Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [22]
Your loving Daughter, Ida
In this same batch of letters, Henry wrote:
Dear Mother
I got a pair of overalls papa bought. I had to have Hedvig (Bertha) to write for me I could not write my Self because they was in such a hurry. I will tell you that I’m a good boy all the time you was gone and will help Papa saw wood and put hay in the mangers when he is working with the horses because he is cold. I will tell you that it is snowing up here today. I feed the two little pigs.
Your son, Henry
Arthur summed up the family feelings when their mama left home when he wrote:
Dear Mamma
I want to write a few lines to you but not much. I am a good boy, I stay in the house all the time I will send a kiss to you. I wish you would come home.
Your little boy Arthur Estby
In another undated letter, Henry wrote:
Dear Mamma
I will write a few lines to you, and tell you I am a good boy. I help to cook food for the pig. I send you a kiss. Me and Arthur wrote ours on the same side
Your loving boy,
Henry Estby
These letters reflect the ways the family coped when their mother needed to be away. They missed her, but took care of one another, whether helping their father with the farm, or remembering the importance of a birthday celebration for a sister and daughter. Helga returned home sometime in the spring, became pregnant again, and then traveled sometime in the late summer, as shown by another similar letter from Bertha and Ida and their Aunt Hanna (Ole’s sister) dated September 6, 1893. Helga kept these treasured letters that connected her to her children.
Love and kisses from the children, however, could not solve the reality of a severe financial crash in 1893 that swept the country. In early summer, it hit the heavily mortgaged city of Spokane and directly affected Ole’s livelihood. After the 1889 fire devastated the center of Spokane, Dutch financiers had loaned millions of dollars to rebuild the gutted city. The major lenders now reacted with quick and aggressive foreclosures on indebted businesses and individuals.
To the Estby’s and the community’s shock, within three days of June, seven of the ten Spokane banks failed. Many prominent town leaders lost their real estate to sheriff’s sales. Foreclosures affected millions of dollars worth of buildings, choice residential property, commercial sites, and farmlands. This early economic depression in Spokane was described as a period of “gloom and disaster, of crashing banks and crippled industry, of riotous demonstrations and counter organization for law and order.”2 Ole found that the city no longer needed carpenters as it reeled under this financial collapse.
Nor could Ole count on getting extra work from farmers. By the end of 1892, the Dutch investment in rural lands rose beyond one million dollars. In the depression of 1893, wheat prices in the rich agricultural land of eastern Washington’s Palouse plunged to a devastatingly low 30 cents a bushel, almost a two-thirds loss from earlier years. Then unseasonable rains destroyed most of the grain in the Palouse country, leaving wheat to mold and rot in the fields, which soon bankrupted farmers. Financiers foreclosed on heavily mortgaged farmland, too, and a tumble in prices left many farmers destitute, too poor to hire Ole for any building.
Eastern Washington farmers and the economy of Spokane did not experience an immediate turnaround after the Panic of 1893. Barter and trade became