B+
Genre: Nonfiction
In 1896, Helga Estby went for a walk with her seventeen-year-old daughter, Clara. They started off from Spokane, Washington, and ended up in New York City. The story of that walk is the topic of the nonfiction book, Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America.
Helga emigrated to the US from Norway when she was eleven years old. At fifteen, she became pregnant. She married a farmer, Ole Estby, and had the baby — Clara, who probably had a different father — while married to him. During their married life they had ten children (counting Clara and a baby who was stillborn). They lost another son to heart problems just after he turned twelve.
During the Financial Panic of 1893, the Estbys were in danger of losing their farm. An anonymous source (who has never been identified) offered Helga a prize of $10,000 if she and Clara would walk across America. There were various stipulations – for instance, they had to work their way across the country and could not start off with more than $5, they couldn’t ask anyone for a ride but if offered they could ride in some kinds of conveyances (a wagon, for instance) but not others (no trains). Once they got from Spokane to Salt Lake City, the women would have to wear bicycle skirts (shorter than regular dresses, with leggings instead of petticoats). The women would have to complete the walk within seven months of starting out.
Helga’s husband and most of her neighbors were horrified that a wife would reveal to the world that she was not properly provided for by her husband. They were even more horrified that a mother would leave her children. However, Helga was determined to save the farm. On May 5, 1896, the women set out on a 3000+ mile trip, navigating by following railroad tracks. They dealt with ruffians, bad weather, a rolled ankle, and getting lost but they also made many friends and built confidence.
Hunt’s book is wonderfully written, managing to make Helga’s life and the trip come to life despite not having much in the way of hard facts to go on. The writing is conversational. Hunt writes with a warm tone, as though she and Helga were friends. Hunt also manages to convey a great deal of emotion and interest without constantly falling back on “She must have thought…” speculation. She also does a good job of explaining why the rest of the family resented the walk so much.
I don’t want to spoil what happens entirely, but it’s not a story in which everyone triumphs. Helga’s family refused to ever speak of the trip and after Helga died, her children burned her notes and memoirs. While most modern readers will see Helga’s walk as laudable, her family viewed it as shameful, partly because of tragedies that took place at home while she was away.
A daughter-in-law saved one of Helga’s scrapbooks and Helga’s grandchildren, most of whom never heard about the walk until long after Helga had died, vowed to tell her story. The last chapter of the book, “A Reflection on the Silencing of Family Stories,” details why some family stories are kept secret, and the benefits to bringing them to life.
I actually found the events before and after the walk to be the most interesting, possibly because they were the most detailed. At various points, Helga lived in a dugout, fought a fire, moved to the city, and sued the city for an injury she sustained while falling on a broken curb. After the walk, Helga became an artist and a suffragette. The walk itself could be a bit monotonous, although the chapter in which they get lost is terrifying. I was amused that of all the items they could possibly bring, one of the very few things they carried for 3000 miles was Clara’s curling iron. It came in handy when they met Native Americans, who found it fascinating.
I had so many feelings about this story, and so many questions. I wanted to know more about Clara, for one thing. Who was Clara’s father? The identity of the sponsor remains a mystery. Why was the prize money offer so sketchy? Sometimes I felt anxious, sometimes I felt triumphant, and frankly at some points the book is just horribly depressing.
But above all, I have one hopeful thought about this book: may we all have people in our lives like Helga’s daughter-in-law and grandchildren who insist on telling our stories.
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Was her husband truly horrified that she would let the public know or was it more a case of his not wanting to be provided for by her? I imagine his pride took quite a hit if her walk saved their farm.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t do that today, not even armed and accompanied by a K-9 and Seal or Ranger. I can’t really wrap my mind around what the two of them accomplished because it refuses to consider anything other than the risks involved. Seriously, the mind boggles.
Looks like my tbr has just gotten larger.
This is a fascinating story but I am not sure what to make of Helga’s actions, though I must respect her courage. I am not sure whether most Americans would find what she did totally laudable either. It is kind of a classic Hollywood setup without a happy ending: there’s no prize, the family was divided (I read Clara was estranged from her family for most of her adult life), the farm was lost, and the family recovered financially anyways. Sometimes a bold choice is not a right one.
What an extraordinary story. Thank you, Carrie, your review raises many questions; mainly about the motivations of the people involved. Guess I’ll have to read the book to find the answers. 🙂
Check out the list of people who have walked or run across the US on Wikipedia. It’s pretty long, and their varying reasons are quite interesting.
The risks certainly get less nowadays, given the magic of cell phones and GPS, since you can never really get lost. (At Helga’s pace of 15-20 miles a day it would be challenging in the Rockies, and probably boring in the plains, but doable. I’d think the biggest modern risk would be getting hit by a car on a highway where drivers aren’t looking for pedestrians, which was presumably less of an issue for Helga and Clara.) Still, if Helga ended up in Washington in 1876 (if I’m doing the math right), there’s a good chance she’d already walked much of the way in the opposite direction. Train tickets cost money, and the last of the covered wagons were still going then. So a child might have alternately walked and ridden. In any case, it was a chance to get away from the endless childbearing and the pressures of raising a family so I can see why it would have some attraction, and be hard on her husband, left behind with eight kids under the age of 17, the youngest presumably not much over seven, if that.
I wonder if her walk can be considered equivalent to someone going on a terrible reality show, or agreeing to an embarrassing go fund me page? It is odd that it seems such a publicity stunt (not for Helga, but for the sponsor) without much publicity?
Ummm… Spoilers much Dr Opossum?
I find the idea of family secrets fascinating. Maybe because I keep finding things out about my own. Nothing like walking across the country, but I didn’t hear the one about my grandfather being subpoenaed to testify in the organized crime hearings back in the 60s until I was 30. And I was around in the 60s.
I wonder what the $ equivalent would be today. If it’s close to $100k, I’d do it. Heck, I’d prolly do it for $50k.
@CatG – In terms of purchasing power, more like $500K in today’s money, a factor of 50 rather than of 10. In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn $50 a month is mentioned as “good pay” for a young couple in 1901. As late as 1970 a $12K a year salary was the equivalent of $100K today. According to the helpful website “Work and Wages in the Early 1900s” a blacksmith (a highly skilled job) earned about $2.25 a day in 1894, or again about $54 a month for a six day work week. Unskilled laborers would have earned about half that. So $10,000 would have been four years wages for a highly paid middle class job (and more than that for a farmer).
@Rebecca- well with that kind of money, I don’t think I know anybody who wouldn’t do it
Thanks for this review. Helga’s story sounds intriguing and I’ve added the book to my wish list.
@Rebecca: Sadly, I think a modern woman would face other risks than being accidentally struck by a car. (Just the other day, something reminded me of what happened to Jenn Gibbons, the woman who rowed Lake Michigan to raise money for breast cancer survivors. Still pisses me off.)
@Susan – if you mean the danger of getting raped and murdered, getting struck by lightning is also a possibility. But not a probability. That was actually the point I was trying to make. Sadly, most people are killed by people they know personally, and most rapists know their victims. The most dangerous place for many women (and many men) is their own home.
We seize on stories of people who are victims of strangers because of our confirmation bias, but that makes us ignore real and more important dangers. Violent crime has been falling across the US for several years now. AT THE SAME TIME the number of fatalities from car crashes has been RISING. We should focus on what’s important more than what’s prurient.
Edit: I was curious so I looked it up. The FBI estimates that there were 14,249 murders in 2014 and an additional 444 “justifiable homicides” when police killed civilians. So say 15,000 murders as a round number. (Source: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/murder)
The US department of transportation estimates that in the same year there were 32,675 people killed in car crashes. (Source: https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx)
So you’re more than twice as likely to die in a car crash as to be murdered in the US in the present day though if you disaggregate the data it probably depends a little where you live. My guess is that rural areas have far higher rates of auto fatalities, and possibly lower rates of violent crime. If you’re going to walk that lonesome highway, a yellow day-glo reflective vest is probably better protection than any kind of weapon.
I didn’t get into a lot of detail in my review because I wanted to avoid anyhting spoilery, but rest assured that the book addresses Helga’s publicity work and all the dangers she and Clara feared, which included getting hit by lightning, attacked by men, and hit by trains (they followed the tracks and sometimes had to cross trestles. Clara even invented a kind of pepper spray to deal with predatory men.
Wait, wait, I’ve got it. The mysterious benefactor was … drumroll … Clara’s biological father, who left town 17 years ago, got rich, started feeling guilty, and could think of no other way to help his daughter without blowing everyone’s cover.
Oh, but I forgot. This is reality, not extravagant fiction. Never mind then.
OK, this post went dark. I’ll just add this: my second cousins are long distance bicyclists. Like ride, unsupported (which means only what they can carry on their bikes, no one in a support vehicle following or waiting), from Chicago to San Diego, like the Lewis and Clark trail from St. Louis to the Oregon. They tell great stories. One about asking a law enforcement officer about a good place to camp. He told them about a hundred more miles up the road. It was coming up on sunset. He wanted them out of his jurisdiction. He didn’t feel they would be safe in his area, and he didn’t want to be responsible for their safety. I asked how often that happened, that they felt unwelcome or unsafe. That was it, the one and only time. Maybe it’s the bicycles, maybe it’s that they’re in their 70s, but they find their adventures full of people who offer shelter, meals and small acts of kindness. The man who pulled over on his pickup and pointed out the huge storm coming up behind them, tossed their bikes in the back and took them home to his wife, who gave them lunch while the thunderstorms passed. Or the young mom who passed them going one way and shortly came back to give them icy cold water on a very hot day. The world’s a scary place sometimes, but it is full of amazingly kind people.
Carol Etsby Dagg wrote a novel for young people called The Year We Were Famous, about this family journey.