David J. Wishart, Editor
MAIL-ORDER BRIDES
The word “mail-order bride” indicates.
Among Plains Indians, sight-unseen wedding had been often arranged by using a m >bride price,” meant to compensate the girl family members for the impending loss in her work. But marriage that is intercultural rare. A prominent Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army the gift of 100 white women as brides, but the army refused in 1854, at a peace conference at Fort Laramie. Russian immigrants brought with them the tradition of koopla, whereby marriage agents had been compensated a charge to set males with possible partners through the Old nation. Likewise, japanese and chinese obtained “picture brides” from their homelands, ladies who that they had visited understand just through grainy photographs. In accordance with historian Glenda Riley, Asian ladies entered such relationships as a result of parental force, to flee poverty, or even conceal a reputation that is sullied.
Throughout the top several years of overland migration, hundreds of 1000s of white ladies traveled west, nevertheless the bulk had been currently hitched, plus it had been thought that “suitable” solitary ladies didn’t get west alone. Even though many cowboys eschewed wedding for perpetual bachelorhood, homesteaders thought that married men made better farmers.
Through the 1830s before the change regarding the 20th century, settlers pined for “that helpful and essential article of home furniture–a spouse.” So serious had been the shortage of solitary white ladies of marriageable age in Nebraska, recounts Mari Sandoz in Old Jules (1935), her classic portrait of Plains homesteading, “a guy had to marry something that got from the train.”
By 1865 it had been believed that there have been as much as 30,000 women that are single east, lots augmented by the Civil War widows. Read more…