"Desperate. Determined. Unwaveringly confident. In 1896, a Norwegian immigrant named Helga Estby dares to cross 3500 miles of the American continent to win a $10,000 wager. On foot." "A mother of eight living children, she attempts to save her family's homestead in Eastern Washington after the 1893 depression had ravaged the American economy. Fearing homelessness and family poverty, Helga responds to a wager from a mysterious sponsor, casts off the cultural corsets of Victorian femininity and gambles her family's future by striking out with her eldest daughter, Clara, to try to be the first women to travel unescorted across the country: independent, audacious, alert, and armed with a Smith-and-Wesson revolver." "Leaving with only five dollars each and dressed in full-length skirts, they follow the railroads east as newspapers chronicle their adventures. Using wits, savvy, and guns to survive snowstorms, hunger, mountain lions, and the occasional thief, they visit Indian reservations, Western boomtowns, governors, mining towns, remote ranchers, politicians, suffragettes, and even president-elect William McKinley." "Accomplishing what was assumed impossible for women, they arrive in New York heralded by the city's popular newspapers for their astonishing achievement. But deep disappointment, betrayal, and heartbreaking news from home cause the remarkable story to become silenced among their family and friends." "Almost a century later, author Linda Hunt recreates Helga Estby's story in Bold Spirit: her culture and time, her abiding love of America, her resilient faith, and her challenge to Victorian constraints as she lived on the transitional edge of a new century of possibilities and of changing beliefs about women." For many modern readers, enduring questions remain about what happens when stories go unspoken among us and what keeps family stories alive. Helga's is a rag-tag history woven from discarded remnants and submerged details, a once-forgotten saga tha