the worst weather and it's 8,000 feet (2,400 meters) high. And look at the way you're dressed…"

To all his pleas came the same stolid reply "I go to Siberia."

Wyman telegraphed his sergeant at Smithers, 64 kilometers southeast of Hazelton, and asked what to do.

"Charge her with vagrancy so we can hold her for her own good," came the reply.

Later, in court, Lillian was given the unusually heavy fine of $25, with $1.75 costs, or two months at Oakalla Prison Farm in Vancouver.

Nothing was said in court about the $20 she'd been carrying which would have caused the vagrancy charge to be dropped. Neither was anything said about the 18-inch iron bar that was found hidden in her skirt. She'd explained it was meant as protection against men.