Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [25]
Drawing on the reservoirs of strength and faith that carried her through earlier dark days, she secretly considered the riskiest opportunity she had ever been offered. Because her family believed she used this story as a kind of “life-motto,” it is likely that this belief fueled her decision to attempt this trek, a trip newspapers of the era claim no other unescorted American woman had ever accomplished. A mammoth risk, but one promising her an almost unfathomable reward.
7 THE WAGER
Why do we take this trip? Well to make money … I have simply got to make a stake some way, for I don’t want to lose the farm and it is the only way I can see of saving it.
—HELGA ESTBY
SPOKESMAN-REVIEW, MAY 5, 1896
Sometime during these vulnerable months of desperation, Helga received a rare offer through “the instrumentality of a friend in the East.”1 A “wealthy woman” in New York or “eastern parties” proposed to pay Helga and her daughter Clara $10,000 if they would walk unescorted across America and meet certain stipulations of a written contract.2 As she considered this surprising turn of events, she could hear the surging power of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation (O.R.&N.) train as it whistled by their farm, a sound of invitation coming and going to the Spokane terminal. A transcontinental train brought her own family west, and Helga began imagining walking the rails that linked the United States into one accessible continent. Sometime in April, her days of deliberation ended. Helga not only decided she could do this, but that she must. Now came the hard part, explaining to her family what she knew she wanted to do.
After the months of worry and grief, the wager must have seemed like an open door, a viable way to solve an intractable problem. She may have even believed it came as a stunning answer to her prayers for finding a way to keep their family together. Helga knew that $10,000 would not only pay the taxes and mortgage and provide survival money until Ole’s health returned, but also that such abundance would assure educational opportunities for their remaining eight children. Clara and Olaf already demonstrated they could qualify to attend the new Washington State College in Pullman or the four-year private college in Spokane, and she believed the younger children seemed equally bright. What futures they could have!
The sponsoring party wanted the women to wear a type of bicycle skirt introduced at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 and being promoted for “the new woman” in America. The light-gray flannel costume included a short skirt that fell several inches below the knee, leggings, and a jacket.3 Helga always dressed in the prevailing Victorian fashion that required women to wear full-length dresses or skirts that hid any “immodest” display of an ankle. These heavy petticoated garments, however, sometimes using over twelve yards of fabric, significantly confined the physical activities of women. When the bicycle craze emerged in the 1890s, the long skirts and slips hampered safe, comfortable cycling.
Fashion designers solved this with the “reform dress,” but convincing American women that shorter skirts or bloomers were respectable presented a formidable challenge. Both the thought of women riding bicycles and daring such a radical change in dress met stiff resistance in some circles. The Rescue League of Washington formed to fight against women riding “the devil’s agent” and wearing bicycle apparel. The organization launched a national crusade to ask clergymen and women to suppress the bicycle craze because of its vulgarity.4 If the fashion industry, however, could use creative promotion to convince large numbers of proper women to shift their sentiments and wear the new bicycle skirts, the potential economic impact was high. Though gaining