The year was 1896. In a daring – some say crazy – effort to save the family farm, Helga and Clara Estby set out from their farm near Spokane to walk across America. Within six months, the mother and daughter hoped to be in New York City, accepting a $10,000 check on a wager from a mysterious publisher.
The most amazing thing about this story is that it’s true. Carole Estby Dagg’s great grandmother and great aunt really did walk across the United States more than a century ago. The Year We Were Famous is, Dagg hopes, the story they never put down on paper themselves.
“When I found out that they never had a chance to write the book they intended to about their trip because all their records were burned, I felt like somebody should tell their story,” Dagg says. “So I did my best to reconstruct the book they might have written if they had the chance.”
Although Helga and Clara kept journals of their trip, intending to write a book about it, the journey ended in tragedy. With no $10,000 awaiting them at the end (and family rumors that there never had been any mysterious publisher), the mother and daughter slowly made their way back across the country only to find that two of Clara’s siblings had died of diphtheria. The family vowed to never speak of the trip again, and nearly all records of the journey were burned.
Dagg knew little about the cross-country walk when she was growing up.
“In the way of families, whispers and rumors get passed down, even if the details aren’t there, and that was the case with me,” she says. “I knew there had been a walk, but I didn’t have the details until I was an adult.
It turned out that two newspaper articles had been saved from the burn barrel by the wife of Clara’s youngest brother, who then passed them down to one of Dagg’s aunts, instructing her to keep them hidden away until all of the family members who lived through the experience had died. Using those articles as a starting point, Dagg searched for more newspaper accounts and started fleshing out the story.
The adventures first caught Dagg’s imagination. The mother and daughter walked along the railroad tracks – there were no roads across the country back then – sleeping under the stars or relying on strangers to take them in for the night. In the course of their journey, Clara and Helga survived a blizzard and a flash flood. They spent a night with Ute Indians in Utah and met President-Elect William McKinley and his frail wife, Ida, in Ohio.
The novel was a labor of love, 15 years and 29 rejections in the making. Dagg’s big break came when she won the Sue Alexander Most Promising New Work Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators in 2006.
An editor at Clarion told Dagg that if she revised the manuscript to flesh out the relationship between the mother and daughter, Clarion would publish it. She had been reluctant to assign thoughts and words to Clara and Helga. So Dagg spent a year immersed in novels and magazines of the period (including a dime novel called Varney the Vampire) and read the diaries of pioneer women in the West.
“Then I started revising again, and we shook hands on the deal the morning after my first grandson was born,” she says.
The result is a novel that is both adventure story as well as the tale of a mother and daughter’s difficult relationship and how the journey changed them.
If there’s one lesson to the story, Dagg says, it’s to not give up.
“If you have something that you want to accomplish just keep at it – and that’s both from my own personal experience of getting the book published, but also Clara and Helga’s experience. It seemed almost impossible that women could walk practically coast-to-coast, but they just kept going and finally got there.”
