The Woman Who Walked Across a Continent Because She Missed Home: Lillian Alling’s Epic Journey

Have you ever felt so strongly about going home that you would do just about anything to get there? In the late 1920s, a woman named Lillian Alling was so overwhelmed by this feeling that she left New York City with a simple but daunting goal: to walk home. Where exactly “home” was is still not entirely clear—probably somewhere in Eastern Europe, maybe Siberia—but what’s certain is that she intended to get there on foot. Not by ship, not by train, and not by car. Just walking, with barely more than a bundle of supplies, a homemade map, and a dog that joined her somewhere along the way.

She left behind very few personal details. Official records don’t tell us much until September 1927, when she was arrested for vagrancy in Hazelton, British Columbia. That’s about 3,000 miles from New York, and she had already walked the whole way. By then, she’d been seen passing through cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg. She took on odd jobs—working in restaurants or helping on farms—to keep herself going. She was reportedly averaging around 30 miles a day.

No one knows for sure why she set out. Several versions of her story have surfaced over the years. One of the earliest, from a 1943 article in The Beaver, described her simply as someone who “could not stand the loneliness and the nostalgia any longer.” That version suggests she dreamed of returning to a familiar life, hearing the “deep-toned laughs of the peasants at the marketplace” and the music of local dances. It’s easy to imagine a young woman in a strange new world, struggling to connect in the crowds of New York, deciding she had to go back—however far that meant.

Another version from a 1949 article claimed she had been sent to the United States by her family after the Russian Revolution, to see if it was a place they might all flee to. According to that story, when she learned her relatives had been imprisoned back home, she set out to return to them. And then there’s a different take entirely, from a retired Canadian Mountie who met her in Hazelton. He later wrote that she had actually come from North Dakota, following a man she was supposed to marry. That man had apparently vanished, and she believed he was in Telegraph Creek, British Columbia.

Whatever her reason, she kept going. After being arrested in 1927 and spending two months in Oakalla Prison—where she was given shelter and food—she got back on the road. Through the next winter, she worked in a Vancouver restaurant, saved money, and by mid-1928, she was deep into the Yukon. She was given a dog by telegraph workers along the trail, whom she named Bruno. When he died, likely from poisoned bait left out for wolverines, she was said to have carried his stuffed body with her in a cart.

Along the Yukon Telegraph Trail, she checked in at cabins that were spaced roughly 30 miles apart, part of an old communication line stretching deep into the northern wilderness. The trail wasn’t made for foot traffic, let alone for someone making a journey of this scale, but she managed it anyway.

By the fall of 1928, Lillian had reached Dawson City. She spent the winter there, working as a cook, and when the river thawed in the spring, she bought a small boat, repaired it herself, and set off down the Yukon River. Her path took her all the way to Nome, Alaska, and from there, she kept moving west, closer to the Bering Strait—the narrow, icy gap that separates Alaska from Siberia.

The last known sightings of her come from around 1929 or 1930. One Inuit person reportedly saw her near Teller, Alaska, pulling a makeshift cart, her stuffed dog balanced on top. Some time later, a story surfaced about a woman seen being questioned by Soviet officials in Provideniya, on the Siberian side of the Bering Strait. She was with three Indigenous men from the Diomede Islands and was described as an “outsider in America” who had walked a very long way. No one could confirm that it was Lillian.

From the start, she resisted help. She turned down offers for rides. She carried an iron bar, not for wild animals but, as she said, “for protection against men.” People who met her described her as quiet, determined, and always moving forward. Her arrest for vagrancy might have been meant to protect her from the approaching winter, but it also shows how unusual her journey seemed to people at the time.

Her route, while difficult, was not random. She followed known paths, relied on telegraph cabins, and used whatever information she could find—often from libraries back in New York where she had studied maps before starting out. Despite her limited resources, she thought it through.

There’s no final chapter to her story. We don’t know whether she made it across the Bering Strait. We don’t know if she reached the steppes she longed for, or if she vanished into the cold without anyone to see it. That gap at the end of her journey has led to plenty of speculation, and more than a few myths. But whether she crossed or not, she made it farther than most would have dared to try.

Lillian Alling’s walk—thousands of miles, through mountains, across rivers, in snow and sun—was not a stunt. It was something deeply personal. Maybe it was grief, or love, or just the feeling that she couldn’t stay where she was. Whatever the reason, she went further than anyone expected, and she did it mostly alone.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10