To Mrs. Patterson this was the end. When the Cheneys moved out to Enterprise, Minnesota, in April, 1856, first paying a farewell visit to Sanbornton Bridge, they vanished out of her life completely, and George with them. They might have been swallowed up by the wilderness, for all she was able to discover. Some years later George got in touch with her again by letter, and almost a quarter of a century later he came back east to visit her;⁷ but practically he was lost to her from this time on—in a raw, vigorous western movement which in time would carry him prospecting into the Black Hills and into the stridently materialistic Deadwood of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane.

Mrs. Patterson’s physical inability to do anything about the situation was compounded by the legal helplessness of the women of her day in the face of such happenings. Only a year or two before, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had appalled the legislature at Albany, New York, with her detailed bill of particulars: a mother legally unable to save a son from being apprenticed to a gambler or a daughter from being forced into prostitution, women forcibly separated from their children through the arbitrary and despotic action of a husband.

In her later years Mrs. Eddy wrote of the Cheneys’ move to the west as a plot to deprive her of her son; and indeed Abigail Tilton may well have furnished Mahala and her husband financial help for their migration. Evidently the family agreed that it was best not to let Mrs. Patterson know anything about the move until it was completed and then to close off all correspondence.