Ebba Hellström: Five Girls, One Compass, July 1911

Six Pages in a Yearbook

In 1912 the Swedish Tourist Association sent its yearbook out to members, as it did every year. It was a thick volume, more than 400 pages with 340 illustrations, and most of it was the kind of material you would expect. Pieces on nature conservation, on old farmhouses, on canoeing in the far north, and one by a well-known art critic about the church in Åre. And then, starting on page 235, six pages signed by somebody called Ebba Hellström, describing how she and four friends walked across the mountains of southern Jämtland the summer before.

The piece is called, roughly, A Walk from Undersåker to Ocke through Southern Jämtland. It opens with a sentence that sets the tone for everything after it. There were 5 of them, all girls, and they wanted nothing more than to get up into the mountains and feel body and soul lift in the thin air. They had picked a route out of the association's own guidebook, packed maps, a compass and food in a birch-bark backpack, and given themselves 6 days.

That is all the yearbook tells us about the author. No title, no hometown, no age. The article simply starts walking. More than a century later that leaves a small, stubborn problem, because there is a Swedish painter called Ebba Hellström with her own encyclopedia entry, and nobody seems to have written down whether she and the hiker are the same person. This is the story of the walk, and then the story of trying to prove who took it.

Up Through the Wrong Path

They set off from Undersåker, climbing through forest toward the village of Edsåsen. The writer notes the mountain Åreskutan mirrored in the wide, calm river and the sun beating down. Then the farms thin out, and she makes a little joke that the further they got from higher culture, the easier the walking became. The plan was to cross a mountain called Vällistafjället. The reality was a tangle of reindeer tracks and cow paths, each doing its best to lure them off course.

Naturally, she writes, they went wrong. They ended up on a miserable path that at least had the decency to go straight uphill. The chatter died down. They trudged in silent single file over fallen trunks while a steady rain reminded them, in her phrase, of their own mortality. Then they broke through the tree line, the wind got under their wings, and the whole range opened up in front of them, with a pair of saddle-shaped peaks easy to pick out on the horizon.

On the plateau they met other tourists, and the exchange has the ring of every mountain encounter since. Somebody asks where they are headed. To the summer farm at Ottsjövallen, on the far side. Oh, comes the cheerful answer, then you have a long way left, and such an awful path. The sun was going down by then and pouring colour over forests and lakes. Their feet sank to the top of the boot in black mud and, she says, they hardly noticed.

Ottsjövallen turned out to be a green shelf just below the tree line with a cold, clear stream running through it. A girl called Gustafva, who looked after the summer farm, took them in. There was a fire in the open hearth and fresh juniper strewn across the floor. They hung their clothes to dry, wrapped themselves in whatever was at hand, and cooked a little food. Gustafva shared her bedding hay and made up the wooden bunk for all 5. They lay like packed herring, the writer says, and every turn in the night had to be done on command.

The Guide Who Set the Rules

Morning came bright. They ran out onto the grass, bathed in the stream, brushed their skirts and greased their boots. Then down to the village of Ottsjö, which she calls one of the loveliest places a person can see, with a dark mountain rising straight out of the lake. You could be rowed across, she notes helpfully, or wade at a ford where the water reaches just above the knee. From the far shore it was barely an hour through tall conifers to Vallbo, with grey Siberian jays gliding silently between the trunks.

The mosquitoes were savage, and she reports that they arrived in Vallbo half eaten. But the place charmed her. A green plateau ringed by mountains still patched with snow. A chapel where services for the Sami were held twice a year. A couple of farms, one of whose families was living in its own bright, tidy cowshed, with the furniture set outside. The girls were given beds in a cottage, on sofas too small and too narrow, and slept well anyway until the sun came up.

The next day needed a guide, because the route east to the lakes at Hosjöbottnarna had no path at all. The guide was a Sami man from Vallbo named Tomas Fjällsten. A word about her language here. She writes in the vocabulary of 1911, using a term for the Sami that is no longer acceptable, and she describes Tomas with an amused fondness that reads as condescending today. But she also clearly liked him, and she wrote down what he said, which is more than most tourists of her time bothered to do.

Tomas moved fast. He followed reindeer trails in a thousand small curves, switched tracks without warning, and every so often dropped into the moss, lit his pipe and rested. The breaks were used for instruction. He explained that he would address the young ladies informally, but that they were to address him formally, because he was an old man. He wore waterproof skin trousers and laughed out loud, slapping his knees, every time the 5 of them picked their way gingerly through an ice-cold stream.

And he told them where his surname came from. During the last war with Norway, he said, the Sami were afraid of the army and hid in a ravine in the Anaris mountains. His grandfather was born there. One day a few of them climbed up to keep watch, were spotted, and the soldiers marched in. Finding only Sami families, the soldiers sat down peacefully to milk and reindeer meat. There was a priest among them, and he baptised the newborn boy on a rock. He gave the child the name Fjällsten, which means mountain stone, and the rock became known as the church stone, with the mountain named after it.

A Night Under the Smoke Hole

The walk itself was brutal. Birch ridges, bog, heath, no trail. They waded streams because, as she puts it, in Jämtland you do not get to cross like the children of Israel through the Red Sea. One member of the party, the one wearing ordinary boots and distracted by thoughts of food, suddenly sank to her waist in a bog and was nearly impossible to pull out. Lunch was taken beside a fast stream. Tomas unpacked reindeer shoulder, butter and bread from a skin pouch and carved with his sheath knife. The girls drank what she proudly calls civilised bouillon made from capsules.

Ridge followed ridge. Tomas kept promising that the descent began behind the next one, and behind the next one there were just as many ridges as before. By evening they had covered about 40 kilometres of rough ground, red and swollen from heat, mosquitoes and midges. She adds drily that the distance from Vallbo is really only 26 kilometres, but that Sami guides are not fussy about 10 kilometres more or less when they are looking for good terrain.

They ended the day at the home of Nikolaus Nilsson, by the lake called Hosjön. It was a large, well-built kåta, the traditional Sami hut, with an entrance room that worked as both windbreak and storage, the kind only the more prosperous families built. The girls crawled in through the smoke and lay down on reindeer hides and fleeces that the mother of the house spread out for them. They fell asleep to the low, even murmur of their hosts talking in a language they could not follow. The fire died down, and through the smoke hole she could see a pale sky of stars with the cool night air drifting in.

That scene matters, because she drew it. One of the 3 illustrations in the article shows the inside of that hut at night, with the sleepers laid out on the floor. The other 2 are portraits of Sami men, printed without names. Hold on to the picture of the hut, because it comes back later in this story with a clue written along its bottom edge.

Home to a Thunder Salute

After a morning swim, Nikolaus rowed them across the lake and pointed the way. From there they were on their own, over bog and heath to a river, and along it to another summer farm where fresh milk and new bread gave them, she says, a strong sensation of civilisation. A friendly boy rowed them downstream through a stretch called the Dead Forest to Bydalen, already a known tourist spot. She praises its kind people and its lodgings at 50 öre a night.

But after days in the wild they felt like disreputable characters, so they soon shook the dust of Bydalen off their feet and climbed the nearest mountain, where they felt at home again. They waited on the summit for sunset. The forests went dark below them like sombre carpets, the sun dropped behind Åreskutan in the west, and a few hours later it came up again in the east. This is July in Jämtland. The night barely happens.

Then came the shortcut. They aimed for a summer farm just below the tree line, lost their way, and spent hours fighting through old-growth forest before they found it. It was scorching, the night and the morning were in their legs, and they rested until the afternoon. Only 3 hours of forest walking remained to Ocke, the village by the Indal River that she calls their home for the summer. They marched the last stretch singing, relieved not to meet anybody with a trained ear.

And as the river came into view, she writes, the thunder fired a booming salute for their homecoming. That is where the article stops. Six pages, 6 days, a storm rolling in over the lake, and then the author steps out of the yearbook and vanishes back into the summer of 1911 without leaving so much as a hometown behind.

The Painter With the Same Name

Now for the other Ebba Hellström. Helfrid Ebba Kristina Hellström was born on the 29th of December 1888 in Härnösand, on the coast, and died in Stockholm in the summer of 1979 at the age of 90. The Swedish artists' encyclopedia describes her as a painter and drawing teacher. She studied at the Technical School in Stockholm, the forerunner of today's Konstfack, from 1905 to 1911. She spent time in 1910 at the handicraft teachers' seminary at Nääs. Later she studied painting under Carl Wilhelmson in 1917, and, remarkably, went back to school again in 1950, in her sixties, at Signe Barth's painting school.

She showed work in group exhibitions at Liljevalchs in Stockholm, illustrated a number of Christmas magazines, and painted portraits and outdoor scenes in oil. Her father was Captain Carl Hellström, an army officer who was also a painter, a printmaker and a cartoonist, with drawings in the Nationalmuseum. The Swedish national biography adds a sister and a brother. Alice, born in 1886, became a school physician and sat on the Stockholm city council in the 1930s. Carl, a little over 2 years younger than Ebba, became a civil engineer and an officer.

Line that up against the article. The walk happened in July 1911. Ebba the art student finished 6 years of training that very year. She was 22. The article is illustrated with 3 drawings credited to the author. So the hiker is a young woman named Ebba Hellström who draws well enough to be printed in a national yearbook, in the exact summer when the painter of that name had just left art school. And 5 young women heading for the mountains soon after graduation sounds a lot like classmates.

Why It Is Still Not Proven

It is a strong case. It is also entirely circumstantial, and the search for something firmer has been instructive. The newspaper archive, for a start, is full of other people. One short notice from Stockholm reports that a girl named Ebba Hellström drank brass cleaning fluid in place of mineral water, and died after several days of agony. It sits between a carter crushed by a boulder and a woman found dead in the woods, 3 deaths in 8 lines. Not our Ebba. But a reminder that a name alone proves nothing.

Then there is the drawing of the hut. In the highest resolution scan, a line of handwriting runs along the bottom edge. It reads July 1911, night at Hosjöbottnarna, Nikolaus Nilsson's hut. Above it are 2 small capital letters, E and H. That confirms the month and shows the caption was written on the spot, like a page out of a sketchbook. But the initials fit any Ebba Hellström at all, so they settle nothing by themselves.

Two oil paintings by the painter have passed through a Swedish auction site. One is signed with her first name and a contracted surname in block capitals. The other carries just the 2 initials, in thick white paint. The habit matches, plain capitals instead of a flourish or a monogram. But a brush dragged through oil, probably decades later, cannot be compared with a pencil in a hut in 1911. The better comparison would be her magazine illustrations from the 1910s, drawings made for print, close in time and in technique.

What Would Settle It

There are 3 places where proof might be waiting. The first is the school. A class list from the Technical School for 1911 is, in effect, a list of candidates for the other 4 girls. If one of her classmates had family around Mörsil, that would explain why Ocke was home for the summer, and it would tie the art student to the valley on paper. The seminary at Nääs is worth a look too, since its archive is known to hold photographs.

The second is the family. Her brother Carl turned out to be a devoted genealogist. His speciality, according to a register of Swedish family historians, was every family in the country named Hellström, and he left large collections on the subject to the Genealogical Society in Stockholm. There is something pleasing in that. The man who spent his spare time sorting out which Hellström was which may have left the very note that sorts out his own sister.

The third is the plainest. The encyclopedia entry that every summary online is built on sits in volume 3, page 99, of the Swedish artists' encyclopedia. Nobody in this investigation has yet read the original. It may name the Christmas magazines. It may mention the yearbook. It may say nothing at all. But it is a printed page on a library shelf, and it can simply be looked up.

There is one more consequence worth knowing. If the painter is the author, she died in 1979, and under the general 70 year rule her text and her drawings stay under copyright through 2049. The six pages are free to read online, but they are not yet free to reprint or to read aloud in full. Which is why this has been a retelling, and not a reading.

Somewhere behind all of this are 5 young women with a compass, a girl called Gustafva sharing her hay, an old guide laying down the rules of address between pipes, and a family asleep in a hut under a hole full of stars. One of the 5 thought it was worth drawing. Whoever she was, she was right.