Free The Year We Were Famous by Carole Estby Dagg

mind off the wedding everyone seemed to expect as soon as Ma and I returned to Mica Creek. Pa favored the match. Erick could work sixteen hours straight in the field. My brothers liked Erick; he laughed at their silliest jokes and taught them rope tricks. He was already close to fulfilling all the requirements for his own 160-acre homestead, with good bottom land near his own Pa's farm and ours. It was a sensible match: hard-working Erick and hard-working Clara. They would have healthy, hard-working children, attend services every Sunday at the Mica Creek Lutheran Church, and be buried side by side in the Mica Creek cemetery.
    When I glanced up from my letter, I caught Ma looking at me. She seemed to be waiting for my comments on his letter, but what was to tell? He was waiting, I was stalling, same as usual.
    I didn't know what Pa said in his letter, but as Ma reread it, she blinked her eyes and pinched her mouth like she half wanted to cry but wouldn't. She wrote her first progress report to Miss Waterson. In the one hundred and fifty pages Ma had sent home, she had undoubtedly described every sunrise and sunset and every conversation she had had along the way. In all those pages of sunsets and conversations, she had no record of how many miles we'd walked. She had to ask me. I flipped through the pages in my own journal and added the figures in my head.
To: Miss A. J. Waterson, 95 William Street, New York City, New York
    From: Helga Estby
    Monthly report #1: Boise, Idaho
    Miles covered, May 5—June 4: 432
    Rain, mud, and blizzard in the Blue Mountains have slowed us down, but we should make up lost time here in Idaho. Shot a man in the leg but were not jailed for it.
    The letter seemed powerfully short, considering all we'd been through this month, but Ma said Miss Waterson wouldn't get all the details until she paid us our ten thousand dollars. The "shot a man" line was just to whet her appetite for the rest of the story.
    We spent the time waiting for the governor's signature doing laundry and gardening. With what we had left of our start-up money, we had enough to buy Ma new boots and a new journal, and socks for both of us. My shoes would have to hold together a little longer.
    Four hundred and thirty-two miles this first month. At two thousand steps a mile, we had taken eight hundred and sixty-four thousand steps, but by now we should have covered nearly six hundred miles and taken over a million steps. We were already a week behind schedule.

CHAPTER 12
LOST
June 10, 1896–Day 36 Idaho
    I NSTEAD OF sagebrush, we had sand dunes and rocks. Instead of rain, we had hot sun. Instead of following the main line out of Shoshone, we walked eighteen miles on a spur line that came to an abrupt dead end in the foothills of the Pioneer Mountains.
    "
Ish da!
" I said, looking at the map in the Richfield station. "We have to backtrack. We'll lose at least another day."
    "Nonsense," Ma said, tracing a finger along a line between where we were and where we wanted to be. "I'm not wasting a day going back the way we came. Let's just take this shortcut directly south to get to the other track that leads to Minidoka."
    "The young lady's right." The voice came from the stationmaster, who'd been hovering behind us as we looked at the map.

    I smiled a thank-you to him for his support of the safe route along the tracks, but retracted my smile when he kept on talking.
    "I don't think two ladies would be up to that rough country between here and the main line." He shook his head, as if already mourning our fate if we should try that shortcut.
    As soon as he said it, I knew he'd goaded Ma into a foolhardy choice.
    She puffed up in indignation. "We are not namby-pamby drawing room ladies," she said. "We crossed the Blue Mountains in a blizzard, and we can certainly walk ten miles over a few rocks to get to the other track." From the glint in her eye, I guessed it was now a matter of principle to show how strong we women could be.
    So we