I spoke before the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union last night, and expect to address every union before the campaign is over. There are only two women’s unions here; the garment workers and the waitresses. We intend to make a canvass of the stores and meet the clerks personally and to get into all the factories, as far as possible, where women are employed, and urge these western women voters to stand by the working women of the East. Tonight we have our first open-air meeting.
In the Suffragist of October 31, Gertrude Hunter writes of the campaign in Wyoming:
The meeting last Saturday night was most encouraging. It was a stormy night, and we went in an auto twenty miles from here, through snow banks, and every other difficulty to a rally at a branch home. This was at Grand Canon, and a strongly Democratic precinct. Every one was wildly enthusiastic over the meeting, even the Democratic women telling me how much they appreciated our position. We had a dance immediately after, and I danced with the voters (male) until one-thirty in the morning, when we were all taken to the railroad station in a lumber wagon and four-horse team, a distance of a mile and a half, and came in on a train at two-thirty A.M. I sold twenty Suffragists and could have disposed of more if I had had them with me.
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights we have big meetings scheduled.
We are now at Egbert on our regular schedule, and in such a snowstorm as I never saw before. However, we have had a good morning in spite of it.
This town is like the others, consisting of a station, a store, and post-office. Not a residence in the place. The people all drove from miles around in a high wind and most unfavorable weather to attend the meeting.
We had the thirty-five mile drive to make to a neighboring town for another meeting and we did it every mile through a high wind and torrents of rain, that flooded the trail with water, as we went over prairie and plowed fields. We did it, however, with only one blow-out, and two very narrow escapes from being completely turned over, getting in at two this morning.
Tomorrow night I shall go to Campstool, where there is a big supper and dance.
I had another very interesting meeting this week at a town fifty miles from here. The “town” consists of a station, the post-office, general store, and a little restaurant; no houses, and only one or two families living there. The meeting was in the schoolhouse and the voters came from miles and miles to attend, at least one hundred and fifty of them, on horseback, in wagons, buggies, and autos. Every one was much interested. The minister, at whose house I was entertained for the afternoon, lived two and one-half miles out in the country, said afterward that the meeting was a thrill to most of them, who had never heard a Suffrage speech in their lives.
These are the solid voters of the community. Many are from the eastern States who are homesteading here. I distributed the literature to every one.