ged
to accept lecture engagements in California. Putting her own personal
longings behind her, she took the stage to California, sitting outside
with the driver so that she could better enjoy the scenery and learn
more about the people who had settled this new lonely overpowering
country. "Horrible indeed are the roads," she wrote her mother, "miles
and miles of corduroy and then twenty miles ... of black mud.... How
my thought does turn homeward, mother."[275]

This time she was warmly received in San Francisco. The prejudice, so
vocal six months before, had disappeared. "Made my Fourteenth
Amendment argument splendidly," she wrote in her diary. "All delighted
with it and me--and it is such a comfort to have the friends feel that
I help the good work on."[276]

She was gaining confidence in herself and wrote her family, "I miss
Mrs. Stanton. Still I can not but enjoy the feeling that the people
call on me, and the fact that I have an opportunity to sharpen my wits
a little by answering questions and doing the chatting, instead of
merely sitting a lay figure and listening to the brilliant
scintillations as they emanate from her never-exhausted magazine.
There is no alternative--whoever goes into a parlor or before an
audience with that woman does it at a cost of a fearful overshadowing,
a price which I have paid for the last ten years, and that cheerfully,
because I felt our cause was most profited by her being seen and
heard, and my best work was making the way clear for her."[277]

Starting homeward through Wyoming and Nevada where she also had
lecture engagements, she wrote in her diary on January 1, 1872, "6
months of constant travel, full 8000 miles, 108 lectures. The year's
work full 13,000 miles travel--170 meetings." On the train she met the
new California Senator, Aaron A. Sargent, his wife Ellen, and their
children. A warm friendship developed on this long journey during
which the train was stalled in deep snow drifts. "This is indeed a
fearful ordeal, fastened here ... midway of the continent at the top
of the Rocky mountains," she recorded. "The railroad has supplied the
passengers with soda crackers and dried fish.... Mrs. Sargent and I
have made tea and carried it throughout the train to the nursing
mothers."[278] The Sargents had brought their own food for the journey
and shared it with Susan. This and the good conversation lightened the
ordeal for her, especially as both Senator and Mrs. Sargent belie