Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [10]
During these years, Helga gained a sense of her importance and worth to her growing family. Although the sudden move from her merchant city family into the role of marginal homesteader must have been daunting, the family did make progress economically as indicated by the house and outbuildings they eventually built on their homestead. However, she might have identified more with Beret, the prairie wife in the well-known Norwegian novel Giants in the Earth. This Norwegian-American writer, O. E. Rolvaag, recognized that early life on the prairie in North Dakota was not a place of sustenance for all women. Instead, they often suffered from severe isolation and loneliness because of living so remotely from friends and neighbors, unlike the settlers in Central Minnesota where woods and lakes and villages offered more variety and community.
In Rolvaag’s book, the first of a trilogy on a Norwegian immigrant settlement in the Dakota prairie not far from Yellow Medicine County, the wife of Per Hansa lives in conflict with the prairie. Sometimes seen as a powerful, omnipresent, and malevolent force shaping their lives, the prairie imposed a severe trial or testing for the pioneers. As Rolvaag wrote: “Beret sees her transportation to Dakota Territory as punishment for her sin of conceiving a child out of wedlock. The prairie is the instrument to effect punishment and Beret is tested by her Creator in the crucible of the prairie.”14
Which was it for Helga? The Minnesota experience gave her a place where she might have surmounted the challenges with the immigrant settler’s optimism that these were temporary difficulties, worthy of enduring to improve the family’s fortunes. Or was she a young displaced Americanized city woman identifying more with Beret’s feelings? Perhaps both were true. Helga’s next actions demonstrated that the simple pleasures of a full root cellar and smiling child were clearly not enough for her.
3 THE CRUCIBLE YEARS
My mother was afraid of tornadoes and cyclones.
She wanted to come where we would be safe.
—IDA ESTBY, DAUGHTER
If the isolation of the prairie distressed Helga, the Siberian-like winter of 1880–81 severely tested her emotional health. The summer of 1880 led to the harvest of an excellent crop and the county again became known as the “land of promise.” But heavy and frequent rains in August made it impossible to begin stacking on most farms near Canby until the middle of September, right when Helga gave birth to Ida on September 18.
Just in the midst of threshing, a major unexpected snowstorm started the worst winter of the century, far before farmers had taken their crops to the granaries. In historical accounts of Canby, no winter has compared to this one in duration, continued severity, depth of snow, and damage to property.1 When darkness came on the evening of Friday, October 15, Helga and Ole saw an occasional flake of snow, but by midnight the wind and snow increased in fury. On Saturday, a blizzard raged with such violence that no farmers dared venture outside their sod homes, even to feed the animals. The fury continued until Monday afternoon, October 18. Snow banks in the city of Canby piled up almost level with second story windows, and snowdrifts filled Main Street from ten to fifteen feet deep. Many a farmer was compelled to dig down several feet to get to the barn door and it required one’s best endeavors to keep cattle from starving or suffocating. No preparations had been made for such a storm and great numbers of stock perished.2
Frightened families experienced weeks of terror. When the wood and coal supply vanished, farmers relied on hay, fence posts, and grain for fuel to keep from freezing to death. Snow completely buried many of the claim shanties in the country. Blizzard followed blizzard and prairie winds created drifts ten to fifteen feet deep. Pioneers excavated tunnels from the house to the barn, to the woodpile, and to the wells. If Ole or Helga ventured