Book Review: Bold Spirit

Bold Spirit: Halga Estby's Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America
by Linda Lawrence Hunt

This is the amazing story of Halga Estry, a Norwegian immigrant and mother of 8, and her 18 year old daughter Clara's walk across America from Spokane to New York in 1896. The walk was done to earn $10,000 from an anonymous donor and avoid foreclosure on the family farm in Mica Creek, WA. The $10,000 offer was made to prove that women were capable of such strenuous exertion and to promote the "reform dress" or bicycling skirt for women [this post is not entirely off topic]. The women started walking in full-length Victorian skirts, but in Utah changed to the bicycling skirt which they wore the rest of the way. They were also required to start the journey with only $5 and earn their living along the way. They walked mostly along railroad tracks and slept in depot shacks along the way, since they carried very little but the clothes on their backs and revolvers (to fight off ruffian men). Though they did succeed in walking across America, Helga did not receive the $10,000. Her family's hardship in her absence lead to lifelong resentment, and thus her story has been virtually lost. She intended to write a book of her adventures, and in later life penned hundreds of pages, but some of her children burned the manuscript. The story for the book was pieced together from newspaper articles in the cities where she stopped, so her adventures between cities are missing. Nevertheless, there is some great history here of the changing role of women in American society, women's sufferage and the 1896 Presidential election. Yet Helga herself had to hide her story after her return because it was so scandalous and shameful for a woman to have left her family for 6 months to undertake a journey like that.

Thanks for posting this Deb!! I will definitely have to go and find it, looks very interesting!!

I read this book too. It was fascinating. She got ripped off by the establishment and then left to fend for herself and survived.