[Illustration: Anna Howard Shaw (Signed: "With affectionate severence for women's truest friend, Anna Howard Shaw.")] The eastern friends sent appreciative letters. "The thought of you and your fellow-workers in South Dakota in this hot weather and with insufficient funds, has lain like lead upon my heart," wrote John Hooker. "How I wish I could accept your invitation to come to you and talk to the old soldiers," said Clara Barton; "but alas, I have not the strength. My heart, my hopes, are with you and if there is a spoke I can get hold of, I will help turn that wheel before the campaign is over. My love is always with you and your glorious cause, my dear, dear Susan Anthony." [Illustration: Autograph: "Hoping once more to see you I am my dear friend, Yours faithfully, Clara Barton"] Anna Shaw wrote from Ohio in August: "I am trying to follow your magnificent example, in quietly passing over every personal matter for the sake of the greatest good for the work. Whenever I find myself giving way, I think of you and all you have borne and get fresh courage to try once more. Dear Aunt Susan, my heart is reaching out with such a great longing for my mother, now eighty years old, that I must go to her for a few days before I enter upon that long canvass, but I will come to you soon." It was a hard campaign, the summer the hottest ever known, the distances long, the entertainment the best which could be offered, good in the towns but in the rural districts sometimes very poor, and the speakers slept more than once in sod houses where the only fuel for preparing the meals consisted of "buffalo chips." The people were in severe financial straits. A two years' drouth had destroyed the crops, and prairie fires had swept away the little which was left. "Starvation stares them in the face," Miss Anthony wrote. "Why could not Congress have appropriated the money for artesian wells and helped these earnest, honest people, instead of voting $40,000 for a commission to come out here and investigate?"