Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [67]
Prior to her travels across the continent, her actions showed enormous confidence in one’s individual effort and responsibility to solve problems. But her active interest in the compelling election issues of 1896, and personal encounters with Jacob Coxey, Mary Baird Bryan, and western populists introduced her to the need to work collectively on solving the nation’s glaring problems. The humility of her destitution in Brooklyn taught her that sometimes individual effort alone was not enough in an unjust system. No matter how hard she and Clara worked in New York, with women’s wages so low, she felt helplessly trapped. Once she returned to Spokane, she began to work with others on issues that concerned her. “The big issue at the time was suffrage for women,” writes her great-great-granddaughter Darillyn Bahr. “Helga would march up and down with her … signs fighting for the right of women to vote.”10
In 1913, Ole died from a fall off the roof of a house he was repairing. Sometime after his death, Helga set up a room of her own where she began learning to paint and finally started writing her memoirs of the trip across America. Helga’s granddaughter, Thelma, and grandson, Roland, moved in with her in 1924 after the death of their father, Arthur. At this time, Helga’s unmarried adult children, Ida and William, also lived with her. These were the happy days that Thelma remembered with her beloved grandma.
Helga’s awakened curiosity about the world continued even after a leg injury from a taxicab accident in 1916 limited her movement for the rest of her life. She still loved to be on the go, and Thelma recalled how sometimes they would take the streetcar, ride to the end of the line out by Minnehaha Park, get out to walk around the beach and the woods, and then come back. “She just liked to see things.”11
During these years, Helga secretly wrote hundreds of pages on yellow foolscap paper, finally describing their adventures across America. In the privacy of her upstairs room, she created a special space to write and draw. It was here that Helga told her granddaughter to “take care of this story,” although the story remained a complete mystery to Thelma. No one ever told her that her grandmother walked across America.
One afternoon after Helga’s death in 1942, Ida’s younger sister Lillian came over to the house. While cleaning up, these two daughters of Helga lit a burn barrel in the backyard and tossed the hundreds of pages of their mother’s manuscript into the fire. Perhaps they hoped the devouring flames would forever silence the story of their mother’s actions that so shamed the Estby children. Ida’s memories of caring for her frightened brothers and sisters in the cold shed scarred her life forever. “Ida never forgave her mother and always blamed her for the trip,” recalled Thelma, “and neither did my father.”12
While flames were destroying Helga’s detailed memoirs, a daughter-in-law, Margaret, discovered the scrapbook with the two Minnesota news clippings of Helga and Clara’s journey. She secretly took them. Margaret’s husband, William, also still harbored resentment over his mother’s journey, the death of his brother and sister, and the frightening cold days in the shed. So she did not even tell him of her discovery.13
But she knew Helga’s story deserved to be saved. Twenty-six years later, after her husband’s death in 1968, Margaret finally passed on the news clippings to Helga’s granddaughter, Thelma. She found out for the very first time what “story” her grandmother was writing. “I was amazed when