Bold Spirit

by Linda Lawrence Hunt

  With Ole’s livelihood as an independent carpenter no longer in demand, the family could not depend on his earnings. Nor could he develop the farm because an injury from a horse accident left him unable to do heavy physical work.5 Without viable income, the Estbys borrowed $1000 on the mortgage from D.K. Welt on July 6, 1894, shortly after their last daughter, Lillian, was born on March 12th. Unable to pay their mortgage or taxes during the midst of this economic depression, Helga awoke every morning haunted by the fear of foreclosure. The “unsatisfied” $1000 debt placed them in imminent danger of losing their farm.

  The thought of a sheriff’s sale taking all of their earthly belongings created a fear that was making Helga physically weaker. Although she was a strong woman who survived ten pregnancies, the last two pregnancies left her health more precarious. She had already undertaken risky gynecological surgery. Helga knew that a bankruptcy would tear the family apart, forcing the older sons and daughters to board out as servants or gardeners in wealthy homes. When hard times hit families, the older children often dropped out of high school to perform this menial labor. Helga longed for them to have the chances that education gave in America because she knew they were intelligent and motivated children. Those remaining with the family would probably live in a crowded dilapidated boarding house back in Spokane, placed at the mercy of unsanitary conditions and uncaring landlords. Though financially poor now, they would become poorer still if the little moments of family joy on the farm that marked their days—the hayrides and sleigh rides, grange dances, and neighborly coffees—should simply cease.

  On January 18, just three days after celebrating his twelfth birthday, tragedy struck the Estby family when they lost their son Henry, possibly from heart complications with childhood rheumatoid arthritis. He was their gentle boy, who liked to help his papa saw the wood, put hay in the mangers, and cook food for the pigs. Exceptionally affectionate and loving, he unabashedly gave kisses and expressed how he missed his mama whenever she was gone.6 Helga always had been grateful that she could help keep their children in good health, other than catching normal childhood diseases. They even avoided the diphtheria epidemic that raced through Minnesota prairie communities in the 1880s. Out of ten pregnancies, she lost only one infant after childbirth, early in their marriage.7 She also knew how to nurse ill children back to health, so Helga was unprepared for the spiraling grief that engulfed her after losing their winsome son. This sorrow sapped her ability to sleep, to work, or even to think clearly at times.

  Ole’s own grief was silently borne. He carried a father’s humiliating sense of inadequacy and frustration over his slow recovery from the injury that kept him from heavy labor. In late-nineteenth-century America, and especially in his Norwegian community, fathers were expected to assume responsibility in providing for their family. As a wife, Helga likely felt torn between her Norwegian sense that a wife should not refuse affection to her husband, especially when he needed comforting and reassurance, and her conviction that at thirty-six she was not ready to bear and nurse an eleventh child. Helga felt desperate and alone as she pondered a way out of their plight.

  Living with the sorrow of losing her twelve-year-old son, the fear of losing the home and land she loved, and the danger of losing her emotional and physical health, Helga was thinking and praying for a solution during the spring of 1896. They had been in dire straits before—during the treacherous winter of 1880 in Minnesota—and survived. After suffering from a dangerous fall on Spokane’s streets, she had sued the city, won a lawsuit, and found a female surgeon who helped restore her health. She still fervently believed that America abounded with opportunity for immigrants willing to work and take risks. Looking back at these events, she even believed that, eventually, their difficulties worked out for something good.

  But a mortgage debt for a family with limited income created immense anxiety in the late 1800s. America provided no “safety net” to offer protection, nor did the immigrant Estby family have extended family nearby to turn to in times of trouble. Another Norwegian immigrant mother, who claimed a homestead in 1874 very near the Minnesota prairie land of the Estbys, described the weight of this anxiety for mothers in Grass of the Earth: The Story of an Immigrant Family in Dakota. As women rarely earned significant income outside of the home, the helpless anguish over an unpaid mortgage could control a life. Aargot Raaen recalled the shadow that enveloped their family life because of debt. When the family feared they could not even pay the 10% interest on their farm, Aargot (the oldest sister) brooded over the burden until she sometimes thought of nothing else. While the other children played, she would sit hidden by some low swinging bough and stare at the river; she watched the water bugs in their hopeless struggle against the swift current of the stream.

  The children could not understand how the signing of a paper could change everything, but it did.… Moor (their mother) was very different. She went about as if she were carrying a burden. She often sat lost in thought. When alone, the children asked, “Moor, what was that paper you signed?”

  “They called it a mortgage; it gives those who left the horses and the money the right to take our home unless we can pay them so much money every year for a certain number of years, besides paying the value of the horses and the money they left.” A chill stole over them all. Moor and the children had barely been able to live before. How could they take over the new burden?8

  Helga’s own burning anxiety about losing the farm mirrored Moor’s, but she was adamant against sitting passively by and staring at the river. The move to Mica Creek had created some of the happiest years for their large loving family, and she knew this beloved place blessed her children.

  In these April days of sorrow and stress, Helga likely carried a handful of spring flowers to place beside her son’s simple headstone. As she mulled over their family’s threatening situation, she fought against her fears. Helga also carried within her a memory from a pivotal experience in an elementary school in Christiana (now Oslo) that gave her courage during dark times. She often shared this story with her own children. One day, when Helga was a little girl, she attended a religion class where the teacher taught the children the biblical story of “Jonah and the Whale,” of how the whale swallowed Jonah and later spit him out to the sea. Her next class had been in science with a different teacher. Norway has a great seafaring tradition of whaling, and that particular day the children were studying the anatomy of whales. Helga learned that whales have small throats.

  The following day Helga boldly approached the teacher in the religion class and announced that Jonah’s story could not be possible because a whale’s throat was not large enough to swallow a man. Troubled by little Helga’s literalist response and her rejection of this biblical story, the teacher told her she should not say things like that. And then she added enthusiastically, “Don’t you know, Helga, that anything and everything is possible with God?”9

  Drawing on the reservoirs of strength and faith that carried her through earlier dark days, she secretly considered the riskiest opportunity she had ever been offered. Because her family believed she used this story as a kind of “life-motto,” it is likely that this belief fueled her decision to attempt this trek, a trip newspapers of the era claim no other unescorted American woman had ever accomplished. A mammoth risk, but one promising her an almost unfathomable reward.

  7 THE WAGER

  Why do we take this trip? Well to make money … I have simply got to make a stake some way, for I don’t want to lose the farm and it is the only way I can see of saving it.

  —HELGA ESTBY

  SPOKESMAN-REVIEW, MAY 5, 1896

  Sometime during these vulnerable months of desperation, Helga received a rare offer through “the instrumentality of a friend in the East.”1 A “wealthy woman” in New York or “eastern parties” proposed to pay Helga and her daughter Clara $10,000 if they would walk unescorted across America and meet certain stipulations of a written contract.2 As she considered this surprising tur
n of events, she could hear the surging power of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation (O.R.&N.) train as it whistled by their farm, a sound of invitation coming and going to the Spokane terminal. A transcontinental train brought her own family west, and Helga began imagining walking the rails that linked the United States into one accessible continent. Sometime in April, her days of deliberation ended. Helga not only decided she could do this, but that she must. Now came the hard part, explaining to her family what she knew she wanted to do.

  After the months of worry and grief, the wager must have seemed like an open door, a viable way to solve an intractable problem. She may have even believed it came as a stunning answer to her prayers for finding a way to keep their family together. Helga knew that $10,000 would not only pay the taxes and mortgage and provide survival money until Ole’s health returned, but also that such abundance would assure educational opportunities for their remaining eight children. Clara and Olaf already demonstrated they could qualify to attend the new Washington State College in Pullman or the four-year private college in Spokane, and she believed the younger children seemed equally bright. What futures they could have!

  The sponsoring party wanted the women to wear a type of bicycle skirt introduced at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 and being promoted for “the new woman” in America. The light-gray flannel costume included a short skirt that fell several inches below the knee, leggings, and a jacket.3 Helga always dressed in the prevailing Victorian fashion that required women to wear full-length dresses or skirts that hid any “immodest” display of an ankle. These heavy petticoated garments, however, sometimes using over twelve yards of fabric, significantly confined the physical activities of women. When the bicycle craze emerged in the 1890s, the long skirts and slips hampered safe, comfortable cycling.

  Fashion designers solved this with the “reform dress,” but convincing American women that shorter skirts or bloomers were respectable presented a formidable challenge. Both the thought of women riding bicycles and daring such a radical change in dress met stiff resistance in some circles. The Rescue League of Washington formed to fight against women riding “the devil’s agent” and wearing bicycle apparel. The organization launched a national crusade to ask clergymen and women to suppress the bicycle craze because of its vulgarity.4 If the fashion industry, however, could use creative promotion to convince large numbers of proper women to shift their sentiments and wear the new bicycle skirts, the potential economic impact was high. Though gaining acceptance in the fashion centers of Paris and New York, few women in the rest of America wore such new fashions. The 1895 Montgomery Ward catalog, the largest mail-order business in the United States and a clothing resource for women, did not show a single shorter skirt for women to purchase.5 Women had not forgotten the ridicule directed at earlier reformers who introduced the bloomer, a comfortable fashion that failed to be widely adopted. The sponsors could benefit from the attention Helga and Clara’s audacious venture would surely generate. A reporter noted, “Mrs. Estby and daughter will be paid a certain sum of money upon their arrival in New York for their services in advertising the dress.”6

  Besides serving as a walking advertisement for fashion reform, the sponsors wanted this cross-continent achievement to prove the endurance of women.7 As America entered the cusp of the twentieth century, progressive “new women” were challenging the common beliefs about females that often limited their choices. Biological assumptions about women’s inferior physical capacities still existed, including that women were physically delicate and needed to be protected.8 In the Victorian era, fragility in urban society women even became fashionable. “Women are too apt to regard delicacy, in its physical sense of weakness, as an essential element of beauty,” noted one critical observer on women’s deliberate attempts at acting frail for social prestige. “This is a false and dangerous notion, which finds expression in the affectation of paleness of complexion and tenuity of figure, which are deliberately acquired by a systematic disobedience of the laws of health.”9 Yet, physicians and advice books reinforced the prevailing belief that a woman’s biology made her susceptible to disease and ill health. Physicians warned that if women made exceptional exertion, they were far more inclined to nervous exhaustion, known as neurasthenic disease, than men. The neurasthenic was “delicate and high strung, subject to fits of anxiety or even hysteria that could erupt at any time. By virtue of their anatomy, all women were susceptible and therefore had to avoid anxiety-producing and enervating situations.”10

  Physicians warned young women of Clara’s age to curtail their physical and intellectual activity during their menstrual periods and gave medical advice such as, “Long walks are to be avoided.… also long wheel rides … in fact, all severe physical exertion.… Intense mental excitement as a fit of anger or grief or even intense joy may be injurious.”11 When Helga asked her eighteen-year-old unmarried daughter to exert herself so strenuously, this ignored society’s advice that young women must guard their reproductive health. Helga’s own years of hard work as a young mother on the prairie gave her confidence that doctors and society underestimated women’s physical strength.

  Although remnants of these beliefs permeated America, especially among the privileged classes of American women, these sentiments were being challenged by 1896. The opening of college opportunities for women also brought the development of physical education classes, partly as a way for colleges to develop women’s strength and to prove that intense academic studying would not endanger their health. As the first women graduated from medical school, they began speaking to public audiences on the values of physical training. Speaking to women’s clubs in the East, Dr. Mary Taylor Bissell claimed that physical exercise provided women, as well as men, with “endurance, activity and energy, presence of mind, and dexterity.” She insisted that the value of physical exercise “cannot be overestimated as a sedative to emotional disturbances, and a relief from that nervous irritability and hypochondria so often engendered by a sedentary or an idle life.”12 The sponsor of the wager may have seen the positive health benefits that emerged when women, freed from constraining dress, could pursue an active physical life. Or, it simply may have been an advertising ploy to sell more reform dresses. Whichever, if two women accomplished the stunning act of walking across the mountains, plains, and deserts of America’s vast continent, news of this achievement could cause a monumental shift in the public’s perception of women’s strength.

  The “eastern parties” wrote up a formal contract with certain stipulations and a seven-month deadline that Helga agreed to and signed. Required to leave with only $5 apiece, they needed to support themselves “without begging” along the way, earning enough for food, lodging, and replacement clothes and shoes. It seems likely their required visits to political leaders in the state capitals would be interpreted as living proof of the economic capability and physical strength of ordinary women. Helga and Clara’s actions could speak volumes.13

  Helga planned to take extensive notes along the way and write a book of their adventures in hopes that the contracting parties might help sell this to the highest bidder for publication. This did not appear to be a stipulation of the sponsoring party, rather it was Helga’s own attempt to increase her income.

  From the beginning, they designed their monumental effort to be a public event. The first instruction from the sponsors required going to a portrait studio in Spokane for a formal photograph to send to the New York World newspaper. This progressive Pulitzer paper featured a weekly news column entitled “Women of the Week: Some extraordinary doings of the New Sisterhood in Unusual Fields of Feminine Effort.” In the April 26, 1896 column, an announcement of the intentions of the “Two Women’s Great Tramp” to walk from Spokane to New York appeared, along with a formal portrait of Helga and Clara. Noting that the women will break all records in the line of pedestrians and will travel rapidly, with very light equipment, the reporter alluded to the high-stake risks or folly of this transcontinental trek w
ith the assessment, “They intend to write up their adventures afterwards if they survive the experiment.”14

  (following pages) Helga and Clara had this photograph taken in a Spokane studio in April 1896 to send to the New York World announcing their upcoming trip. It served as the basis for a photoengraving included in the article “Two Women’s Great Tramp,” which appeared in the New York World on April 25, 1896.

  Photograph courtesy Portch/Bahr Family Photograph Collection.

  Photoengraving courtesy General Research Division,

  The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

  Detail of this photograph on this page.

  Two Women’s Great Tramp.

  The Spokane newspaper offices saw the startling New York World picture and article and published their first acknowledgment of the Estby women’s trip in the May 4, 1896, issue of the Daily Chronicle. Entitled “Tramp to New York: An Eastern Paper Tells of Spokane Women’s Plans,” it told how Mrs. H. Estby and daughter are the “latest among the new women of this section of the country to attract attention in the east.”15

  For some reason, Helga gave the Spokane city address of 1725 Pacific Avenue where their children worked occasionally as domestics and gardeners, probably while attending a Spokane high school.16 This distinctive home of the Rutter family, a leading Spokane businessman and his wife, was designed by a prestigious Northwest architect, Kirkland Cutter, and located in Spokane’s wealthiest neighborhood. Because of this, the newspaper ended with a note of skepticism. “The story is an interesting one and the only fault found with it at this end of the line is that no person named Estby lives, or ever has lived at the address given nor can such a name be found in any of the city directories.”17