The Year We Were Famous

by Carole Estby Dagg

  "You have to put in the part about the man with the rifle, though," Ma said.

  "And the lonesome stationmaster who needed his socks darned."

  "Chopping wood."

  "Eating grasshoppers."

  "The Indians and the curling iron."

  "The water bottles on the tracks."

  Our momentum halted when Ma looked away, fiddling with the top button on her shirtwaist. I suspected she was remembering Pittsburgh. Passing time could not turn the evening she'd told me about my real father into a funny story or thrilling adventure. I suspected we would never talk about that night again. Ma turned back toward me with a question in her eyes. She would never ask for forgiveness, and I didn't feel she had to ask for it. I reached across the table and laid my hand on top of hers. "Love you, Ma," I said.

  Her eyes welled up. She blinked. "Love you, Clara," she whispered.

  I had this story to tell, but one book would not support me for the rest of my life. I thought about the wizened widow in Oregon, the stationmaster with holes in his socks, the dressmaker in Salt Lake City with her clothing store, Dr. Holmes in Wyoming, Mrs. Bryan, the McKinleys. I had passed through their lives for an hour, a day, and then moved on, but they all left parts of themselves in my mind. I couldn't help wonder what happened to them after we left. Maybe the father I'd never met would inspire a story, too. Nellie Bly didn't need a poetic imagination; she wrote about real people and places. I had a hundred people and places to write about, too.

  And how about Mr. Doré's story? I pressed his letter against my chest and closed my eyes. I remembered his thick stubby eyelashes, the smell of his soap, the texture of his cheek against mine.

  Dear Miss Estby,

  Congratulations on reaching New York! Please write the very day you get there to let me know that you are well. I know you will have given interviews to the reporters at the World and Times already, but I'd like to do an article about you and your mother, too, for the Deseret Evening News, Would you write me a page or two with what you most remember and places you'd like to go back to?

  I hope Salt Lake City is on your list of places to revisit, I'll meet your train if you let me know when you expect to arrive, Miss Ernestine would still like you to visit her class, but don't do it on my account, I told her I planned to go to Seattle and the Klondike next year to cover the gold strike, She told me that if I went, I should not be surprised to find that she had become engaged to someone else while I was gone,

  While I was staying put in Salt Lake City learning the newspaper business, you were off on your adventure, and now perhaps you will put down roots long enough to go to college while I go off adventuring, Do you suppose someday we'll be of a mind to go adventuring or put down roots at the same time?

  I will send you my address in Seattle as soon as I know it.

  Travel home safely,

  Most sincerely yours,

  Charles Doré

  I slipped the letter between pages of my journal. A year from now, after the excitement of the Klondike, would he remember the gap-toothed girl who tromped into his office in Salt Lake City?

  How would my own story turn out? Related by blood or not, I was Ole Estby's daughter: strong, stoic, reliable. Everyone in Mica Creek said so. Perhaps I was also a little like the father I had never met. I hoped I would also be like Ma, the bravest woman I knew, a woman who could envision a world better than the one she found herself in, where farm families kept their homes in bad times, where women could vote, and every child with the will could go to college.

  In a lull between snow squalls, a shaft of late-afternoon light glinted silver off the lever on the typing machine. I stood in front of the desk. My right index finger hovered over the keys as I searched for the round black button with C for Clara. Most typists were men, but I could learn to type, too. I could support myself while I got started writing. I would write my own story day by day, one step at a time. If I just kept putting one foot in front of the other, I could go anywhere my dreams led me.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  CLARA AND HELGA ESTBY were real people, my great-aunt and great-grandmother. Newspaper articles documented their meetings with notables and described how they demonstrated their curling iron for a group of Indians and survived three days in the lava fields, a flash flood in the Rockies, mountain blizzards, rattlers, a cougar, and assailants. I hope Helga and Clara would not wince at the words I have put in their mouths or the thoughts I have put in their heads.

  I made up Erick Iverson and Mr. Doré, and concocted a name for Clara's birth father, since Helga never revealed his name. Miss Waterson is also fiction, since no one knows who—if anyone—made the wager with Helga Estby. Helga said at first that it was with someone in the fashion industry, but later implied that it was someone in publishing. Although newspaper articles disagreed on many details, they all quote Helga's claim that she had a ten-thousand-dollar bet with a mysterious party in the East. In 1896, ten thousand dollars would have been thirty-five times what a typical unskilled woman worker would earn in a year. The payoff Helga claimed for the walk was so extravagant that I began to wonder if the ten-thousand-dollar figure was part of Helga's hoopla.

  Helga was so inconsistent about other provisions of the contract and her deadlines that I even doubted if there was a contract, except in her lively imagination. Despite my doubts on the truth of the wager, I chose to stick to Helga's version of the story and cast Miss Waterson in the role of the "mysterious party."

  This book ends with Helga and Clara expecting to sell their story for at least enough to save the farm. In real life, their story did not have a happy ending. They were left stranded in New York with no money, without a change of clothes.

  With Clara's bad ankle, they could not have walked clear back across the country, especially not in winter. I imagine them walking across the new bridge to Brooklyn where there was a large Norwegian community and finding jobs scrubbing and cleaning—earning enough to keep them off the streets, but not enough to save for train fare home.

  Spring came with bad news from Mica Creek. Clara's sister Bertha was dying of diphtheria. Helga and Clara were desperate to get back home. Someone hearing about their plight gave them railway tickets as far as Chicago. From Chicago they walked to Minneapolis, where newspapers printed long articles about them. With this publicity, they likely raised enough money to get the rest of the way home.

  Back in Mica Creek, they were greeted with the news that both Bertha and Johnny had died of diphtheria. Helga went into another of her dismal spells—the worst yet—and the family agreed never to talk about the trip again. Helga and Clara's journals and the letter with the signatures of all the famous people they met along the way were apparently destroyed.

  Four years later they lost the farm, but moving to Spokane was not the disaster Helga had predicted. Her husband, Ole, later joined by Arthur (my father's father), started a construction business, which did well enough for the remaining family to have a comfortable home in Spokane. No one starved. Helga continued to demonstrate for women's suffrage and had her first chance to vote in a national election in 1920. She died in 1942.

  And what of Clara? A year after the trip, Spokane businesswomen raised money for her to go to business school. After that she disappeared until 1924, when she returned to the family for her brother Arthur's funeral. Although Clara and her surviving brothers and sisters were estranged for many years, they had reconciled by the time I knew them. Clara and her sister Ida lived on the main floor of a large Tudor house in Spokane, and her youngest brother, William, and his wife lived on the top floor. My cousins, sisters, and I looked forward to visits when we could explore the attic and shout important messages into the speaking tube that connected the floors.

  In 1950, Aunt Thelma (my father's sister) took me to Sacred Heart Hospital to see Great-Aunt Clara for the last time. Children weren't usually allowed on patient floors in those days,so Aunt Thelma must have convinced the nuns that I was an exceptionally quiet child who
absolutely had to see her Great-Aunt Clara again before she died. It's as if my aunt knew that many years later I would want to tell Clara's story and would need a clear memory of her.

  Clara is described by other family members as an intelligent, detached observer and a competent businesswoman. She kept her vow never to write about her trip across the country, and as far as I know, she did not publish any writing. She enjoyed writing for her own amusement, though. Several letters she wrote to a niece eighty years ago survive to this day. They are written in verse, sprinkled with fairies and magic.

  Helga and Clara inspired me to persevere in my attempts to tell their story even after twenty-nine rejections. I just kept taking classes, writing, and rewriting one word at a time for nearly fifteen years before seeing this book in print. I hope Helga and Clara inspire you, too, to keep on walking in the direction you want to go, one step at a time.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  If you picture me writing at a battered desk with nothing but a napping cat for company, you'd be right for ninety-five percent of the time. But it's the other five percent of the time in the real or digital company of editors, teachers, librarians, relatives with stories to tell, other writers, and forthright early readers that is the most important. Here, then, are my five percent people. I'm sorry if I left anyone out—it's been fifteen years since I started the project and my memory is, alas, fallible.

  Jennifer Wingertzahn, my acquiring editor at Clarion, who helped me pare 150 pages and find the real story. Dinah Stevenson, publisher at Clarion, who let Jennifer take a chance on me. Daniel Nayeri, who coaxed me into writing a new beginning and fixing the middle and the end. Everyone else at Clarion, including Christine Kettner, Amy Carlisle, and Alison Kerr Miller.

  My critique group: Deb Lund, Pamela Greenwood, Penny Holland, and Ruby Tanaka. My favorite teachers: Brenda Guiberson, Janet Lee Carey, Darcy Pattison, and Patricia Lee Gauch. Early readers: my sisters, Rollanda O'Connor and Helen Barr, my daughter, Emily Dagg, and Kaitlin Senter, Bev Katz Rosenbaum, Teresa Gemmer, Kate Snow, and Meg Lippert.

  Everyone in the Seattle chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. Candy Moonshower, who nominated me for the Sue Alexander Award, and Sue Alexander, who chose an early version of this book to receive the award. Librarians across the country who scrolled through microfilm of local papers to make copies of articles about Clara and Helga.

  Preservers of the family legend: Dorothy and Darryl Bahr, Mary K. Irwin, Aunt Thelma and Uncle Harold, Great-Aunt Margaret, and my parents, Wanda and Rolland Estby.

  And, of course, Great-Aunt Clara and Great-Grandmother Helga, who lived the story.