Five thousand people gathered in the Union Station at Washington to see the envoys off—what the Washington Times describes as a “banner-carrying, flag-waving, flower-laden cheering crowd.” Automobiles flying the tri-color brought the envoys to the station. Two buglers sounded the assembly for the farewell. The Naval Gun Factory Band greeted them with the Marseillaise, and in the half-hour before the train’s departure, it continued to play martial music. When it struck up Onward Christian Soldiers and America, the crowd sang with them.
The envoys made a tremendous impression in the West. Whenever their train arrived—purple, white, and gold decorations floating from all the windows—that arrival became an event and created excitement.
“I wish you might see some of these meetings,” Abby Baker wrote to the Suffragist of April 29, “and see the looks of amusement of the men as our train pulls in, gay with our Congressional Union colors. They invariably call out, ‘Here come the Suffragettes,’ but very soon they are saying, ‘She’s all right,’ and ‘That’s straight lady,’ or some such approving phrase, and as the train pulls out of the station, we hear, ‘Bully for you!’ ‘Good luck!’ and so forth.”
“At Williams, Arizona,” said another letter in the same number of the Suffragist, “there was nothing in sight but a water tank, a restaurant, a picture postal card shop, and yet we had a tremendous meeting.”
At El Tova, in the same State, they carried the message of the unenfranchised women of the East to the very rim of the canyon, a mile below sea level!
Leaving very early in the morning, at Maricopa they found a group of women waiting, who said plaintively, “Oh, if you could only stop longer, so that we might drum up all the women out of the sage brush!”
It was not the people alone or the civic authorities who made this trip of the envoys so attractive. When the Suffragists came to breakfast on the road from Maricopa to Tucson, they found that the management of the railway had decorated the breakfast tables in the dining car with purple, white, and gold—sweet peas and yellow laburnums. At Tucson, Eugene Debs came with the crowd to meet them.
At a meeting in Cheyenne, Mrs. Blatch was presented with a framed copy of a facsimile of the Governor’s signature attached to the act enfranchising the women of Wyoming when the State came into the Union.
In San Francisco, where there was a large meeting in the Civic Auditorium, presided over by Gail Laughlin, Sara Bard Field spoke. At the close of the meeting, she asked if the people present who put Suffrage before Party affiliations would say, “I will.” The audience arose as one man, and answered roundly, “I will.”
At Sacramento, California, where they were given a reception and luncheon by the Chamber of Commerce, the annual fruit show was in progress and the envoys were presented with an immense box of raisins and two boxes of Sacramento Valley cherries.