Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [37]
Courtesy Portch/Bahr Family Photograph Collection
10 NIGHT TERRORS
They lit a huge bonfire at night for protection, but stayed awake with guns in hand.
—LEBANON EVENING NEWS,
DECEMBER 19, 1896
Staying focused steadily on their goal, they headed northeast from Salt Lake City to Wyoming, stopping on the way in Park City, Utah, to visit the silver mines. Perhaps emboldened by their new leg freedom and Helga’s strong curiosity, they claim “they went 1500 feet underground to observe”—clearly unusual actions for women.1 From there they traversed through the Heber Valley along the Union Pacific rails through the Wasatch Mountains, across wetland meadows into Silver Creek Canyon. Here they described climbing halfway down the canyon whose sides descended three hundred feet almost perpendicularly. “We managed to get part way down,” said Helga to a reporter, “but had to return after nearly losing our lives.”2
They entered Wyoming through Evanston at a time when violent clashes in northern Wyoming among big ranchers, rustlers, and settlers in the Johnson County War in 1892, and the murder of Chinese mineworkers in the Rock Springs Massacre in 1887 had given the new state a reputation of vigilante lawlessness. Sparsely populated, far more men than women lived here. But it was not just romanticized cowboys on the ranges. Miners were needed to extract the coal, and workers toiled for the railroads. Mine owners and railroad captains recruited cheap laborers from around the world, including Mexico, England, Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, Finland, and China. A climate of racial tension pervaded the workforce, and outbreaks of violence persisted.
Helga and Clara needed to walk more than 350 miles to Cheyenne, first crossing an area known as the Red Desert, a dry land receiving less than ten inches of rain a year. This sagebrush land fed some of the world’s largest herds of pronghorn antelope, thousands of head of sheep, plus cougars and grizzlies. With long distances between towns, they again faced problems finding food and shelter, and spent hours and hours of tedious trudging in the vast great basin. For three days and nights they walked without food and slept in the open air.3 The scorching heat in August, coupled with bouts of hunger, made reaching their twenty-seven-mile goal each day a grueling challenge.
While in the wilderness, their terror of mountain lions often kept them awake, especially when they heard them prowling nearby. In Wyoming they had a narrow escape from a gray mountain lion “as big as a man” that followed them for twelve miles. “Being acquainted with the animal’s traits, we knew they never attacked from behind and never except by running and springing upon a victim,” explained Helga to a reporter. “We kept up a steady pace and kept the animal about ten feet behind us.” They lit a huge fire at night for protection but stayed awake with guns in hand.4
Helga and Clara needed to cross the Union Pacific’s highest bridge, the Dale Creek trestle near Laramie, Wyoming. The bridge was an engineering marvel at 150 feet above the creek, but terrifying to walk across.
Courtesy Colorado Historical Society, photo by Wm. H. Jackson, CHS-J1046, 20101046.
Most of the time they spent the nights in Union Pacific section houses along the railroad tracks, and sometimes farmers and ranchers invited them into their homes. When Helga and Clara traveled through Rock Springs, they found tangible evidence of the racial tensions among coal-mine workers when they saw armed federal troops in the city. Ever since the powerful Union Pacific Railroad hired low-paid Chinese laborers in 1875, tensions flared between the union miners who sought better wages and working conditions and the foreigners they resented for taking their jobs. When a strike situation arose again in 1885, a labor riot erupted and a white mob torched Chinatown, a section of Rock Springs. They killed at least twenty-eight Chinese miners, forcing miners to flee into the desert hills where more died of exposure. Federal troops, called in by the governor,