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By Root 449 0

the currency of cash-poor farmers.3 Hired help and local stores accepted goods, such as old saddles, produce, or livestock because no one had cash for services, groceries, dry goods, machinery, or supplies. Farmers also bought on credit, hopeful the next harvests might be good. The Estbys encountered major expenses in the early 1890s, including the cost of three doctors performing surgery on Helga and months of recovery, the $600 purchase of land, building a home, two more childbirths, plus feeding and clothing a large family. They sank into a debt cycle even before the 1893 panic. They began a pattern of borrowing a new loan to pay off the last loan.4 This threat of slipping into destitution created intense anxiety and a sense of helplessness for Helga throughout the spring. If good fortune seemed with them earlier, providing them the means and the confidence to create their dream, the national Panic of 1893 destroyed these dreams.

With Ole’s livelihood as an independent carpenter no longer in demand, the family could not depend on his earnings. Nor could he develop the farm because an injury from a horse accident left him unable to do heavy physical work.5 Without viable income, the Estbys borrowed $1000 on the mortgage from D.K. Welt on July 6, 1894, shortly after their last daughter, Lillian, was born on March 12th. Unable to pay their mortgage or taxes during the midst of this economic depression, Helga awoke every morning haunted by the fear of foreclosure. The “unsatisfied” $1000 debt placed them in imminent danger of losing their farm.

The thought of a sheriff’s sale taking all of their earthly belongings created a fear that was making Helga physically weaker. Although she was a strong woman who survived ten pregnancies, the last two pregnancies left her health more precarious. She had already undertaken risky gynecological surgery. Helga knew that a bankruptcy would tear the family apart, forcing the older sons and daughters to board out as servants or gardeners in wealthy homes. When hard times hit families, the older children often dropped out of high school to perform this menial labor. Helga longed for them to have the chances that education gave in America because she knew they were intelligent and motivated children. Those remaining with the family would probably live in a crowded dilapidated boarding house back in Spokane, placed at the mercy of unsanitary conditions and uncaring landlords. Though financially poor now, they would become poorer still if the little moments of family joy on the farm that marked their days—the hayrides and sleigh rides, grange dances, and neighborly coffees—should simply cease.

On January 18, just three days after celebrating his twelfth birthday, tragedy struck the Estby family when they lost their son Henry, possibly from heart complications with childhood rheumatoid arthritis. He was their gentle boy, who liked to help his papa saw the wood, put hay in the mangers, and cook food for the pigs. Exceptionally affectionate and loving, he unabashedly gave kisses and expressed how he missed his mama whenever she was gone.6 Helga always had been grateful that she could help keep their children in good health, other than catching normal childhood diseases. They even avoided the diphtheria epidemic that raced through Minnesota prairie communities in the 1880s. Out of ten pregnancies, she lost only one infant after childbirth, early in their marriage.7 She also knew how to nurse ill children back to health, so Helga was unprepared for the spiraling grief that engulfed her after losing their winsome son. This sorrow sapped her ability to sleep, to work, or even to think clearly at times.

Ole’s own grief was silently borne. He carried a father’s humiliating sense of inadequacy and frustration over his slow recovery from the injury that kept him from heavy labor. In late-nineteenth-century America, and especially in his Norwegian community, fathers were expected to assume responsibility in providing for their family. As a wife, Helga likely felt torn between her Norwegian sense that