In 1872 Chase's business failed. Unemployed, he moved to Boston leaving his wife and children, where he obtained a meager and unsatisfying living as an actor and singer. In 1873, amidst the Panic of 1873 and subsequent Long Depression and its privations, Chase described having what he called a mystical experience of God's love, of love "unspeakable," of "absolute oneness," which set him on a path of renewed hope in a religious search. Not finding sufficient work to support him and his family in Boston, Chase moved to Fort Howard (Green Bay, Wisconsin), where he taught school. The first high school graduates of the city ever were in 1875. He moved to Chicago briefly and then he moved to Kansas with teaching and music tutoring jobs and was visible in the local newspapers in 1879 in a regional music convention. However the school broke up. Next Chase settled in Del Norte, Colorado as an early mining town but was not successful. Meanwhile, Annie remained in Springfield living with her mother and their two daughters, waiting for her husband to provide his family support. However in March 1878 she moved back to Rhode Island and filed for divorce. He wrote a certified letter responding, and despite family pressure to reconcile, Annie persevered and the court granted the divorce. Chase had little to do with the family after that. Annie lived the rest of her days in Newport, Rhode Island, dying in 1918. Chase's older daughter, Sarah, married in 1895 and had five children before dying suddenly in 1908. Chase's last daughter, Jessamine, never married and became a school teacher and musician; she died in 1947. A letter from some family in New York looking for him was published looking for him some years later in South Dakota. Meanwhile he met and married Eleanor Francesca Hockett Pervier on 6 May 1880 and they settled in Pueblo, Colorado.