Susan B. Anthony, 1871
Some of Susan's' critics at home felt she was again besmirching the suffrage cause by setting foot in polygamous Utah, but this was of no moment to her, for she saw the crying need of the right kind of missionary work among Mormon women, "no Phariseeism, no shudders of Puritanic horror, ... but a simple, loving fraternal clasp of hands with these struggling women" to encourage them and point the way.
Hearing that Susan and Mrs. Stanton were in the West en route to California, Leland Stanford, Governor of California and president of the recently completed Central Pacific Railway, sent them passes for their journey. They reached San Francisco with high hopes that they could win the support of western men for their demand for woman suffrage under the Fourteenth Amendment. Their welcome was warm and the press friendly. An audience of over 1,200 listened with real interest to Mrs. Stanton. Then the two crusaders made a misstep. Eager to learn the woman's side of the case in the recent widely publicized murder of the wealthy attorney, Alexander P. Crittenden, by Laura Fair, they visited Laura Fair in prison. Immediately the newspapers reported this move in a most critical vein, with the result that an uneasy audience crowded into the hall where Susan was to speak on "The Power of the Ballot." As she proceeded to prove that women needed the ballot to protect themselves and their work and could not count on the support and protection of men, she cited case after case of men's betrayal of women. Then bringing home her point, she declared with vigor, "If all men had protected all women as they would have their own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in your jail tonight."[270]
Boos and hisses from every part of the hall greeted this statement; but Susan, trained on the antislavery platform to hold her ground whatever the tumult, waited patiently until this protest subsided, standing before the defiant audience, poised and unafraid. Then, in a clear steady voice, she repeated her challenging words. This time, above the hisses, she heard a few cheers, and for the third time she repeated, "If all men had protected all women as they would have their own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in your jail tonight."
Now the audience, admiring her courage, roared its applause. "I declare to you," she concluded, "that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and here I take my stand."
Reading the newspapers the next morning, she found herself accused not only of defending Laura Fair, but of condoning the murder of Crittenden. This story was republished throughout the state and eagerly picked up by New York newspapers.
As it was now impossible for her or for Mrs. Stanton to draw a friendly audience anywhere in California, they took refuge in the Yosemite Valley for the next few weeks. Susan was inconsolable. These slanders on top of the loss of The Revolution and the split in the suffrage ranks seemed more than she could bear. "Never in all my hard experience have I been under such fire," she confided to her diary. "The clouds are so heavy over me.... I never before was so cut down."[271]
Not until she had spent several days riding horseback in the Yosemite Valley on "men's saddles" in "linen bloomers," over long perilous exhausting trails, did the clouds begin to lift. Gradually the beauty and grandeur of the mountains and the giant redwoods brought her peace and refreshment, putting to flight "all the old six-days story and the 6,000 jeers."
Bearing the brunt of the censure in California, Susan expected Mrs. Stanton to come to her defense in letters to the newspapers. When she did not do so, Susan was deeply hurt, for in the past she had so many times smoothed the way for her friend. Even now, on their return to San Francisco, where she herself did not yet dare lecture, she did her best to build up audiences for Mrs. Stanton and to get correct transcripts of her lectures to the papers. Disillusioned and heartsick, she was for the first time sadly disappointed in her dearest friend.
Moving on to Oregon to lecture at the request of the pioneer suffragist, Abigail Scott Duniway, she wrote Mrs. Stanton, who had left for the East, "As I rolled on the ocean last week feeling that the very next strain might swamp the ship, and thinking over all my sins of omission and commission, there was nothing undone which haunted me like the failure to speak the word at San Francisco again and more fully. I would rather today have the satisfaction of having said the true and needful thing on Laura Fair and the social evil, with the hisses and hoots of San Francisco and the entire nation around me, than all that you or I could possibly experience from their united eulogies with that one word unsaid."[272]