Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [9]
Helga, like other pioneer prairie wives, fought a constant battle against pests, including prairie dogs and snakes that came through the dirt floor in spring. To keep the house clean, sheets draped under the sod roof caught the dirt and bugs. Rivulets of mud ran through the dwellings when rain soaked the sod. A fastidious housekeeper, who often said, “The cheapest thing in the world is a five-cent cake of soap,” Helga found housekeeping in her sod house conditions a continual challenge.8
These early years brought the loss of one child at birth, a firstborn son they named Ole.9 During the next few years, Helga was continually pregnant or nursing a newborn. Their son Olaf was born in March, 1879, the couple’s first daughter Ida in September, 1880, and another daughter, Hedwig (called Bertha), in March, 1882. Without even a two-year span between births, she bore another son, Henry, in January, 1884, and one more son, Arthur, in November, 1885.10
Two of Helga and Ole’s children, Bertha and Olaf, in the mid-1880s. Helga was an excellent seamstress and lacemaker and most likely had sewn these clothes.
Courtesy Portch/Bahr Family Photograph Collection.
Birthing, nursing, and raising these six young children and keeping a sod home livable were only part of Helga’s responsibilities for survival on the frontier. Settling a home in this demanding environment required women to be physically and emotionally strong. Rather than a city neighborhood with friends next door, now Helga had only herself and family to rely on. Never-ending work and long distances between farms made close friendships and regular socialization with neighborhood women almost nonexistent. Because they lived in such isolation, they seldom mingled with anybody, and the family and children spoke in Norwegian because of Ole’s lack of English.11
As a farm wife, Helga’s days involved constant chores—churning butter, making soap, sewing, mending and patching clothes, planting, weeding, harvesting and preserving garden produce, making tallow candles, or cleaning kerosene lamps. During her childhood in Norway and America, Helga developed exceptional skills as a seamstress. But having been an urban child, the challenges of homestead farming were all new to her.
The ability of the homemaker to make the most of the environment determined the subsistence level of the family. Western homesteading women knew their resourcefulness and hard work were essential, and they received respect as the nurturers and center of all life around the early farms. As the character Ántonia tells Jim in Willa Cather’s book on prairie life, My Ántonia, “We’d never have got through if I hadn’t been so strong. I’ve always had good health, thank God, and I was able to help him in the fields until right up to the time my babies came.”12
Prairie reminiscences from women settlers also spoke of genuine satisfactions. Many mentioned they liked the idea of the family working together, and they took pride in being a real helpmate to their husbands. Pleasures needed to be simple. As one pioneer stated, “You have to respect each other and work together.… Joy was found in small things like a child’s first step, playing games.… Good crops, or a root cellar filled with canned goods and produce for the coming winter months gave great satisfaction.”13 For immigrants with meager resources available to them in Norway, the bounty in America seemed far more promising than anything in their homeland. This may have been particularly true for Ole. Optimism prevailed;