er niece. Then suddenly in the fall of 1864,
Ann Eliza was taken ill, and her death within a few days left a great
void.[161]

In the midst of this sorrow, Daniel sent Susan a ticket and a check
for a trip to Kansas. Hesitating no longer, she waited only until her
"tip-top Rochester dressmaker" made up "the new, five-dollar silk"
which she had bought in New York.[162]

Before leaving for Kansas, in January, 1865, she pasted on the first
page of her diary a clipping of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
"Something Left Undone," which seemed so perfectly to interpret her
own feelings:

Labor with what zeal we will
Something still remains undone
Something uncompleted still
Waits the rising of the sun....

Till at length it is or seems
Greater than our strength can bear
As the burden of our dreams
Pressing on us everywhere....[163]

With "the burden of her dreams" pressing on her, Susan traveled
westward. The future of the Negro was much on her mind, for the
Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery had just been sent to the
states for ratification. That it would be ratified she had no doubt,
but she recognized the responsibility facing the North to provide for
the education and rehabilitation of thousands of homeless bewildered
Negroes trying to make their way in a still unfriendly world, and she
looked forward to taking part in this work.

Beyond Chicago, where she stopped over to visit her uncle Albert
Dickinson and his family, her journey was rugged, and when she reached
Leavenworth she reveled in the comfort of Daniel's "neat, little,
snow-white cottage with green blinds." She liked Daniel's wife, Annie,
at once, admired her gaiety and the way she fearlessly drove her
beautiful black horse across the prairie. "They have a real 'Aunt
Chloe' in the kitchen," she wrote Mrs. Stanton, "and a little Darkie
boy for errands and table waiter. I never saw a girl to match. The
more I see of the race, the more wonderful they are to me."[164]

There was always good companionship in Daniel's home, for friends from
both the East and the West found it a convenient stopping place, and
there was much discussion of politics, the Negro question, and the
future of the West. Business was booming in Leavenworth, then the most
thriving town between St. Louis and San Francisco. Eight years before,
when Daniel had first settled there, it boasted a population of 4,000.
Now it had grown to 22,0