Bold Spirit Page 3

  Helga, like other pioneer prairie wives, fought a constant battle against pests, including prairie dogs and snakes that came through the dirt floor in spring. To keep the house clean, sheets draped under the sod roof caught the dirt and bugs. Rivulets of mud ran through the dwellings when rain soaked the sod. A fastidious housekeeper, who often said, “The cheapest thing in the world is a five-cent cake of soap,” Helga found housekeeping in her sod house conditions a continual challenge.8

  These early years brought the loss of one child at birth, a firstborn son they named Ole.9 During the next few years, Helga was continually pregnant or nursing a newborn. Their son Olaf was born in March, 1879, the couple’s first daughter Ida in September, 1880, and another daughter, Hedwig (called Bertha), in March, 1882. Without even a two-year span between births, she bore another son, Henry, in January, 1884, and one more son, Arthur, in November, 1885.10

  Two of Helga and Ole’s children, Bertha and Olaf, in the mid-1880s. Helga was an excellent seamstress and lacemaker and most likely had sewn these clothes.

  Courtesy Portch/Bahr Family Photograph Collection.

  Birthing, nursing, and raising these six young children and keeping a sod home livable were only part of Helga’s responsibilities for survival on the frontier. Settling a home in this demanding environment required women to be physically and emotionally strong. Rather than a city neighborhood with friends next door, now Helga had only herself and family to rely on. Never-ending work and long distances between farms made close friendships and regular socialization with neighborhood women almost nonexistent. Because they lived in such isolation, they seldom mingled with anybody, and the family and children spoke in Norwegian because of Ole’s lack of English.11

  As a farm wife, Helga’s days involved constant chores—churning butter, making soap, sewing, mending and patching clothes, planting, weeding, harvesting and preserving garden produce, making tallow candles, or cleaning kerosene lamps. During her childhood in Norway and America, Helga developed exceptional skills as a seamstress. But having been an urban child, the challenges of homestead farming were all new to her.

  The ability of the homemaker to make the most of the environment determined the subsistence level of the family. Western homesteading women knew their resourcefulness and hard work were essential, and they received respect as the nurturers and center of all life around the early farms. As the character Ántonia tells Jim in Willa Cather’s book on prairie life, My Ántonia, “We’d never have got through if I hadn’t been so strong. I’ve always had good health, thank God, and I was able to help him in the fields until right up to the time my babies came.”12

  Prairie reminiscences from women settlers also spoke of genuine satisfactions. Many mentioned they liked the idea of the family working together, and they took pride in being a real helpmate to their husbands. Pleasures needed to be simple. As one pioneer stated, “You have to respect each other and work together.… Joy was found in small things like a child’s first step, playing games.… Good crops, or a root cellar filled with canned goods and produce for the coming winter months gave great satisfaction.”13 For immigrants with meager resources available to them in Norway, the bounty in America seemed far more promising than anything in their homeland. This may have been particularly true for Ole. Optimism prevailed; the hard work and fierce determination required of frontier homesteaders would surely be rewarded.

  During these years, Helga gained a sense of her importance and worth to her growing family. Although the sudden move from her merchant city family into the role of marginal homesteader must have been daunting, the family did make progress economically as indicated by the house and outbuildings they eventually built on their homestead. However, she might have identified more with Beret, the prairie wife in the well-known Norwegian novel Giants in the Earth. This Norwegian-American writer, O. E. Rolvaag, recognized that early life on the prairie in North Dakota was not a place of sustenance for all women. Instead, they often suffered from severe isolation and loneliness because of living so remotely from friends and neighbors, unlike the settlers in Central Minnesota where woods and lakes and villages offered more variety and community.

  In Rolvaag’s book, the first of a trilogy on a Norwegian immigrant settlement in the Dakota prairie not far from Yellow Medicine County, the wife of Per Hansa lives in conflict with the prairie. Sometimes seen as a powerful, omnipresent, and malevolent force shaping their lives, the prairie imposed a severe trial or testing for the pioneers. As Rolvaag wrote: “Beret sees her transportation to Dakota Territory as punishment for her sin of conceiving a child out of wedlock. The prairie is the instrument to effect punishment and Beret is tested by her Creator in the crucible of the prairie.”14

  Which was it for Helga? The Minnesota experience gave her a place where she might have surmounted the challenges with the immigrant settler’s optimism that these were temporary difficulties, worthy of enduring to improve the family’s fortunes. Or was she a young displaced Americanized city woman identifying more with Beret’s feelings? Perhaps both were true. Helga’s next actions demonstrated that the simple pleasures of a full root cellar and smiling child were clearly not enough for her.

  3 THE CRUCIBLE YEARS

  My mother was afraid of tornadoes and cyclones.

  She wanted to come where we would be safe.

  —IDA ESTBY, DAUGHTER

  If the isolation of the prairie distressed Helga, the Siberian-like winter of 1880–81 severely tested her emotional health. The summer of 1880 led to the harvest of an excellent crop and the county again became known as the “land of promise.” But heavy and frequent rains in August made it impossible to begin stacking on most farms near Canby until the middle of September, right when Helga gave birth to Ida on September 18.

  Just in the midst of threshing, a major unexpected snowstorm started the worst winter of the century, far before farmers had taken their crops to the granaries. In historical accounts of Canby, no winter has compared to this one in duration, continued severity, depth of snow, and damage to property.1 When darkness came on the evening of Friday, October 15, Helga and Ole saw an occasional flake of snow, but by midnight the wind and snow increased in fury. On Saturday, a blizzard raged with such violence that no farmers dared venture outside their sod homes, even to feed the animals. The fury continued until Monday afternoon, October 18. Snow banks in the city of Canby piled up almost level with second story windows, and snowdrifts filled Main Street from ten to fifteen feet deep. Many a farmer was compelled to dig down several feet to get to the barn door and it required one’s best endeavors to keep cattle from starving or suffocating. No preparations had been made for such a storm and great numbers of stock perished.2

  Frightened families experienced weeks of terror. When the wood and coal supply vanished, farmers relied on hay, fence posts, and grain for fuel to keep from freezing to death. Snow completely buried many of the claim shanties in the country. Blizzard followed blizzard and prairie winds created drifts ten to fifteen feet deep. Pioneers excavated tunnels from the house to the barn, to the woodpile, and to the wells. If Ole or Helga ventured outside these paths, drifts like quicksand could suck them and their farm animals to their deaths because the soft deep snow was impossible to walk through.3 By December, no groceries or provisions remained in the stores. The railway in Yellow Medicine County was blocked for weeks at a time, virtually shutting off the region from receiving any help, or even delivery of outside newspapers and mail. Helga, Ole, their two young children, and infant Ida spent long weeks of discouraging isolation in the midst of these dangerous surroundings. If their provisions didn’t hold until the railroad reopened, famine was a real threat. Some lost their lives in the storms or suffered frostbite and, as a result, amputated limbs.

  Yet, during these dreary circumstances, the Scandinavian prairie settlers showed their grit and determination. Volunteers began to shovel snow off the railroad tracks, businesses reopened by creating tunnels to their doors, and local theater
groups formed to relieve the monotony of the siege. The railroad company gave permission to cut and use the snow fences along the track for fuel.4 How did Helga and Ole, huddled alone in their sod home with their family and newborn, cope during this devastating winter? Whatever tenacity it took, Ole and Helga endured. When summer crops proved bountiful in the county the following year, the family’s pioneer perseverance was rewarded.

  Living in the era before readily available birth control, Helga’s continual pregnancies suggest she adopted similar cultural values as other Norwegian immigrant farm pioneers. Although women gathered together occasionally at husking bees, quilting bees, and other work-related activities, their daily lives were often very lonely. Also, these reserved Norwegian wives in Minnesota did not ordinarily discuss personal, intimate concerns. Most women followed traditional religious teachings that reinforced feminine virtues to be supporting and nurturing. This included that their role was to satisfy their husband’s natural sexual desires and to bear children. This view of marriage was understood and rarely questioned.5

  Once sixteen-year-old Helga married Ole and bore his children, she invested all of her considerable energy and talent working alongside her husband to create a sustainable and loving family life. Motherhood also aroused in Helga a sense of protectiveness. Especially after the frightening winter of 1880, living on their remote prairie land began to raise fears for the safety of the children she loved.

  As a young mother in Minnesota in the 1880s, Helga faced another fear, particularly ominous because of its invisibility. Parents could recognize a treacherous snowstorm, a raging prairie fire, or a cyclone funnel, and seek a safe shelter for their children. But when Minnesota towns and surrounding farm homes experienced virulent outbreaks of diphtheria, this highly contagious disease caused significant alarm. Doctors found themselves helpless to treat diphtheria when it attacked families in its worse form known as “black diphtheria.” The lack of specific knowledge of the cause, or of any preventative or curative agents, staggered both doctors and laymen. Although light cases could be cured, the more deadly black diphtheria caused death “with startling certainty and machinelike regularity … often in a short four days.”6

  Children were particularly vulnerable, suffocating to death as their windpipe closed. Even the finest doctors felt helpless when this attacked a family, and during the epidemics in the 1880s, they saw some parents lose all their children in a matter of days. As parents of young children, the Estby family would be targeted by their local Health Board to receive circulars required by the Minnesota State Board of Health. These disseminated the latest information concerning the restriction and prevention of diphtheria. Some of the information in this 1880 bulletin would later be disputed, but it provided the best medical insight of the era.7

  Helga and Ole read that as a contagious and infectious disease, diphtheria proved most fatal when found in filthy localities. “These common and visible forms of filth are seen in the untidiness of living and sleeping rooms, in the filthy condition of clothing and persons, in decaying garbage in cellars, in the faulty conditions of cess-pools and privy-vaults.”8 Although this warning placed immense pressure on the housekeeping skills of a family, at least a mother and father could exercise control over these conditions. But the bulletin gave further warnings about the dangerous invisible forms found in drinking water, soil, and odorous gases in drains and sewers. This insidious unseen virus that “is apt to attach itself to clothing, bedding, furniture and be retained for a long time in the walls of the rooms” required that homes receive all the “sunlight possible and a liberal supply of fresh air.”9 Keeping a poorly ventilated sod home in high sanitary conditions was impossible and perhaps prompted the Estbys to build their frame home and outbuildings on the homestead.10

  Although doctor’s experiences showed that even the very neatest families living in commodious homes could suffer as much as those in small squalid hovels, the general perception prevailed that poor housekeeping contributed to a family’s tragedy. This added another burden, usually borne by the mother of a home. This opinion also heaped guilt onto the deep grief of losing a child. The Estby family managed to avoid this tragedy that struck some Minnesota communities with as many as eighty to ninety deaths during epidemic stages. But they inevitably carried the anxiety created by these epidemics.

  Another burden that dwelled inside each homesteader involved the Estbys directly. If contagious disease epidemics caused an unseen fear for Minnesota farm families, wild prairie fires caused a visible and tangible terror. Fires demanded constant vigilance if farmers hoped to save their homes, barns, grain piles, stock, and livelihood from swift obliteration. But unlike the invisible menace from diphtheria, pioneers knew they could take steps to protect their property by plowing fire breaks and scanning the skies daily for any sign of smoke.

  With even a mild wind, fire was treacherous because one never knew where it might start up. And with a bad wind, prairie fires swept everything before it. When sparks flew into the hay, often everything on the farm could be lost. If a fire threatened a homestead, everyone big enough to help fought the fire. Women often took some old clothing, like a woolen coat dipped in water, and wiped the ground with it, dragging it along the blaze.

  In one terror-filled afternoon, Helga fought a fire that came within feet of their home.11 The Estbys saw signs of the fire raging across the prairie; by the time the suffocating smoke neared their home, the roar and crackle of flames threw sparks high in the air, terrifying their livestock and young children. As she needed to help fight the fire, Helga could not comfort their screaming little ones. They managed to save their house and barn—many neighbors were not so lucky and lost their wheat stacks. Worse yet, a farm husband and wife were badly burned from fighting the fire.12

  After the frightening fire, one final threat convinced Helga they needed to move their growing family off the Minnesota homestead. Sudden and unpredictable cyclones and tornadoes created devastating damage to life and property in Minnesota and pioneers barely had time to flee into the dugouts that every farm needed. In 1885, a tornado hit the Canby area particularly hard.

  (following pages) Helga and Ole, around 1887, with six of their children shortly before selling their prairie homestead in Canby, Minnesota, and moving to Spokane Falls, Washington Territory.

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

  The Estbys felt the same fear as their neighbors felt on “Black Friday,” the name given to a frightening storm on June 19, 1885. Near sundown, Helga looked on the horizon and saw a dark cloud roll in from the west. Within minutes, it began to rain in torrents and hailstones struck with the force of bullets, with a sound compared to “a continuous fire of musketry.” Glass, windows, storefronts, and window lights were shattered into fragments. Nearby barns blew down and hail the size of hen’s eggs knocked bark off the trees. Within an hour and a half, twelve to eighteen inches of water covered the prairie, causing extensive damage to crops and trees. After the storm, Helga learned that the severe winds, hail storms, and falling trees had killed a young child and a baby in his mother’s arms as they tried to get to shelter—exactly the fear that Helga harbored.13

  Just one month later, on July 16, another major storm caused havoc seven miles northwest of Canby, very near the Estby homestead. In a three-mile destructive sweep, a new barn was blown flat, another barn almost full of hay was lifted off its foundations, a falling tree killed a man, a barn struck by lightning burned down and killed two horses, lightning caused three houses to be consumed by fire, game was killed in great abundance, and most growing crops were greatly injured by the storm.14

  That was enough for Helga and Ole. Scared of future tornadoes and cyclones, the Estbys began planning a move to the West, a region promoted actively by the Northern Pacific Railroad. The assurances in brochures of a better climate, available land, affordable housing, and educational opportunities in “the promised land” lured many an imm
igrant to the West. So many immigrants came in the 1880s, they established a vibrant Scandinavian presence in churches and organizations in urban centers in Washington State, such as Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane Falls, the new “gem” city of the Pacific Northwest. One brochure particularly addressed the quality of educated people who lived in Spokane Falls and the educational opportunities for children, a topic that would have drawn Helga’s attention. Educated in America, and fluent both in written and spoken English and Norwegian, she had more schooling than many of the Scandinavian farm women. She longed for her children to have the chance to better themselves in every way, intellectually, spiritually, and materially.15 In the Canby region, she saw that young girls often began working for families instead of attending high school. The brochure boasted: “The permanent population of Spokane Falls is of a very highly intellectual and moral character.… They recognize the fact that intellectual culture is the genius of the age in which we live, and constitutes in itself a true exponent of wealth and power.”16

  The brochure then elaborated on the new public schools and the superintendent of education with a doctorate, the high school literary society, the two private schools, the establishment of Gonzaga University (a Jesuit institution), the four-year Spokane College and the Methodist-Episcopal College, which aimed to “provide thorough scholarship and a high standard of moral and Christian character.” All three colleges insisted they offered education equal to those of the East and included modern languages, Latin, Greek, philosophy, higher math, logic, and bookkeeping in their curricula. For Helga, familiar with urban life, a city that grew from less than three hundred to more than two thousand in just thirty months must have sounded remarkable. Spokane Falls offered churches, newspapers, an opera house, good hotels and a high percentage of college-educated citizens.17