Months afterwards she wrote her sister Hannah:  “Today I made a pilgrimage to Mount Hope.  The last rays of red, gold and purple fringed the horizon and shone serenely on the mounds above our dear father and Ann Eliza.  What a contrast in my feelings; for the one a subdued sorrow at the sudden ending of a life full-ripened, only that we would have basked in its sunshine a little longer; for the other a keen anguish over the untimely cutting off in the dawn of existence, with the hopes and longings but just beginning to take form, the real purpose of life yet dimly developed, a great nature but half revealed.  The faith that she and all our loved and gone are graduated into a higher school of growth and progress is the only consolation for death.”

At another time she wrote her brother:  “This new and sorrowful reminder of the brittleness of life’s threads should soften all our expressions to each other in our home circles and open our lips to speak only words of tenderness and approbation.  We are so wont to utter criticisms and to keep silence about the things we approve.  I wish we might be as faithful in expressing our likes as our dislikes, and not leave our loved ones to take it for granted that their good acts are noted and appreciated and vastly outnumber those we criticise.  The sum of home happiness would be greatly multiplied if all families would conscientiously follow this method.”

There were urgent appeals in these days from the lately-married brother and his wife for sister Susan to come to Kansas and, as no public work seemed to be pressing, she started the latter part of January, 1865.  She stopped in Chicago to visit her uncle Albert Dickinson, was detained a week by heavy storms, and reached Leavenworth the last day of the month.  Of her journey she wrote home: 

I paid a dollar for a ride across the Mississippi on the ice.  When we reached Missouri all was devastation.  I asked the conductor if there were not a sleeper and he replied, “Our sleeping cars are in the ditch.”  Scarcely a train had been over the road in weeks without being thrown off the track.  We were nineteen hours going the 200 miles from Quincy to St. Joe.  Twelve miles out from the latter we had to wait for the train ahead of us to get back on the rails.  I was desperate.  Any decent farmer’s pigpen would be as clean as that car.  There were five or six families, each with half a dozen children, moving to Kansas and Nebraska, who had been shut up there for days.  A hovel stood up the bank a little way and several of the men went there and washed their faces.  After watching them enjoy this luxury for a while I finally rushed up myself and asked the woman in charge if she would sell me a cup of coffee.  She grunted out yes, after some hesitation, and while she was making it, I washed my face and hands.  When she handed me my drink she said, “This is no rye; it is real coffee.”  And so it was and I enjoyed it, brass spoon, thick, dingy, cracked cup and all.