Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [19]
Courtesy Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture/Eastern Washington State
Historical Society, Spokane, Washington, L94-19.123.
Detail of this photograph on this page.
A prevailing frame of mind justified allowing the vice-regulation policies of the city. Some city leaders believed that the prostitute was a necessary guardian of virtue who kept innocent moral women from being raped and ruined by men fulfilling their natural sexual needs. This doctrine of sexual necessity, supported by some medical physicians into the 1910s, asserted that men periodically needed to obtain sexual release for their health’s sake.4 “We could do it; it is within our power to drive those women out,” admitted Spokane’s mayor to inquisitors who questioned the city’s open policies. “But, speaking frankly, I question the advisability of doing it. Reputable physicians say the social evil is a necessary evil—that without it the number of shocking crimes would increase greatly.”5
By 1890, the oldest children in the Estby family were nearing their teenage years and inevitably needed to walk through the rough edges of the city to attend school, visit friends, or go shopping. Even if the Estbys could prevent their children from wandering into back alleys and encountering prostitution cribs, Spokane Falls’ lively street corners fascinated them. Palmistry readers, Chinese grocery-cart peddlers, “fire-and-brimstone” preachers, tinhorn street gamblers, and clairvoyant mediums all sang their songs of invitation. Drunken men and vagrants commonly loitered or roamed the streets and violence and disorder could erupt any night—hardly the ideal environment that the Estbys desired.
Helga’s nervousness in having the children out on these streets caused her to restrict the children’s activities outside the house, becoming extra protective as she worried over their moral and physical well-being.6 When she first came to Spokane Falls, Helga also brought her Midwest settler’s prejudice about Native Americans with her, an anxiety she passed on to her children. Peaceful Indians from the Spokane Tribe often came to the city, and Helga hired an Indian woman to help wash clothes in their yard. However, the children were “deathly afraid of her,” and Helga kept them indoors during the wash-woman’s visits.7 One day, while six of the children were walking in the city streets, a large Indian chief, dressed in paint and wearing feathers, noticed a glass-bead necklace that Clara was wearing. Interested in this jewelry, he reached out to touch it, and the family assumed he wanted to grab Clara. All the children screamed. Speaking in English, he assured them he wasn’t going to take her. He just wanted “to pat the pretty beads.”8 But in Helga’s eyes, the former farm children’s primary source of vulnerability came from their lack of experience in living in an unpredictable urban environment.
Although Helga appreciated the benefits of the city, the open city’s flagrant problems contributed to her desire to return to the countryside where she perceived a simpler and more moral life prevailed. She knew her growing children needed to be free to roam and explore without her constant worry about corruptive influences. Restless once again, the family began to think about moving outside the city, but near enough to be accessible to the advantages of Spokane. About this time, only twenty-eight miles southeast of Spokane Falls, the small town of Rockford actively encouraged settlers to come to the beautiful Rock Creek Valley. Rich agricultural farmland, situated near the foothills of the Coeur d’Alene mountain range, was available through the railroads and government. In 1892, Helga and Ole paid $600 to the Northern Pacific Railroad for 160 acres in Mica Creek, a Scandinavian enclave of farms known as “Little Norway.” Their funds most likely came from money seeded in their two apparent misfortunes: the town’s fire and Helga’s fall.9 Once again their family enjoyed the comfort of rural values in a Scandinavian community and the freedom and fresh air of