In the spring of 1867 George left for a mission in England. Before he left, he and Hannah went to Salt Lake to get their Patriarchal Blessings. Hannah was blessed by Patriarch C. B. Hyde, April 30, 1867.

During the months that George was away Hannah had a hard struggle to provide food and clothing for her family.

The first summer he was away their garden was growing well and looked as if there would be plenty of food for them and their animals. Then the grasshoppers came in swarms, a terrible plague. They devoured every green thing. Even the potatoes which were three or four inches high were left like little sticks standing in the ground.

Hannah and Grandma Shaw and all the children went out to fight them to save their food. They piled the straw in the ditches and set fire to it in an effort to burn the creeping, hopping creatures and keep them off the fields but the grasshoppers came on and walked or hopped over the ones that were dead or dying in the fires. In the ditches where there were streams of water they shooed and drove them into the water to try to drown them.

In their enthusiasm the children gathered large gunny sacks full of grasshoppers and trudged proudly home with them. Hannah was horrified when she saw what they had done and realized that the sacks were full of crawling grasshoppers. She was distracted and threatened to send them back with their full sacks, but Grandma Jane Shaw said, "Laws, Hannah, boil them and feed the hens with them. " So the boiler was filled with water and brought to a boil, then the sacks, one at a time, was put into the boiling water and kept there until its live contents were all dead.

[Editor's note - The Goshiute Indians made flour of grasshoppers. The Burridges were not that desparate. It was probably during the following winter that the shoe incident with Luke Johnson took place.]

The family had little food to eat and Hannah made a thin flour gruel called brochin which they were thankful to have.

But food continued to get more scarce and Hannah gladly accepted a job as washer woman for the Overland Stage Station keeper's wife. This meant that she walked three miles to the station and spent the day washing. She carried water and heated it, then rubbed the clothes by hand on a wash board. After cleaning up the place she was given a pan of shorts for payment for her day's labor. Shorts are something like bran. She took these gratefully and walked the three miles back to her dear ones.

They had a pig to butcher for a little meat. Every bit of that pig was used.

The head was boiled and the meat taken from it was chopped and made into head cheese.

The cracklings that were left when the lard was rendered out, were carefully saved and used to make a cake for Christmas.

So the days of her life went full of hard work and worry. One bleak cold day in November they wanted to go to meeting but little Pauline had no wrap, Hannah had a good warm shawl she took from her shoulders and tore it in half. Wrapping one half around Pauline's shoulders and kept the other half for herself.