Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [34]
After this near catastrophe, they continued south to Utah, committed now to staying with their original plan to follow the rails. The sparsely populated land in southern Idaho provided no alternative but to walk through miles and miles of hot, dry, lonely territory, with no towns, railroad stations, or even farms to find meals or shelter. It was not unusual for them to find only one meal a day and they felt fortunate when they ate twice a day. The barrenness of Utah, generally bereft of foliage except here and there in narrow, rock-ribbed gorges, seemed inhospitable after living in the lush land of the Pacific Northwest. By now, electric storms, flash floods, rain, and snow had slowed their walk, caused detours, and changed Helga’s almost cavalier confidence that crossing this vast American continent on foot might be easy. In classic understatement, she describes these dangers and difficulties to a reporter, “We had considerable trouble in making our way through Idaho and over the mountains.”3
Entering northern Utah, which had just received statehood in 1896, Helga and Clara saw the land chosen and settled by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in their great migration for religious freedom in the 1840s and 50s. Coming into Brigham City, Helga gained a sense of the magnitude of Mormon influence in this region when she saw her first tabernacle rising high above this small town located about forty-five miles north of Salt Lake City. After tromping for days in arid land and bleak isolation, Helga and Clara marveled at how the hardworking citizens irrigated the desert and built a town with schools, churches, businesses, and sycamore-lined streets.
Knowing of hostilities between Native Americans and white settlers during the westward expansion made Helga nervous when they first encountered Indians. One day, while Clara and Helga walked through Utah, a band of young Indians spotted the women and stopped them. One spoke a little English and directed them to empty their satchels on the ground. After looking over Helga and Clara’s skimpy supplies of sketchpads, pencils, lanterns, revolvers, and medicine, he seemed puzzled by the women’s curling iron. He signaled he wanted to see what it was used for, so Clara demonstrated how she curled her silky brown hair into ringlets. He seemed satisfied, returned all their items, and left the relieved women to continue on their journey.4
These late June days also brought Helga and Clara near the Great Salt Lake and wetlands, one of America’s prime resting places for waterfowl. Surrounded by salt flats and sage plains, hundreds of thousands of migratory birds nest there in the spring. During the month of Helga and Clara’s arrival, the white-faced ibis, Canada geese, great blue herons, snowy egrets, white pelicans, shorebirds, cormorants, and dozens of other species made this their home. They likely saw the thousands of colony-nesting California gulls—the common white, black, and gray gulls that are legendary in Mormon history for rescuing the settlers’ crops in 1848 from an infestation of crickets.5
The blistering July heat forced them to begin walking at night, and they arrived in Salt Lake City at 8 o’clock in the morning on July 8. They stopped by the Deseret News because they intended to remain for a week or so to rest up and work to “get a few pennies to help us further along.” They also admitted to their first discouragement, describing the trouble making their way through Idaho and over the mountains.
“Thus far,” said Mrs. Estby to the local reporter, “we have had a pretty hard time. The journey, however, is not what it is cracked up to be and I can assure you that when the trip is over I will never undertake such a trip again.” But then her confidence returned with her hope that “it has to get much better now” as the districts through which they will pass are more thickly settled than those which they have already traversed.6
After the previous days of desolation, Salt Lake City