"Very unexpectedly," wrote Stone in June 1856, "I find myself on the
way to Wisconsin." ¹ Her destination, Viroqua, was pioneer territory in
1856, lying some two hundred miles and nine full days' travel northwest
of Chicago. To reach it, she and Blackwell jounced across roads that
often were little more than cart tracks. Accommodations were primitive;
they stayed at farmhouses, once sharing a room with "six room-mates,"
another time sleeping on filthy sheets in a room through which "two girls
and a dog kept passing." ² What they found when at last they arrived in
Viroqua was a frontier hamlet comprising some thirty shanties and a small
hotel. They remained there for nearly three months, living first at the
hotel, and when Stone found that too dirty and uncomfortable, boarding
in a rented room. As the scope of Stone's public activity diminished, she
grew more emotionally dependent on Blackwell.

Within days of their arrival, Blackwell found a prospective buyer, a
local man named Grace, for one of Stone's Bad Axe land parcels. The
three of them set off for Bad Axe in a buggy. Stone described their har-
rowing journey--a trip that may have caused her to question the security
of her large-scale investments in wilderness lands--in a letter home.
Twelve miles out of Viroqua, the road ended; the horse fell, and they
proceeded on foot, "entirely lost in grass as high as my shoulders . . . full
of sloughs, frightfully deep. . . . We travelled on through the nettles,
briars, tall grass . . . bitten by mosquitos and black with wood ticks that
fastened on us. . . . I was wet to my knees. . . . The sun had gone down,
and the stars were thick over us, and still we toiled on."

Late at night, they arrived at the junction of two "wild and high" rivers
where they were able to quench "our horrid thirst." Heavy rains had
swept the log bridge away, and they shouted for help for over an hour,

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