Bold Spirit Read online

  Linda Lawrence Hunt

  BOLD SPIRIT

  Linda Lawrence Hunt, a former associate professor of English at Whitworth College, now directs The Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship. An engaging speaker and award-winning freelance writer, Hunt traveled across America and to Norway to reconstruct the silenced story of Helga Estby’s epic journey. Bold Spirit won the 2004 Willa Cather Literary Award for nonfiction, the Washington State Book Award, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. She lives in Spokane, Washington, with her husband Jim.

  www.boldspiritacrossamerica.com

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2005

  Copyright © 2003 by Linda Lawrence Hunt

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in paperback in the United States by the University of Idaho Press, Moscow, Idaho, in 2003.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Map Courtesy of the Library of Congress

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hunt, Linda, 1940–

  Bold spirit : Helga Estby’s forgotten walk across Victorian America / Linda

  Lawrence Hunt; foreword by Sue Armitage.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42506-5

  1. United States—Description and travel. 2. United States—Social life and customs—1865–1918. 3. Estby, Helga, b. 1860—Travel—United States. 4. Estby, Clara, b. 1876—Travel—United States. 5. Walking—United States—History—19th century. 6. Norwegian Americans—Biography. 7. Mothers and daughters—United States—Biography.

  E168.H94 2005

  973.8′7′0922—dc22

  [B] 2004057372

  Author photograph © Jim Hunt

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1_r1

  TO

  THELMA PORTCH

  AND

  DOROTHY, DARYLL, DARILLYN, AND DOUG BAHR,

  WHO BECAME KEEPERS OF THIS FAMILY STORY

  AND TO

  EVELYN CHRISTENSEN

  ANOTHER ORDINARY WOMAN WHO

  LIVES AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Map

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword by Sue Armitage

  Preface

  Introduction

  1 On Foot to New York

  2 Motherhood on a Minnesota Prairie

  3 The Crucible Years

  4 Surprises in Spokane Falls

  5 Frontier Vices and the Move to Mica Creek

  6 Financial Fears and a Family Death

  7 The Wager

  8 Undaunted by Rain, Sleet, and Snow

  9 Hot, Hungry, and Hopeful

  10 Night Terrors

  11 “New Women’s” Actions and Old Victorian Attitudes

  12 An Electrifying Presidential Election

  13 Earning Their Own Way

  14 A Rush to the Finish

  15 The Impossible Happens

  16 Heartbreak at the Mica Creek Homestead

  17 Homeward Bound

  18 Lost and Found

  A Reflection on the Silencing of Family Stories

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Foreword

  The amazing story of Helga Estby’s walk across America, which you will read in the following pages, was almost lost from history. Even now, after all of Linda Hunt’s diligent research and imaginative retelling, there are aspects of Helga’s story that remain mysterious. Although some readers may be frustrated by these lingering mysteries, I suggest that they give us opportunities to think about what we call “history.” The historical record tells us about how people acted in the past, but it often does not tell us why. It is the job of professional historians to provide plausible reasons for the actions of the past. But the truth is that even the most famous and well-documented historical personages contain pockets of mystery and take actions that we do not fully understand. If this is true for the great and famous, think how much more likely it is to be true for an immigrant woman like Helga Estby. Think also about how many life stories of ordinary people have been lost to history because there are no surviving records. The truly amazing thing about Helga Estby is that she did something extraordinary, and her story still remained unknown—until now. Her erasure should prompt us all to think about how little of the past we really know and encourage us to think about how to preserve more of our present-day lives and concerns (tomorrow’s historical record).

  Every day we make decisions about which events are important and which are not. In fact, our historical record begins right now in the present with this daily process of inclusion and omission. In her conclusion to Helga Estby’s story, Linda Hunt invites us to think about the different kinds of omission she calls silencing. In that contemplation are some hard lessons that bear directly on our sense of history. Several lessons occur to me; doubtless each of you can add to the list. First, we expect the already great and famous to do great things, but we easily overlook the achievements of the more humble among us. Second, we prefer predictable stories with easily understood motivations; unexpected actions undertaken for uncertain reasons make us uncomfortable. Third, people who act too far from their expected norms are embarrassments to those around them. How much truer is this likely to be when the historical actor is poor and female?

  Throughout history, silencing has been the fate of most women. Thanks to Linda Hunt’s interest and extraordinary persistence, Helga Estby has escaped that common fate. Finally then, this is not just Helga Estby’s story but Linda Hunt’s as well, for in the following pages she shows us just how much silenced history can be recovered when we really want to know.

  —Sue Armitage, Washington State University

  Preface

  It was late one evening in 1984 when I read eighth-grader Doug Bahr’s seven-page essay entered in the Washington State History Day Contest. This farm son from Wilbur, through the encouragement of his mother, Dorothy, and older sister, Darillyn, told a stunning story in “Grandma Walks from Coast to Coast.” This brief family story of a mother and daughter’s walk captivated my imagination and curiosity. Who was this Norwegian immigrant, Helga Estby? Whatever gave Helga and her daughter Clara the courage to attempt such a journey? I recently had read Peter Jenkin’s observations and experiences on his contemporary cross-continent trek in A Walk Across America, a story that attracted immense national interest. I felt certain a mother and daughter’s observations and experiences across an unsettled continent almost one hundred years earlier would prove compelling. Was there more to the story?

  In subsequent investigation, I found that little was known about Helga’s audacious gamble to earn the $10,000 wager offered by unknown sponsors for completion of the journey. Behind on paying taxes and the mortgage, she was desperate to save the 160-acre Mica Creek farm and home built by her husband, Ole, for their family of nine children. Hers was a woman’s story, and like most ordinary mothers of her era, her active participation in life was not valued as part of America’s historical record. Even more telling, Helga’s choice to leave home, and the subsequent tragedy of loss, led to such anger in the family that they did not value her remarkable story either. Her walk across the United States with her daughter Clara remained a silenced topic within the family for over seventy years.

  Because of this lack of recognition, the most difficult aspect of rediscovering Helga Estby’s life is the paucity of primary resources. For example, no diaries, l
etters, or art sketches remain from Helga and Clara’s trip, although Helga wrote many letters and kept a diary. Nor do the hundreds of manuscript pages she wrote still exist. Her children are all dead. Furthermore, the children’s lifelong condemnation of their mother’s actions led to fateful choices about her memoirs. It was unfathomable to them that Helga’s writings might contribute significantly to a fuller picture of American history. Like the history of most women at the end of the nineteenth century, her life story became silenced partially by what I call “negation through neglect.” But it was silenced also by intention.

  A short poem from a Scottish psychologist, R.D. Laing, in Vital Lies, Simple Truths, addresses this neglect and the failure to recognize the importance of family stories of all people, not just the culturally privileged. It speaks also to the truth that, until recently, academia ignored the history of most women in the American story. The poem states:

  The range of what we think and do

  is limited by what we fail to notice

  And because we fail to notice

  that we fail to notice

  there is little we can do

  to change

  until we notice

  how failing to notice

  shapes our thoughts and deeds

  Because Helga’s immediate family “failed to notice” the importance of her endeavor, they did not keep any letters from the trip, or pass her stories orally through the family. Even more distressing, they destroyed the hundreds of pages of her first-person account. The necessity for creative historical detective work to unearth her life inaugurated years of research.

  I call this approach to the reconstruction of Helga Estby’s life a “rag-rug history.” In Scandinavia, resourceful women historically collected the discards and remnants of previously used fabrics from all possible sources. From these worn castoffs, often considered of little value to others, they wove together a weft of rags to create incredibly strong and durable artistic rugs. In contrast, early American women usually made quilts from good-quality remnants intentionally saved and treasured. Frugal immigrants continued to create rag rugs to warm their pioneer homes. Contemporary rag-rug weavers still go on hunting expeditions to search for the fabrics from ordinary lives, such as torn and tattered chenille bedspreads, blue jeans, corduroy, and calico. Often weavers will alert their friends and family to help discover old fabrics that others rarely find useful. From these they collect the textures and colors that provide the beauty and interest for today’s creations. The weaver takes these piles of ripped rags, packs the strips tightly together to prevent unraveling, and then, using a beater bar on a loom with warping thread, creates a durable, useful family rug.

  My search to find as many remnants of her story as possible led to my own trips across America, and to Norway to learn about Helga’s childhood. Scraps of information gathered from our nation’s rich resources in local historical societies, community and university libraries, and museums became the fabrics of her story. The strong golden thread that wove the rag-rug remnants together came from newspaper accounts of Helga’s visits with reporters along the railroad routes. These eyewitness accounts verified her itinerary and provided a general timetable. More important, they offered a rich vein of stories, although admittedly, they were limited by what a reporter asked and by what Helga and Clara chose to report. Little existed in these accounts of the ordinary daily challenges the women faced in meeting basic survival needs, such as finding food, water, and shelter during the long distances between towns in the West. Nor do reporters show how they coped with the life-threatening extremes of cold and heat, sore muscles and feet, women’s hygiene, electric storms, or dangerous wildlife. Nor do we read of the many specific human kindnesses they say eased the journey, or of the ways nature sometimes refreshed their spirits. However, the varied tone and observations within the reporter’s accounts did provide insights into the attitudes the writers held about the two women “globetrotters.” The tenor of a newspaper, whether primarily interested in international and national issues or local and human-interest stories, affected the coverage. Whether scant or lengthy articles, newspaper errors sometimes emerged. It is also impossible to know if Helga or Clara embellished their adventures. The consistencies of their accounts throughout the newspaper coverage, however, suggest genuine experiences. If anything, their reporting of the travails seem understated.

  Whenever people heard portions of Helga’s bold trek, they worked eagerly to help me find additional rag remnants of this nearly discarded life story. The generous gifts of memory and artifacts from the remaining Estby family, a family that does “notice” the importance of Helga’s achievement, augmented these institutional resources.

  During this research I discovered a refreshing image that symbolizes the new scholarship emerging on previously neglected women. When Norwegian artist Aasta Hansteen came to America, she was enchanted with the sunflower image that some early American feminists used as a symbol of a woman’s claim to light, and air, and an optimistic spirit. She introduced this symbol on her return to Norway, and the Norwegian Feminist Society adopted it as their official symbol right about the time of Helga’s walk. Helga’s courageous story, once shrouded in silence, now can be linked with other women’s stories emerging in a new American history, a history open to giving light and air to the many voices in our land. My hope is that Bold Spirit contributes an enduring remnant that reflects the irrepressible spirit, intelligence, and abundant love for family and America that Helga Estby’s adventurous life illuminates.

  —Linda Lawrence Hunt

  INTRODUCTION

  Eight-year-old Thelma Estby, bewildered by the sudden death of her father from meningitis, moved to her Grandma Helga Estby’s home in Spokane, Washington, in 1924. Living with her beloved grandma was the one comfort in her new life as she adjusted to a strange school and unfamiliar neighborhood. The child sensed that her grandma understood how much she missed her dad. Sometimes Thelma and her grandma Helga rocked on the porch swing that her grandpa Ole built. Then, grandma told stories of what Thelma’s father, Arthur, was like as a young boy living on the Estby’s farm at Mica Creek, southeast of Spokane, Washington. Thelma loved hearing these stories, their lively memories easing the empty loss she felt. But more often the grandmother and grandchild sat in companionable silence as little Thelma grieved the loss of her dad, and Helga grieved the death of her fifth son. They found warmth and joy in each other, drawn together to relieve the sorrow surrounding them both. Even the scent of her grandmother’s Azure of Roses perfume comforted her.1

  Thelma thrived on the special attention her grandmother gave her. Even at sixty-four years, with a crippled knee, Helga Estby loved to be on the go. When her small widow’s pension arrived each month from Ole’s trade union death benefit, Helga took Thelma on a trolley ride over the Spokane River to downtown. Often they watched Spokane Falls tumble over the basalt rocks, enchanted with its beauty and power, and then paused at the water’s edge to feed scraps of stale bread to the ducks. Usually they stopped at the stately Crescent department store where Helga found colorful fabrics, threads, ribbons, and buttons to make special clothes for Thelma and her dolls. Sometimes they strolled uptown past the twin towers of Our Lady of Lourdes Cathedral, which Ole helped build, and continued down through the stately tree-lined streets of Browne’s Addition. Here the turn-of-the-century mansions and formal gardens spoke of a world of wealth unfamiliar to the farm child more at home with wheat fields and sunflowers. To Thelma’s surprise, many fashionably dressed women in this prestigious neighborhood seemed to know her grandmother and spoke to her with respect. They were obviously interested in Helga’s thoughts and friendship, something Thelma also noticed among Norwegian-American women in their own middle-class neighborhood on Mallon Street.2 On summer days, they joined the throngs of people riding the carousel at Natatorium Park or rode the train east to Lake Coeur d’Alene where Helga visited a friend from her earlier work in the women’s suffrage movement.
<
br />   Thelma Estby, mid-1920s, Spokane, Washington.

  Courtesy Portch/Bahr Family Photograph Collection. Detail of this photograph on page xxiv.

  If daytime gave Thelma fun adventures with her grandma, nighttime gave her an abiding sense of security in her grandma Helga’s faith. Helga loved to read, and Thelma liked climbing under the quilt in her grandma’s pine bed while grandma read to her from one of her favorite books, The Lamplighter, over and over. Second only in popularity to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, this popular religious novel showed how suffering, self-discipline, and devotion can form a person’s character in positive ways. The main character, Gerty, was also an unhappy eight-year-old girl who had lost her parents. Neglected and abused, she developed into a troublesome orphan with an explosive temper. Eventually, a loving blind woman adopted Gerty and taught two truths to the little girl. First, that “The world is full of trials, everyone gets a share,” and second, “Even in the midst of our distress, we can look to God in faith and love.” Thelma loved the reassurance of hearing how the sad, fatherless child grew into a strong, happy woman.3

  Helga told Thelma how she also suddenly lost her own father when she was just two years old, so she seemed to understand her granddaughter’s loss. Born in Christiana (now Oslo), Norway, on May 30 in 1860, Helga knew her parents enjoyed a union of genuine love because she saw how this unexpected loss left her mother grief stricken for years.4 But she told Thelma that good experiences still came after their family’s distress, especially when her mother remarried a merchant when Helga was seven years old. Because her stepfather, Mr. Haug, had money, the family sent Helga to a private school in Norway that included instruction in English, science, and religion.5 Coming to America when she was eleven was another wonderful surprise in Helga’s life that happened because of her mother’s remarriage.

  Every evening, even if their meal seemed quite simple, Helga set the table with white linen, china dishes, silver napkin rings, and whatever flowers were blooming in their garden. The family loved music, often listening to classical musical on the radio. Although they could not afford a piano, Aunt Ida played the harmonica, Uncle Bill enjoyed the violin, and grandma loved to sing, even if off-key. For their festive Norwegian Christmas Eve celebration, Helga always made lefse, sour-creme pudding with almonds and lingonberries, and homemade wine from the backyard cherry tree.6