Author to Present Interpretation of Women’s Long-forgotten Trek Across U.S.

PULLMAN, Wash. — The Washington State University Department of History next month will present a theatrical interpretation drawn from Spokane author Linda Hunt’s recent book about an intrepid and long-forgotten trek across America by a Spokane woman and her daughter in 1896.

Hunt’s book “Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America,” chronicles the tale of a Norwegian immigrant and her daughter who dared to walk from Spokane to New York in what ultimately proved a fruitless venture to win a $10,000 wager and save their family farm from foreclosure.

A former associate professor of English at Whitworth College and now director of The Krista Foundation for Global Citizenship, Hunt will be joined by Pat Stein, theater professor emeritus at Whitworth, for a presentation at 7 p.m. March 8 in Room 203 of the Samuel H. Smith Center for Undergraduate Education. The event is one of a number of activities scheduled at WSU in March in connection with National Women’s History Month.

“I’ve been very fortunate that Pat Stein also loves for Americans to learn of Helga’s story,” Hunt said. “She often travels with me to give a dramatic enactment of different characters in the book while I narrate the story.”

Detailing many of the incidents captured in her book, Hunt will join with Stein to recreate the true story of how Helga Estby, a mother of eight children, attempted to save her family’s homestead in Eastern Washington following the 1893 depression that ravaged the American economy

“Fearing homelessness and family poverty, Helga responded to a wager from a mysterious sponsor in New York, cast off the cultural corsets of Victorian femininity, and gambled her family’s future by striking out with her eldest daughter to try to be the first women to travel unescorted across the country,” Hunt said.

“What they achieved stood in contrast to contemporary views of what was acceptable and appropriate for women of that era,” she said. “These two women were independent, audacious, alert, and armed with a Smith and Wesson revolver.”

Hunt discovered Estby’s story while serving as director of writing at Whitworth and continued to research the woman’s epic journey for her Ph.D. dissertation at Gonzaga University. A freelance writer, with articles in regional and national publications, Hunt traveled throughout America and to Norway in reconstructing the tale of what she sees as a transitional era between Victorian views of the role of women and those that emerged at the turn of the 20th century.

Hunt’s book received the Willa Cather Literary Award and the Washington State Book Award in 2004 and has been honored by the Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Association, University Presses and ForeWord magazine. It has been featured also by the Associated Press and by CNN.

Through a resolution passed by congress in 1987, the month of March is annually designated as National Women’s History Month, in recognition of women all races, ages, cultures, ethnic tradition, and ways of life. In observance of National Women’s History Month, the WSU Women’s Resource Center coordinates a wide range of activities supported by many colleges, departments and student organizations and also presents the annual Women’s Recognition Luncheon, during which the WSU Women of Distinction and Women of the year are honored.