The eastern delegates assembled in Chicago on June 25 to take the "suffrage special" train for Seattle and a reception was given to them at Hotel Stratford by the Chicago suffragists. At St. Paul the next morning ex-Senator S. A. Stockwell and Mrs. Stockwell, president of the Minnesota Association, with a delegation of suffragists, met them at the station and escorted them to the Woman's Exchange, where a delicious breakfast was served on tables adorned with golden iris and ferns. Many club officials were there and brief addresses were made by Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, Mrs. Florence Kelley, Miss Laura Clay, Mrs. Fanny Garrison Villard, Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Miss Alice Stone Blackwell, Miss Kate M. Gordon and Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton. Mrs. Villard recalled a visit she had made there twenty-six years before with her husband, Henry Villard, who had just completed the Northern Pacific Railroad and his train was making a kind of triumphal tour across the continent. "St. Paul welcomed him with a procession ten miles long," she said, "and Minneapolis, determined not to be outdone, got up one fifteen miles long. It gives me joy to remember that not only my father, William Lloyd Garrison, but also my good German-born husband believed in equal rights for women." The train sped through the Great Northwest and continuous business meetings were held by the board of officers in what was usually the smoking car until the next stop was made at Spokane, Washington. Here the Chamber of Commerce had appropriated $500 for their entertainment. They were presented with buttons and badges and taken in automobiles through the beautiful residence district, the handsome grounds of the three colleges and to the picturesque Falls. Then they saw the fine exhibits in the Chamber of Commerce and were taken to the Amateur Athletic Club, whose facilities for rest and recreation were placed at their disposal. An elaborate banquet followed with Mrs. May Arkwright Hutton, president of the Spokane Equal Suffrage Club, presiding. Mrs. Emma Smith De Voe, president of the State Suffrage Association, welcomed them to Washington, and Mayor N. S. Pratt to the city. "I have welcomed many organizations to Spokane," he said, "but none with so much pleasure as this. My belief in equal suffrage is no new conviction; I have voted for it twice and hope soon to do so again. The coming of equal rights for women is the inevitable result of progress and enlightenment." He presented Dr. Shaw with a gavel made of wood from the four suffrage States bound together with a band of Idaho silver and expressed the hope that when she used it to open the convention in Seattle the sound would be like "the shot heard round the world."