Hearts West: True Stories of Mail-Order Brides on the Frontier

As men press west across America and begin to settle down, one thing soon becomes clear: there is a distinct lack of women. A man's only option is to advertise, contact friends or family back east, for a bride to come to him. These are just a few of the stories.

This was a fun and interesting read! Like Frontier Teachers, which I read first, this is a short book with short chapters. Some of the chapters tell of a mail order "romance", whether it ended happily or not, and other chapters share actually advertisements of men and women from the past.

The last one was my favorite part of the book. Some of the ads made me sad, thinking about how desperate the person writing it must have felt. And others made me laugh. (I totally didn't show more contemplate what I would have put in my own advertisement).

It did come as a surprise to see a familiar name here. A teacher featured Frontier teacher was also a mail order bride. her parents answered the ad on her behalf. Sadly, it was not a happy ending and Bethenia Owens-Adair took on a teaching position after her marriage failed.

Overall, this was an entertaining read and provided a lot of detail in a short amount of time. I would recommend this to a reader who wants to know more about the business of mail order brides. show less

First Line: The promise of boundless acres of land in the West lured hundreds of men away from farms, businesses, and homes in the eastern states as tales of early explorers and fur trappers filtered back from the frontier.

When all those men wound up on the frontier working gold claims, building businesses, and starting farms and ranches, the one thing that was in very short supply was women. It wasn't long until weekly newspapers like the Matrimonial News began circulation in an attempt to match men and women in marital bliss.

The strength in Hearts West lies in the stories of the mail-order brides as they came west to start new lives with total strangers. Some lucky couples found their soul mates. Some found the exact opposite, as in show more the story of the unlucky young woman who discovered the man she'd come hundreds of miles to marry was one of the men who'd just robbed the stagecoach on which she was traveling.

I've loved reading this author's books in the past, but this one was a bit of a disappointment. There weren't enough actual stories of the mail-order brides and the men they married. There were way too many ads from the Matrimonial News-- to the point where they felt like filler instead of a glimpse into the precursor of online dating. Worst of all, the book needed much closer editing. One chapter had me grinding my teeth due to the nautical errors. (The type of ship referred to is a "scow" not a "scowl"; and a ship only has one "bow"-- not multiple "boughs".) Add those errors to the one in which the character was wearing a skirt that wasn't going to be designed for another sixty years, and I almost stopped reading the book.

However, it's a small book, and I would have missed some excellent history about the brave women who traveled hundreds and thousands of miles to make new lives for themselves. show less

Times haven't changed much. Women wanted marriageable men way back when. They answered newspaper ads and wrote letters to find their heart's desire. Today we have the internet.

This was an interesting look at the brave women who decided to take the risk of a long and arduous journey to meet a stranger. Simply reading the ads they wrote intrigued me. I do wish the book was longer and filled with more of the individual stories. However, there is a bibliography at the back of the book for those who wish to delve deeper into the history of these daring women who helped tame the west.

I enjoyed reading this book very much. It reminded me of all the cost and trauma went through to settle the frontier. It has some amazing stories of the women who came west to men they had never met, and immediatly married them. Some of the unions worked out and some didn't. Not much as changed has it?

An interesting book which discusses the courage, trust, strength, and fortutide of women who left their homes and journeyed into the frontier in the mid- to late 1800s in search of a home. Their stories did not always turn out well, but each was interesting. Unfortunately, the book was very spare and did not often give us the women's own words from their diaries (where possible). I wanted more of that and wondered about how fair the author had been in putting down their lives in a few short paragraphs or pages. I appreciated that the author did give us many newspaper accounts and newspaper ads run by the prospective brides or grooms so that we were privy to the thoughts of society on this form of matchmaking.

The settlement of the western United States was largely done by men who were trying to make their fortunes in the California Gold Rush, the silver mines of Colorado or as farmers or ranchers in the vast expanse of the great plains of the United States. y the end of the Civil War there was a predicament of too many me in the west where men could out-number women by a ratio of 12:1, and too many women in the east where the male population had been depleted due to the war. To solve this problem a newspaper called Matrimonial News was born. It ran advertisements from both men and women looking for spouses and was in existence from 1970 until the turn of the Twentieth Century, and was clearly the precursor of such modern dating web sites as show more match.com. The book tell the story of almost two dozen couples who met and married though the mail.

One has to admire the women who took their future into their own hands and took off from the comfortable eastern United States to the wilds of California or the Pacific Northwest. They were resourceful, practically fearless and always up for a good adventure. The book, based on the letters and diaries of these pioneer women, tells their stories with great compassion and affection.

To read this book i to find new admiration for the women who came before us and new appreciation for our own forebears,. show less

True stories of mail order brides of the Gold Rush era.

"a gentleman of 25yrs, 5feet 3inches desires the acquaintance
of a young, intelligent, refined lady possessed of some means, of a loving disposition from 18 to 23, and one who could make a home a paradise

4*

easy to read and a great deal to learn about this era