Bold Spirit, by Linda Lawrence Hunt

Bold Spirit: Helga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America, by Linda Lawrence Hunt
University of Idaho Press, 2003
260 pages, plus Notes, Bibliography and Index. B&W photos and illustrations scattered thoughout the book
Library: 973.87092 HUN


Description
Desperate. Determined. Unwaveringly confident. In 1896, a Norwegian immigrant named Helga Estby dares to cross 3500 miles of the American continent to win a $10,000 wager. On foot.

A mother of eight living children, she attempts to save her family's homestead in Eastern Washington after after the 1893 depression had ravaged the American economy. Fearing homelessness and family poverty, Helga responds to a wager from a mysterious sponsor, casts off the cultural corsets of Victorian femininity, and gambles her family's future by striking out with her eldest daughter, Clara, to try to be the first women to travel unescorted across the country: independent, audacious, alert, and armed with a Smith-and-Wesson revolver.

Leaving with only five dollars each and dressed in full-length skirts, they follow the railroads east as newspapers chronicle their adventures. Using wits, savvy, and guns to survive snowstorms, hunger, mountain lions, and the occasional thief, they visit Indian reservations, Western boomtowns, governors, mining towns, remote ranchers, politicians, and even President-elect William McKinley.

Accomplishing what was assumed impossible for women, they arrive in New York heralded by the city's popular newspapers for their astonishing achievement. But deep disappointment, betrayal, and heartbreaking news from home cause the remarkable story to become silenced among their family and friends.

Almost a century later, author Linda Hunt recreates Helga Estby's story in Bold Spirit: her culture and time, her abiding love of America, her resilient faith, and her challenge to Victorian constraints as she lived on the transitional edge of a new century of possibilities and of changing beliefs about women.

For many modern readers, enduring questions remain about what happens when stories go unspoken among us and what keeps family stories alive. Helga's is a rag-rug history, woven from discarded remnants and submerged details, a once-forgotten saga that sheds insight into women's history, and demonstrates the tenacious spirit of the human will.

Table of Contents
Foreword by Sue Armitage
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. On Foot to New York
2. Motherhood on a Minnesota Prairie
3. The Crucible Years
4. Surprises in Spokane Falls
5. Frontier Vices and the Move to Mica Creek
6. Financial Fears and a Family Death
7. The Wager
8. Undaunted by Rain, Sleet and Snow
9. Hot, Hungry and Hopeful
10. Night Terrors
11. "New Women's" Actions and Old Victorian Attitudes
12. An Electrifying Presidential Election
13. Earning their Own Way
14. A Rush to the Finish
15. The Impossible Happens
16. Heartbreak at the Mica Creek Homestead
17. Homeward Bound
18. Lost and Found
A reflection on the silencing of family stories
Notes
Bibliography
Index