Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [32]
On the way down the mountain before reaching La Grande, Oregon, a tramp followed and threatened them for several days. “At a lonely point [he] attempted to intercept” them. They protested and tried to avoid him. But he persisted. Frightened by his actions, when he “refused to desist” and instead attacked, Helga shot a bullet through this “dudishly looking fellow’s leg.” Shaken by this face-off with a dangerous man and her need for lethal action, she was “pleased to announce that they were not arrested for this.”8 This first incident defending themselves gave Helga growing confidence that she possessed the mettle to protect them, if necessary. The town of La Grande, situated at the foot of the Blue Mountains, was a welcome relief. A farming community in a long fertile valley, surrounded by mountains abundant with fir, pine, and tamarack trees, it promised a place for food and rest.
Then, by the afternoon of May 24, they arrived at the Bedrock Democrat newspaper office in Baker City, Oregon. The reporter described the revolver-toting women as weather beaten and sun brown, and Clara as “tall, well built, rather pleasant appearing, and of mature years.” Helga expressed hope that they might earn part of their travel funds by “furnishing reports to New York and San Francisco newspapers.” She recognized that working in towns absorbed valuable time from their seven-month deadline, more time than she originally imagined. They planned to continue selling portraits of themselves, which was a quicker way to gain funds. She said, however, “if driven to extremes,” they will accept any employment that may be offered them at cities through which they may pass.9
The enthusiasm of the women caught the reporter’s attention, even as they casually told of the hardships they had encountered already. Getting healthier each day, Helga noted that she doubted she would need the medicine she carried in her knapsack as “the exposure has improved her indifferent health and given both herself and daughter appetites like bears.”10
Helga and Clara stopped at Boise’s Idaho Daily Statesman newspaper to get publicity about their trip. They stayed a week working to replenish funds needed for food, lodging, and clothes.
Courtesy Idaho State Historical Society, 74-126.5. Detail of this photograph on this page.
For the first time, she admitted how much her husband’s inability to provide for the family motivated her decision, something she never said quite so publicly in Spokane. When questioned as to their motives in undertaking the trek, Helga said that it had been first conceived through “the inability of her husband to maintain the family.” This fueled her determination “to do something herself” to help retrieve some of their lost belongings. If they succeeded, it would help her to recover the farm which is “all but hypothecated.”11
So many people expressed concerns over the danger of unsavory men that when Helga and Clara began, they admitted to harboring some of these fears too, especially potential assaults by isolated ranchers and cowboys, hobos, and highwaymen. But by the time they arrived in Baker City, their fears began dissolving. Their many kind encounters with others gave Helga and Clara a growing confidence in people they met and in their own capacity to cope. Farmers