The Daughter's Walk - Jane Kirkpatrick [138]
Linda Lawrence Hunt’s rag-rug history, which pieced together fragments of newspaper accounts, social history, and descendants’ memories also kept the story alive. She filled in many of the missing pieces about the walk, Helga’s life, and the social context in which the walk was made. Her award-winning account, Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America (Random House, 2003), celebrated the often-overlooked stories of women’s journeys and applauded the extraordinary trek this mother and daughter made in service to their family. It was when reading this book prior to publication that I had the privilege of meeting Linda Hunt and her husband, Jim, both professors then at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. Jim had been the judge in that essay contest and first alerted Linda to Doug Bahr’s captivating account.
The book fascinated me, especially a brief reference stating that after their return, Clara changed her name and separated herself from the family for many years. I wanted to know what happened to Clara, how the journey might have affected her. As I began to research Clara’s life, I wondered how she’d found a way to go on to business school while the Estby family perched on the cliff of foreclosure. Why did she change her name when she did and why to the name she chose? Where was she those twenty-plus years, and how might she have felt separated from her family?
I’ve often said that like good scientists, writers find something strange and then want to thoroughly explore it. Biography is one path to exploration. It tells us what and when and who; social history sets the context, and in this case, Bold Spirit set the stage for understanding the power of story and grief and what happens when one attempts to silence both. As Shakespeare so wisely noted in Macbeth: “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak, whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.” Without the witness, grief sinks us into depths only love can pull us from. But neither Helga’s biography or social history can tell us why the family separated as it did. Only fiction allows us to explore the truths and turmoil inside the landscapes of Clara’s heart and soul, about whom the present-day family knew so little and who was described by one descendant as having “abandoned” the family.
So with the blessings of descendants Mary Kay Irwin, Dorothy Bahr, Stephen Portch, and Norma Fay Lee, and with Linda Hunt’s encouragement and shared research, I began my pursuit to discover the what and why of the daughter’s story.
My journey took me to Olea Stone (sometimes called Steen) Ammundsen and Louise Gubner, the latter in partnership with Clara while they lived in Coulee City, according to the 1910 census. Olea lived down the street. Both Olea and Louise came from Norway and held links to the New York furrier industry prior to their arrival in the Spokane area around 1900, about the time the Estbys struggled with the final throes of foreclosure. This linkage to the New York fashion industry let me find them in New York in 1897 (when Louise changed her name from Gulbrandson to Gubner), and so I speculated how they might have found their way into Clara’s life. I wondered if they might have had something to do with the “eastern parties” in the fashion industry who sponsored the original walk and whether disagreement tied to that journey ultimately caused the family severing. One family story indicated there were “two Norwegian women who helped Clara go to school” and finding their names linked through property and census records gave me license to make those women be Olea and Louise.
Records of deeds and mortgages reveal that Clara had funds as early as 1901 and began buying and selling property shortly after that. She owned more than twenty separate pieces of property and farms or ranches throughout her life. That she paid cash for many of the properties (the Spokane River farm, for one) proves she had funds, though the source I provided is