So I got the book and eagerly began to read it. Linda Lawrence Hunt tells the
exciting tale of the two women crossing the country, a story, she said, that had
been suppressed so effectively that the only traces of it lay in the memories of
Estby's family and newspaper accounts of her visits to towns along the way. Time
and again, Hunt has to resort to speculation about what happened and why, to so
great an extent that it is difficult to believe that her account even remotely
resembles history — at least if history has much to do with discovering and
telling the truth about the past.
Since nearly all the documented evidence comes from newspaper stories whose
origin was Estby herself and the stories that she provided the reporters in one
city sometimes contradict the stories she told reporters in other cities, the
story has hardly any credibility at all.
Estby claims, for example, to have gone on the long walk from Spokane to New
York, in order to get an award of $10,000, the very premise of the book. Well,
who offered the award? Estby told reporters in one town that it was offered by "a
wealthy woman" from New York, but told another it was offered by "eastern
interests." She told other reporters that she had a "written contract," and still
others that she and her daughter were required to wear a particular kind of
"bicycle skirt" because the unnamed party wanted to prove the "endurance of
women."
She told numerous reporters that the deal required that they walk all the way,
though she eventually said, after being observed hitching a ride on a wagon, that
it only required that they travel without riding on a train. The closer she came
to New York, the vaguer she got about the details of the promised reward, and
when she finally got there, no reward was forthcoming, a fact that didn't seem to
surprise or upset her very much.
Happily, the family homestead escaped foreclosure, undermining the credibility
of Estby's rationale for the venture. But the family was not without tragedy
while she was away: her youngest child, still a baby, died while she was on her
trip, an event that she exploited, like many elements of her story, to appeal for
funds from newspapers.
By the time Hunt is through adding surmises to fill in the gaps in the
historical record, Estby has emerged as a heroic mother and pioneering feminist,
courageously going on a dangerous mission to save her family's home. It never
seems to occur to Hunt that Estby may have been a publicity hound who abandoned
the hard way of living she had chosen for herself in rural eastern Washington for
a more glamorous life as a celebrity.
Estby had abandoned her husband and family on at least two other occasions.
Hunt mentions this fact, which she learned from letters written by Estby's
abandoned children, but dismisses it by theorizing that "perhaps [her absences]
were to help her mother in Wisconsin after her stepfather's death." Perhaps they
were. But perhaps they were earlier attempts to escape the man she had married
and the children she had borne.
It's not that Hunt has deserted the conventions of history. "Bold Spirit" is
filled with footnotes and has an extensive bibliography. The problem is that
nearly all of the references are about events largely external to the story. I
was reminded of the idiot anti-Semitic conspiracy books I encountered as a
teenager. They too teemed with footnotes and had excellent bibliographies. But
when I read the notes, I'd discover that a claim like, "Of Germany's 41 million
people in 1870, only 2 million were Jews, but they secretly controlled the
government and kidnapped Gentile babies to suck their blood at secret rituals,"
was supported by an old Encyclopedia Britannica entry documenting Germany's total
population and Jewish population but (what a surprise!) making no mention of
secret Jewish control or Jews sucking baby blood. Hunt doesn't write on that
scale of lunacy, but she documents details like the population of Spokane and the
emigration of Estby and her parents, while leaving undocumented all sorts of
details that are critical to her account of the trip, her heroic interpretation
of Estby's life, and the pernicious suppression of Estby's story by her
family.
Me? I'm not going to conclude that Estby was a publicity whore who went on her
escapade to escape the life she'd made for herself and then suppressed her own
story from the shame of realizing that her action had resulted in the death of
one of her children. But after reading "Bold Spirit," I think that hypothesis is
as consistent with the actual facts that Hunt offers as Hunt's own theory.
