Bold Spirit

by Linda Lawrence Hunt

  Although Spokane Falls was becoming known for beautiful residential neighborhoods, these were not the neighborhoods in the Estby’s backyard. Within a few short city blocks from their home existed all the lures of a brawling western town, created by greedy businessmen for workers passing through. The city catered extensively to the drinking, sexual, gambling, and entertainment desires of the hungry miners, loggers, and farm hands carrying cash to spend. Saloons, gambling halls, boarding houses, billiard halls, Turkish baths, Chinese opium dens, and brothels openly operated in a downtown area that reached over to Division Street. The Estby home on Pine Street was just one block east and a few blocks north of the active downtown. Although city ordinances outlawed prostitution in 1889, the police department, under the orders of the city council, was lax in how they enforced the antiprostitution laws. Instead of eliminating prostitution in the city, these laws allowed the city to collect fines systematically—rich revenue for the city coffers. Once a month, prostitutes came to city hall to pay their fees.3 Nor was there only one identified red-light district; rather, these places were scattered throughout town, with some not too far from Helga’s home. A prostitution hierarchy existed, with the lowest-ranking working in “cribs,” which were easily observable small shacks built in city alleys.

  Spokane businesses catered to a large group of itinerant male miners, lumberjacks, and farm laborers who passed through the city during the years the Estby family lived near downtown. Smith Cigars on Riverside Avenue in 1888.

  Courtesy Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture/Eastern Washington State

  Historical Society, Spokane, Washington, L94-19.123.

  Detail of this photograph on this page.

  A prevailing frame of mind justified allowing the vice-regulation policies of the city. Some city leaders believed that the prostitute was a necessary guardian of virtue who kept innocent moral women from being raped and ruined by men fulfilling their natural sexual needs. This doctrine of sexual necessity, supported by some medical physicians into the 1910s, asserted that men periodically needed to obtain sexual release for their health’s sake.4 “We could do it; it is within our power to drive those women out,” admitted Spokane’s mayor to inquisitors who questioned the city’s open policies. “But, speaking frankly, I question the advisability of doing it. Reputable physicians say the social evil is a necessary evil—that without it the number of shocking crimes would increase greatly.”5

  By 1890, the oldest children in the Estby family were nearing their teenage years and inevitably needed to walk through the rough edges of the city to attend school, visit friends, or go shopping. Even if the Estbys could prevent their children from wandering into back alleys and encountering prostitution cribs, Spokane Falls’ lively street corners fascinated them. Palmistry readers, Chinese grocery-cart peddlers, “fire-and-brimstone” preachers, tinhorn street gamblers, and clairvoyant mediums all sang their songs of invitation. Drunken men and vagrants commonly loitered or roamed the streets and violence and disorder could erupt any night—hardly the ideal environment that the Estbys desired.

  Helga’s nervousness in having the children out on these streets caused her to restrict the children’s activities outside the house, becoming extra protective as she worried over their moral and physical well-being.6 When she first came to Spokane Falls, Helga also brought her Midwest settler’s prejudice about Native Americans with her, an anxiety she passed on to her children. Peaceful Indians from the Spokane Tribe often came to the city, and Helga hired an Indian woman to help wash clothes in their yard. However, the children were “deathly afraid of her,” and Helga kept them indoors during the wash-woman’s visits.7 One day, while six of the children were walking in the city streets, a large Indian chief, dressed in paint and wearing feathers, noticed a glass-bead necklace that Clara was wearing. Interested in this jewelry, he reached out to touch it, and the family assumed he wanted to grab Clara. All the children screamed. Speaking in English, he assured them he wasn’t going to take her. He just wanted “to pat the pretty beads.”8 But in Helga’s eyes, the former farm children’s primary source of vulnerability came from their lack of experience in living in an unpredictable urban environment.

  Although Helga appreciated the benefits of the city, the open city’s flagrant problems contributed to her desire to return to the countryside where she perceived a simpler and more moral life prevailed. She knew her growing children needed to be free to roam and explore without her constant worry about corruptive influences. Restless once again, the family began to think about moving outside the city, but near enough to be accessible to the advantages of Spokane. About this time, only twenty-eight miles southeast of Spokane Falls, the small town of Rockford actively encouraged settlers to come to the beautiful Rock Creek Valley. Rich agricultural farmland, situated near the foothills of the Coeur d’Alene mountain range, was available through the railroads and government. In 1892, Helga and Ole paid $600 to the Northern Pacific Railroad for 160 acres in Mica Creek, a Scandinavian enclave of farms known as “Little Norway.” Their funds most likely came from money seeded in their two apparent misfortunes: the town’s fire and Helga’s fall.9 Once again their family enjoyed the comfort of rural values in a Scandinavian community and the freedom and fresh air of the countryside.

  Helga, now thirty-two, finally found a place where she believed their children could flourish. She took pride in Ole’s carpentry skills when he built an attractive three-bedroom farmhouse and pine furnishings. Two bedrooms upstairs gave the boys and the girls separate spaces. Clara, Ida, Bertha, and later, baby Lillian, shared one room and the five brothers, Olaf, Johnny, Arthur, William, and Henry shared the other. Ole and Helga finally had a private bedroom and a dining room on the main floor.

  It made the constant work of taking care of her family far easier than their days living on the remote Minnesota prairie. A nearby pump provided easy access to natural spring water. Ole added an all-purpose building and furnished it with an old wood cook stove for heating water. Here Helga washed clothes and gave the children summer baths, ground wheat, and dressed chickens and other wild game on a wooden table. Their root cellar stored potatoes and one-gallon crocks that Helga covered with lard in the winter, or filled with cherry and dandelion wine or root beer for the children.

  They soon cleared part of the land, planted an orchard and garden, and then built a barn with stalls for horses and small calves, an outbuilding for pigs and cows, and refurbished an old log chicken house that came with the land.10 For a woman who started raising a family in a one-room dirt-floor sod house on the prairie, this home seemed almost luxurious. Even during hard times, the children could always be fed. Plus, with all the responsibilities in developing the farm and caring for the animals, her children were gaining important work habits. Watching William’s and Arthur’s delight as they played with their first litter of squealing piglets or remembering Bertha’s pride in bringing her father a wildflower bouquet brought Helga a quiet pleasure over their choice to have moved once more.

  The Estbys enjoyed the wholesome family atmosphere in the small town of Rockford near their Mica Creek farm, like this chilly Fourth of July community celebration at the turn of the century.

  Courtesy Frances E. Hurd Collection.

  Although Helga wanted the children to concentrate on English when they moved to Spokane Falls (which gradually changed in name to Spokane in the 1890s), she still desired for them to know the friendship of a Scandinavian community. The Mica Creek neighborhood, with its many Norwegians and Swedish immigrants, had a reputation for common decency, neighborliness, and support during difficult times. Even better, these Scandinavians knew how to have fun. In Minnesota, many of the religious Norwegians came from the “Haugian” Lutheran faith background, part of an earlier pietistic revival movement in rural Norway in the 1800s. One outgrowth of this movement included a legalism that deemed certain actions sinful and made some Norwegians fearful of life’s simple pleasures. But in Mica Creek, their neighbors visite
d for card games, sleigh rides and hayrides, and Ole could drink his daily beer without criticism from the community. “We used to have lots of fun,” recalled daughter Ida.11 Nor did Helga feel the isolation that permeated her days on the prairie in Minnesota.

  The local community around Mica Creek, centered in school and family life, offered rich everyday moments. The schoolhouse became the neighborhood gathering place for harvest dances, box socials, a literary club, baseball games, eighth-grade certification days, pie socials, fairs, and the election polling place. The school was right near the Estby’s land, allowing the family convenient access to school-sponsored social events. Helga appreciated that their Mica Creek community placed a high value on education for daughters. At times, more girls attended the Mica Creek schoolhouse than boys because families needed boys at home for clearing land, planting and harvesting crops, cutting wood, or tending livestock.12 When daughters outgrew the eighth-grade local schools, many families encouraged them to attend high school in the city, where they often worked as maids in exchange for room and board. This practice allowed Clara to attend a Spokane high school.

  Beyond their home and fields grew magnificent ponderosa pine forests to wander through, a mountain to lift your eyes and spirit each day, and a mild climate that brought an early spring and a dry summer. The family gathered wildflowers and created bouquets of Indian paintbrush, ladyslippers, bluebells, trilliums, and wild roses to grace their polished handcrafted furnishings. On snowbound wintry evenings, Helga enjoyed crocheting delicate lace for tablecloths, an art she learned as a child in Christiana.

  Less protective as a mother now, Helga allowed the older children to take trips to the nearby town of Rockford, a six-mile walk that Olaf especially liked to do.13 The entire family enjoyed visiting the town’s general mercantile store where barrels of apples, prunes, apricots, and a showcase full of candy appealed to the children. Hardware supplies, barrels of molasses, and coal oil, as well as the bank in the back of the store, drew in the adults. Helga bought fabrics to sew the children’s clothes and enjoyed conversations with local women. Sometimes the family joined the crowd at the train depot waiting for mail delivery, always a favorite event in the city. The trains brought memories of their own adventures riding across the continent from Minnesota.

  They shopped at George B. Hurd and Company’s General Store, which was kept well stocked for farm family’s needs.

  Courtesy Frances E. Hurd Collection.

  The Estbys still traveled to Spokane for cultural events. “They had lots of operas and things that would come,” recalled daughter Ida. “But that was too expensive for our family because one couldn’t go unless we all went.” They especially enjoyed seeing live musical performances of the Jessie Shirley Company and theater performances. However, these excursions were extremely rare.14 Just the train fare for a family of eleven could be prohibitive. Each year though, they did take advantage of the special one-cent-a-mile railway excursion rates aimed to bring surrounding citizens into Spokane to enjoy the annual parades and Fourth-of-July Food Fair. Enticing displays of sun-ripened pears, peaches, cherries, giant squash and potatoes, red-cheeked apples, and wheat and sunflowers encouraged settlers like the Estbys to develop their farms, offering proof of what good earth and hard work could produce.

  When the Estbys bought their land in 1892, Ole built their comfortable home and planned to continue making his primary earnings as a carpenter, not as a farmer. He expected to hire out in Rockford, help nearby farmers build barns and outbuildings, or ride the train to work in Spokane. While they built up the farm to meet their family needs, Helga occasionally hired out as a seamstress to augment their incomes.

  However, just one year after Ole built their new home, national events shattered the Estby’s assumptions about America’s ongoing prosperity and their personal ability to keep their farm.

  6 FINANCIAL FEARS AND A FAMILY DEATH

  The children could not understand how the signing of a piece of paper could change everything, but it did … Moor (their mother) was very different. She went around as if she were carrying a burden.

  —A. RAAEN, GRASS OF THE EARTH

  During 1893, Helga traveled away from the family twice, perhaps to help her mother in Wisconsin after her stepfather’s death. During these months of her absence, the children wrote affectionate letters to their mother, using their recently learned English.1 A long letter from Ida, now twelve, dated February 9, 1893, let her mother know of important family events. Ida’s reference to Christy indicates the likelihood of an earlier connection.

  Dear Mother

  I will write a few lines to you and tell you that we are all and Will (now 10 months old) is good he can stand alone by the wall and he crawls all over the floor and puts every thing in his mouth I will tell you that my shoes fit me nicely. Henry felt bad because he did not get any shoes. Papa bought some overhols for him. It is snowing here to-day. I am waiting for you to come home papa was in Rockford Friday and he bought some Baking powder and we want to invite Richardson’s girls on Bertha’s Birthday because I had a party on my Birthday and I want her to have some fun on her Birthday because it will not be right to not let her have any fun when I had. I don’t feel well today so I can not write good my hand shakes it but I hope you can read it. Bertha wrote so I wanted to write to. My eyes are well now so Clara said that it was no use the glasses. I have nothing more to tell you I will send our regard to you here is a kiss for you I send my love to christy.

  Your loving Daughter, Ida

  In this same batch of letters, Henry wrote:

  Dear Mother

  I got a pair of overalls papa bought. I had to have Hedvig (Bertha) to write for me I could not write my Self because they was in such a hurry. I will tell you that I’m a good boy all the time you was gone and will help Papa saw wood and put hay in the mangers when he is working with the horses because he is cold. I will tell you that it is snowing up here today. I feed the two little pigs.

  Your son, Henry

  Arthur summed up the family feelings when their mama left home when he wrote:

  Dear Mamma

  I want to write a few lines to you but not much. I am a good boy, I stay in the house all the time I will send a kiss to you. I wish you would come home.

  Your little boy Arthur Estby

  In another undated letter, Henry wrote:

  Dear Mamma

  I will write a few lines to you, and tell you I am a good boy. I help to cook food for the pig. I send you a kiss. Me and Arthur wrote ours on the same side

  Your loving boy,

  Henry Estby

  These letters reflect the ways the family coped when their mother needed to be away. They missed her, but took care of one another, whether helping their father with the farm, or remembering the importance of a birthday celebration for a sister and daughter. Helga returned home sometime in the spring, became pregnant again, and then traveled sometime in the late summer, as shown by another similar letter from Bertha and Ida and their Aunt Hanna (Ole’s sister) dated September 6, 1893. Helga kept these treasured letters that connected her to her children.

  Love and kisses from the children, however, could not solve the reality of a severe financial crash in 1893 that swept the country. In early summer, it hit the heavily mortgaged city of Spokane and directly affected Ole’s livelihood. After the 1889 fire devastated the center of Spokane, Dutch financiers had loaned millions of dollars to rebuild the gutted city. The major lenders now reacted with quick and aggressive foreclosures on indebted businesses and individuals.

  To the Estby’s and the community’s shock, within three days of June, seven of the ten Spokane banks failed. Many prominent town leaders lost their real estate to sheriff’s sales. Foreclosures affected millions of dollars worth of buildings, choice residential property, commercial sites, and farmlands. This early economic depression in Spokane was described as a period of “gloom and disaster, of crashing banks and crippled industry, of riotous demonstrations and
counter organization for law and order.”2 Ole found that the city no longer needed carpenters as it reeled under this financial collapse.

  Nor could Ole count on getting extra work from farmers. By the end of 1892, the Dutch investment in rural lands rose beyond one million dollars. In the depression of 1893, wheat prices in the rich agricultural land of eastern Washington’s Palouse plunged to a devastatingly low 30 cents a bushel, almost a two-thirds loss from earlier years. Then unseasonable rains destroyed most of the grain in the Palouse country, leaving wheat to mold and rot in the fields, which soon bankrupted farmers. Financiers foreclosed on heavily mortgaged farmland, too, and a tumble in prices left many farmers destitute, too poor to hire Ole for any building.

  Eastern Washington farmers and the economy of Spokane did not experience an immediate turnaround after the Panic of 1893. Barter and trade became the currency of cash-poor farmers.3 Hired help and local stores accepted goods, such as old saddles, produce, or livestock because no one had cash for services, groceries, dry goods, machinery, or supplies. Farmers also bought on credit, hopeful the next harvests might be good. The Estbys encountered major expenses in the early 1890s, including the cost of three doctors performing surgery on Helga and months of recovery, the $600 purchase of land, building a home, two more childbirths, plus feeding and clothing a large family. They sank into a debt cycle even before the 1893 panic. They began a pattern of borrowing a new loan to pay off the last loan.4 This threat of slipping into destitution created intense anxiety and a sense of helplessness for Helga throughout the spring. If good fortune seemed with them earlier, providing them the means and the confidence to create their dream, the national Panic of 1893 destroyed these dreams.