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The Year We Were Famous: How Clara Estby and Her Mother Walked across America
by Carole Estby Dagg

For readers from twelve to adult Clarion/HMH. Pages: 256
ISBN 10: 061 8999 833
ISBN13: 978 061 8999 835



Available April 4, 2011 at...
Indiebound, Amazon, B&N, Borders, Books-A-Million, Powell's
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In 1896, Clara and her suffragist mother left their Norwegian-American enclave of Mica Creek, Washington to walk to New York City to prove the endurance of women and - if they reached New York in time - win a $10,000 wager which would save the family's farm.

The book is based on newspaper articles which described the real Clara and Helga Estby's 232-day trek, during which they camped out with Indians, took tea with president-elect McKinley, wore out thirty-two pairs of shoes, and repeatedly cheated death.

How the book came to be:
I kept promising myself that one day I would write about Great-aunt Clara and her mother, my Great-grandmother Helga. Typical librarian, I procrastinated doing the actual writing with research. For a year, I read nothing but books, diaries, and women's magazines from the Victorian era, trying to get into Great-aunt Clara's head.

For another year I pored over old railroad maps and constructed a plausible day-by-day route, wrote to libraries to collect a dozen newspaper articles about them, read biographies of people they met, went on e-bay to buy 100-year old postcards of the places they passed through, and researched frontier treatments for blisters and habits of bears and rattlesnakes.

I took eight writing classes and a dozen workshops. I wrote and re-wrote. The first, the second, the third drafts were all rejected. So were the twentieth, the twenty-first, and twenty-second. Final rejection count: twenty-nine.

The last time I saw my Great-aunt Clara she was lying in a hospital bed, so frail that her body hardly raised a bump under the sheets. It was hard to believe she had ever been robust enough to walk clear across the country. Because of the way her walk with her mother ended, their travel journals were destroyed and they agreed they would never talk or write about the walk again. Since they never published the book they had originally intended to write, when I finally signed a contract with Clarion I felt as if I had not won a victory for myself, but for them.