Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [14]
After the challenges of eleven years of homesteading on the prairie, the young wife and mother emerged a very different woman than the young bride who moved to Minnesota with her infant child. Through the hardships of isolation, mercurial crop production, the worst snowstorm of the century, and threats of fire, cyclones, and pestilence, she not only endured but also helped her carpenter husband carve out a living on the farm. She birthed and nurtured six healthy children, grieved the loss of their firstborn son, and built a farm, which left them with modest funds to choose a new destiny as a family. She knew during every day of her work that she was needed, essential to their family’s quality of life.
These formative years gave Helga an inner confidence of her ingenuity, persistence, adaptability, survival skills, intelligence, and talents. Though glad to leave, like many other pioneer women, she took with her permanent qualities of character forged in the crucible of prairie survival. And when she moved to Spokane Falls, the 1888 city directory listed her with the title she chose: She did not identify herself as housewife but as Helga Estby, “farmer.”20 Yet nothing in Helga’s imagination prepared her for the twist of fate that befell her on a dark Spokane Falls street just one year later.
4 SURPRISES IN SPOKANE FALLS
I also suffered much pain at all times and much
worry, loss of sleep, and nervous prostration.
—HELGA ESTBY’S TESTIMONY
SPOKANE COUNTY COURT RECORDS
One of the first sights and sounds Helga and the children witnessed when they stepped off the train in May of 1887 was the roaring, spectacular Spokane Falls. The Spokane River cascaded over upper and lower basalt channels in 130 feet of stunning power right in the heart of downtown. The pride of early settlers, it was the source that sparked imaginative men in the early 1880s to gamble their destinies on this isolated land even though it was far from any railroad connections. Minneapolis had gained status as the largest flour manufacturing center of the world through the 20,000 horse power generated from the famed St. Anthony’s Falls, yet engineers estimated the power of Spokane Falls at a monumental 90,000 horse power.1 This power motivated pioneers to tame nature and harness the water to run the early granaries, lumber mills, and other industries.
The Spokane Indians knew this magnificent resource as the home for rich runs of spring salmon, which drew the tribal members back to their traditional river waters each August. For many Spokane Falls citizens and visitors, the falls’ roaring presence near the dusty dirt streets of the city spoke of a greater power, a Creator with a lavish spirit of energy that refreshed; people constantly paused on the bridges to watch the foaming swirls and hear this thundering natural force. The one-hundred-mile Spokane River cut a swath through eastern Washington territory from the north end of Coeur d’Alene Lake to its confluence with the Columbia River below Fort Spokane. Each natural wonder added to a sense of the splendor of the Northwest, a visual feast to Helga after the flat expanse of the prairie.
For centuries, this region along the river had been the ancestral home of the Spokane Indians, most commonly translated as “children of the sun.” An interior Salish tribe, they lived in the general area of the Spokane River in three primary bands, the Upper Spokanes, the Middle Spokanes, and the Lower Spokanes. They began fur trading with the first white men in 1810. Both Protestant and Catholic missionaries came into the area during the ensuing years, but it was not until the 1860s that miners and farmers began their push to settle in the Spokane tribal lands. The Northern Pacific Railroad arrived in Spokane