traveled in freight cars, as transportation was limited, or
drove long distances in wagons over the sun-baked prairie. The heat
was intense and the hot winds, blowing incessantly, seared everything
they touched. After two years of drouth, the farmers were desperately
poor, and Susan, concerned over their plight, wondered why Congress
could not have appropriated the money for artesian wells to help these
honest earnest people, instead of voting $40,000 for an investigating
commission.[371]

Occasionally Susan and Anna spent the night in isolated sod houses
where ingenious pioneer women cooked their scant meals over burning
chips of buffalo bones gathered on the prairie. Glorying in the
valiant spirit of these women, who in loneliness and hardship played
an important but unheralded role in the conquest of this new country,
Susan was generous with her praise. To them her words of commendation
were like a benediction, and few of them ever forgot a visit from
Susan B. Anthony.

By this time life on the frontier was an old story to her, for she had
campaigned under similar conditions in Kansas and in the far West.
Nonetheless, the hardships were trying. Yet this plucky woman of
seventy wrote friends in the East, "Tell everybody that I am perfectly
well in body and in mind, never better, and never doing more work....
O, the lack of modern comforts and conveniences! But I can put up with
it better than any of the young folks.... I shall push ahead and do my
level best to carry this State, come weal or woe to me personally....
I never felt so buoyed up with the love and sympathy and confidence of
the good people everywhere...."[372]

Young vigorous Anna Howard Shaw proved to be a campaigner after
Susan's own heart, tireless, uncomplaining, and good-tempered, an
exceptional speaker, witty and quick to say the right word at the
right time. It was a joy to find in Anna the same devotion to the
cause that she herself felt, the same crusading fervor and
reliability. During the long drives over the prairie, she talked to
Anna of the work that must be done, of what it would mean to the women
of the future, and she fired Anna's soul "with the flame that burned
in her own."[373]

Another young western woman, Carrie Chapman Catt, also attracted
Susan's attention at this time. She had volunteered for the South
Dakota campaign, after attending her first national woman suffrage
convention; and Susan, meeting her in Huron, South Dakota,