Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [11]
Yet, during these dreary circumstances, the Scandinavian prairie settlers showed their grit and determination. Volunteers began to shovel snow off the railroad tracks, businesses reopened by creating tunnels to their doors, and local theater groups formed to relieve the monotony of the siege. The railroad company gave permission to cut and use the snow fences along the track for fuel.4 How did Helga and Ole, huddled alone in their sod home with their family and newborn, cope during this devastating winter? Whatever tenacity it took, Ole and Helga endured. When summer crops proved bountiful in the county the following year, the family’s pioneer perseverance was rewarded.
Living in the era before readily available birth control, Helga’s continual pregnancies suggest she adopted similar cultural values as other Norwegian immigrant farm pioneers. Although women gathered together occasionally at husking bees, quilting bees, and other work-related activities, their daily lives were often very lonely. Also, these reserved Norwegian wives in Minnesota did not ordinarily discuss personal, intimate concerns. Most women followed traditional religious teachings that reinforced feminine virtues to be supporting and nurturing. This included that their role was to satisfy their husband’s natural sexual desires and to bear children. This view of marriage was understood and rarely questioned.5
Once sixteen-year-old Helga married Ole and bore his children, she invested all of her considerable energy and talent working alongside her husband to create a sustainable and loving family life. Motherhood also aroused in Helga a sense of protectiveness. Especially after the frightening winter of 1880, living on their remote prairie land began to raise fears for the safety of the children she loved.
As a young mother in Minnesota in the 1880s, Helga faced another fear, particularly ominous because of its invisibility. Parents could recognize a treacherous snowstorm, a raging prairie fire, or a cyclone funnel, and seek a safe shelter for their children. But when Minnesota towns and surrounding farm homes experienced virulent outbreaks of diphtheria, this highly contagious disease caused significant alarm. Doctors found themselves helpless to treat diphtheria when it attacked families in its worse form known as “black diphtheria.” The lack of specific knowledge of the cause, or of any preventative or curative agents, staggered both doctors and laymen. Although light cases could be cured, the more deadly black diphtheria caused death “with startling certainty and machinelike regularity … often in a short four days.”6
Children were particularly vulnerable, suffocating to death as their windpipe closed. Even the finest doctors felt helpless when this attacked a family, and during the epidemics in the 1880s, they saw some parents lose all their children in a matter of days. As parents of young children, the Estby family would be targeted by their local Health Board to receive circulars required by the Minnesota State Board of Health. These disseminated the latest information concerning the restriction and prevention of diphtheria. Some of the information in this 1880 bulletin would later be disputed, but it provided the best medical insight of the era.7
Helga and Ole read that as a contagious and infectious disease, diphtheria proved most