Her roommate Melissa Warner, a fellow Normal College (now Eastern Michigan University) student living at the Hoag boarding house, called her “a level-headed, common-sense girl . . . and not a frivolous one who would do anything foolish.”

Her cousin J. G. Connor, of Millington, Michigan, said “They can all go home contented. She’s gone to the seashore.”

She hadn’t. Bryant was hundreds of miles from Ypsilanti, in a Montana slum.

Early Monday morning, Bryant told her roommate that she was going out to gather some wildflower samples for her botany class. Instead, she went to the Ypsilanti depot and bought a train ticket for Chicago from station agent Elmer Mower. When the train pulled away from the platform shortly after 9 a.m., Bryant was aboard.

That afternoon she arrived in Chicago. She stayed one night and the next morning bought another train ticket, to Dickinson, N.D. A girlfriend of Bryant’s, who’d graduated with her from Valparaiso, lived there.

Bryant discovered upon her arrival that her friend had moved away. During her college days, Bryant had done some work with a rescue mission. Perhaps nostalgia for that experience led her to head next to a Salvation Army rescue mission in Helena.

Or perhaps she wanted to head even farther but could not, as the April 24 1907, Press suggested.

“Miss Bryant’s money ran out and she got off at Helena and appealed to the Salvation Army to find her work and a respectable boarding house.” Bryant “has thrown herself ardently into the work of the Salvationists since she arrived here Friday. She has not missed a service and attended the revival meetings on the streets in the slum parts of the city.”

For Bryant to run out of her $100 means she spent the equivalent of $2,200 in 2007 dollars — in 5 days.

This was in an era when a train ticket from Ypsilanti to Chicago cost less than $8, and a night’s stay in Ypsilanti’s own Hawkins Hotel cost $1. Even if the big-city prices for a Chicago hotel were double that, it is difficult to see how Bryant spent $100.

As Bryant traveled west, searches for her back in Ypsilanti centered on the agent of numerous tragic deaths in the city, the Huron River.

By the end of Tuesday after Bryant’s Monday disappearance, search parties had “scanned both banks of the Huron River from Geddes to the water works plant,” said the Wednesday, April 17, 1907,, Press. “They found no trace of the missing girl.” On Wednesday night, Lora’s father arrived in town, and with Police Chief Gage spent Thursday morning searching the riverbank in the vicinity of Highland Cemetery. On Friday, Gage and Bryant’s cousin O’Connor spent the morning searching north of the city, as officer Ryan and two others walked up the river to the Shanghai gravel pit and searched there. Both parties returned at noon, having found nothing.

A tip came in that a girl of Bryant’s description had been seen in Highland Cemetery, and nearby footprints were found in a bank overlooking the bayou just north of the Forest Street bridge and railroad overpass. The large swampy bayou extended north and east from the river, occupying most of an area bordered by Norris Street, the southern edge of Highland Cemetery, and the river. The bayou was the result of the Ypsilanti Underwear Company’s dam just south of the Forest Street bridge. The dam extended from the northern tip of Frog Island to the western bank of the river. The water in the boggy bayou “at this season of the year is from a few inches to a couple of feet in depth,” noted the April 21, 1907 Press.

On Saturday, Gage spoke of possible plans to open the dam and drain the bayou. “If the Underwear Company’s dam were opened,” said the April 21 Press, “it is calculated that in from two to three hours the water would be lowered several feet, draining the bayou. This would facilitate the work of hunting for the missing girl. If the work were undertaken tomorrow, [Sunday], it would not interfere with the mill.” It was decided.

On Sunday morning, the news that the dam would be opened attracted hundreds of sightseers. “It seemed as if the whole town had turned out,” noted the April 22 Press. “Reading that the floodgates at the mill of the Ypsilanti Underwear Company’s dam would be raised at daylight, citizens began to gather at 5 o’clock in the morning.” The gates were raised at 7 a.m. “Slowly the gates were pried up by iron bars and ratchets. The deep water in the dam went rushing and roaring through the opening. The spectators watched the current, hoping to catch a glimpse of the body, if it were raised by the suction of the water.”

“Slowly the water above the dam receded and by noon had fallen about three feet. A few boats and canoes patrolled the river, and some more adventurous poled their flat-bottom boats into the bayou, before it became wholly dry.”

Chief Gage dragged the river for five hours from two rowboats hitched together. “When Chief Gage had finished his work everyone was satisfied he had done everything he could do to find her body if it lay in the Huron River.”

The following Tuesday came the first telegrams from Montana leading to the confirmation that Bryant was there.

From Montana, Bryant wrote her father that she didn’t want to come home. Her letter was summarized in the April 27 Press. “I left Ypsilanti under a spell of insanity. A man on the train happened to direct me to the Salvation Army in Helena. I don’t want to come home.” The paper said “it is her explanation of why she ran away from college here without informing any of her friends or relatives of her going, throwing the whole state into anxiety as to her welfare and causing a heedless expense to the city and her family in efforts to locate her. It is not very satisfying to the general public.”

Bryant did eventually return to her home in Dowling, accompanied from Montana by her brother Royal. She then went to Battle Creek for a rest in Kellogg’s famous sanitarium, “to take treatment for her nerves,” notes the May 9 Marshall Daily. “She will not attempt school again, either as a teacher or pupil.”

Laura Bien is a local history writer. Her column, Cold Off the Presses about interesting events in local history, runs on Wednesdays.