Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [38]
Many nights Helga and Clara slept in railroad depots, such as this one in Rock River, Wyoming. The depots were often the only shelter across long, desolate stretches of the West.
Courtesy Union Pacific Historical Collection. Detail of this photograph on this page.
Walking through the Sweetwater region of Wyoming, they passed through Carbon, where the Union Pacific opened up seven coal mines in the traditional lands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians. Helga felt the pain of her son’s death again when she saw the tiny gravesites of the town’s children. Many died from cholera from an imported, contaminated water supply in the early years of mining.6 On their way to Rawlins, they saw more cattle than people in the vast stretches of dry land in the flat plains of the Great Divide Basin. The sounds of songbirds broke the long stretches of solitude.
After Rawlins, they began the climb through the Medicine Bow region. Constant blowing winds that raced through the channel between the Hanna Basin uplift and Elk Mountain dusted their clothes and skin with grit and gravel. By the time they reached Laramie on August 26, they clearly felt they had accomplished another milestone. The Daily Sun Leader described the wager, the threatening moments, and the women’s persistent optimism even though they now had slept out eight nights and sometimes had to go without food. “They had been lost in forests, had adventures with mountain lions, but still they trudged on in their short gray suits and came up smiling.”7
As news of their unusual venture became known among the railroad men, some began to leave bottles of water along the tracks to quench the women’s thirst in the blistering heat. As working-class men who endured the depression of 1893, they understood the vulnerability of a family losing a home. This unexpected “kindly consideration” gave Helga and Clara firsthand experience in the ways men in Wyoming showed respect toward women.8 This respect extended far beyond acts of kindness and courtesy. Since 1869, the Territory of Wyoming had given women the right to vote, and when Wyoming entered the union in 1890 as the forty-fourth state, it became the first with women’s suffrage. Women served on juries and held public office. As a conventional mother deeply immersed in the daily demands of caring for nine children, nothing indicated that Helga held much interest in politics before this extensive journey through America. But sometime during the walk, her interest in politics awakened, perhaps from earlier memories of the suffrage movement in Manistee during her childhood. It is possible that here in Wyoming, known as the Equality State, Helga began to wonder, “Should such rights be given to Washington women too?”
Crossing over the Laramie Mountains, summer storms and flash floods washed away bridges, which caused significant delays in their travel. After one bridge washout, they walked six miles through water two feet deep before they could climb up on the opposite bank of the river.9 In eastern Wyoming, Helga and Clara entered the fabled land of the cattle drives, where wealthy Texas ranchers fattened their cattle on the thick carpet of tall prairie grasses on an open range. Needing to protect their landholdings, small-scale ranchers began to fence in their land from grazing, which infuriated the cattle barons. Helga and Clara heard stories of the serious clashes, strife, and murders in the region from the local ranchers or farmers with whom they stayed.
But during August, excitement stirred around another topic of conversation at the dinner tables and in the towns of southern Wyoming as citizens looked to America’s future in the 1896 presidential election. The dynamic young Democratic candidate from Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan, surprised the Republicans with his magnetic grassroots campaign. The nation still reeled from the sustained financial depression of the early 1890s. Bankruptcies had caused thousands