He did manage to bring back a boatload of women—though far fewer than he’d hoped. And those intrepid, plucky Mercer girls, trying to make their way in the pit of mud and vice that was early Seattle, stuck in my imagination. For years I intended to write a novel about them—someday. But neither Victorian-era American society nor the western frontier were my fortes, so I continued to work with settings and themes that felt more natural to me: ancient history and American Indian cultures.
Then, in April of 2015, I went out to lunch with Jodi Warshaw, my editor at Lake Union Publishing. We had just finished the rather strenuous edits on my novel about Empress Zenobia, Daughter of Sand and Stone. It was time to discuss my next project for Lake Union, but Jodi didn’t seem terribly keen on any of the ancient history or Indian stories I pitched.
Finally she said, “You know what I’d really love to find—from you or from any of my authors? A story about really plucky, pioneering women going out into a rowdy, western frontier town and just making it theirs—really coming to own it.”
All at once, I remembered the Mercer girls. I was so excited that I nearly jumped out of my seat, and as I filled Jodi in on some of Seattle’s earliest history—and the fascinating part women played in the city’s founding—I could tell that we had finally found an idea that appealed to us both. That weekend, I wrote the official proposal and outline for Mercer Girls and sent it off to Lake Union.
It was during the writing of the proposal that I experienced a rare and very welcome stroke of insanely good luck. Via a chain of twisty Google searches, I found myself with the contact information of Peri Muhich, a historian from Camas, Washington, whose exhaustive knowledge of Asa Mercer’s two expeditions to New England—and of the women who chose to come with him to Seattle—was nothing short of astounding.
Peri enthusiastically agreed to meet with Paul and me for lunch, so that I could ply her with questions about the Mercer girls and about the cultural and political climate of Seattle during the 1860s and 1870s. Paul and I trekked down to Vancouver, Washington, just across the Oregon border, where we met Peri and then proceeded to gleefully spread Mercer girl photos and documents over more square footage of the local Applebee’s than our dining table occupied. Over the years, Peri had assembled a stunning array of artifacts and documents pertaining to the Mercer girls, including all of the novels that had previously been written on the subject (none of them published more recently than the early 1990s, and all of which she very kindly loaned to me).
Three history buffs going into full geek-out mode apparently make for a real spectacle; other diners and several of the restaurant’s staff wandered over to look at Peri’s beautiful mounted portraits of many of the Mercer girls, and to listen as she answered my questions about the expedition and about the character and motives of Asa Mercer and the women he accompanied to the West.
Peri advised me to use caution in my depiction of the expedition and its participants. From the mid-twentieth century through the 1980s, the Mercer girls were a fairly popular source for historical fiction and historical romance (and inspired the 1968 to 1970 television series Here Come the Brides), but they were not always depicted in the most flattering light. Many of the girls and Asa Mercer still have relatives living in and around Seattle, and they take their affiliation with history quite seriously, even holding regular reunions. The descendants of the Mercer girls take exception to seeing their foremothers depicted as prostitutes or women of otherwise questionable morals—and rightfully so. My discussions with Peri and perusal of her documents convinced me that the women who joined Mercer’s two expeditions were in no way “fallen women.” I certainly had no intention of portraying them as anything but moral, upstanding people, because that’s exactly what I believe all the Mercer girls were. After all, the one thing Seattle did not lack for in those days was prostitutes. As one of my characters in this novel says, if Asa Mercer had been seeking to fill the brothels, he wouldn’t have had to go all the way to New England to do so!
My original plan for this novel was to feature one real-life Mercer girl in particular, but after considering Peri’s advice and her experience with Mercer descendants, I decided instead to invent three fictional women as my main characters. Josephine and Dovey are based heavily on a few real women from both of Mercer’s expeditions, but Sophronia is a whole-cloth invention. However, her rigid ideals and dedication to “moralizing” the city were typical attitudes shared by many upstanding women of Seattle, whether they came to the city already married to the town’s founding fathers, or whether they arrived in one of Mercer’s two expeditions.
Although I pulled interesting facts about various Mercer girls to create Jo’s and Dovey’s stories, no reader should interpret either Jo or Dovey as attempts to depict any real, historical woman. Jo and Dovey are ultimately just as fictitious as Sophronia: truly inventions of my imagination, with only a few biographical details lifted from the life stories of real women, simply because those details are fascinating and fun.
Jo’s creation was most heavily influenced by the biography of Lizzie Ordway—the woman I’d originally intended to be the central figure of this novel. Ordway had an amazing life. She was the oldest woman who traveled with Asa Mercer—thirty-five years old at the time of the first expedition. Highly educated and an accomplished teacher of languages (and many other subjects, one assumes), she seems to have come to Seattle with professional rather than matrimonial motives.
Ordway quickly settled into her new life, first taking up as a teacher at Coupeville on Whidbey Island, then moving to Kitsap County on Washington’s peninsula, where she opened and established new schools to meet the needs of a rapidly growing population. Ordway gained true fame among the teachers of Washington Territory when she managed to settle and reform the notoriously rowdy Port Gamble student body. Port Gamble’s children, about whom she had been thoroughly warned, left her “agreeably disappointed” when she found that they came “readily under discipline.” She wrote of her hopes to “arouse ambition in them to redeem themselves, and to feel a love for and an interest in their studies.”
Later in her life, in 1881, Ordway successfully ran for Kitsap County’s superintendent position. She continued to win elections to the post for the next eight years, and was highly regarded throughout her career, and long after her death in 1897.
The same drive and confidence that gave Ordway the ability to reform the Port Gamble school made her a success in the women’s suffrage movement. She dedicated a significant portion of her working hours to the cause and developed a close and trusting relationship with Susan B. Anthony. In fact, Ordway joined Anthony on her speaking tour of western cities and even appeared at her side during a key 1871 speech in Seattle. She also accompanied Anthony and Abigail Duniway to Olympia on October 19, 1871. On that fateful date, Susan B. Anthony became the first woman in American history to address lawmakers in session.
Although only Anthony spoke on that occasion, the chamber was so crowded with male and female observers that the crowd spilled over into the lobby outside. I’m afraid the scene was very different from the way I depicted it in this novel—but I wanted to stress the underdog status of the suffragists by painting a very particular, metaphorical picture: a small handful of women standing up against a vast chamber full of men, those lawmakers imbued with the power of ceremony that ensured the females present remained outsiders.
Of all the women who came to Seattle with Asa Mercer, Lizzie Ordway was the only one who never married. Her reasons for remaining single were apparently not recorded. Perhaps she was wholly committed to her career in education—and to her activism as a suffragist—and had no time or attention for a husband. Perhaps she was considered already “too old” to marry when she arrived in Seattle at the age of thirty-five, and so had no suitors. Perhaps she preferred the company of women, and turned all male suitors away. Whatever her reasons, she remained single but active in the school systems and in various women’s leagues until her old age.
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sp; Lizzie Ordway’s work with Anthony and Duniway was key in the suffrage movement. Ordway was a major force in making Washington the third territory to grant women the vote, just after Utah and Wyoming. None of the states had yet seen the sense of suffrage, but in 1883, after many attempts to pass the bill, Washington Territory’s legislature finally enacted full suffrage for women. (Black men had received the right to vote in Washington in 1869; with the passage of the 1883 bill, Washington Territory became the first place in America where black women cast their ballots.)
Washington Territory revoked women’s suffrage just five years later. Sophronia may be a fictional character, but she had many real-life counterparts—and once they’d gained the vote, Washington’s upstanding women, including many of the Mercer girls, quickly used their newfound political power to outlaw prostitution, gambling, and liquor.
Unfortunately for the women who worked so hard to gain a political voice, the practical ramifications of obliterating vice were more than Seattle could handle. Although the lumber mills were booming, it is no exaggeration to say that the city’s economy truly hinged on prostitution, gambling, and liquor. Once vice became illegal, the economy of the largest city in the Territory crashed, and the men who ran Olympia panicked. They revoked the female vote in 1888, instead upholding their 1871 decree that Washington women would not achieve the vote until and unless it became a Federal mandate.
And that’s how Dovey found her way into this book.
Despite my conviction that the Mercer girls were certainly not prostitutes, I wanted to include in this novel a discussion of how relevant prostitution was to this developing city—and the conflicted place it held in the minds of American women in the nineteenth century. If the elimination of that particular vice was enough to send lawmakers into a vote-revoking panic, then clearly the oldest profession couldn’t be left out of this story.
But prostitution in the West was much more than just an economic issue. The profession didn’t just generate funds for growing cities and territories; it also represented one of the very few viable (if frowned upon) means for a woman to support herself. Women who wanted to earn their own keep—or who had no choice but to do so—had a very small handful of options. They might teach, midwife, care for others’ homes and children, operate a laundry, or work in a restaurant. A very small number of them might break into jobs usually reserved for men, but only if the stars aligned just so.
By far the easiest line of work to enter and keep was the world’s oldest profession. It was also the most lucrative work available to women, particularly in a town of early Seattle’s demographics. Sure, the work demanded that a woman live with heavy stigmatization, but for many of them, the pros far outweighed the cons. Men in Seattle were so plentiful and so starved for female affection that throughout the city’s early history, many of its most well-off citizens were prostitutes, or the female owners of brothels.
In Seattle, prostitution provided women with autonomy and power as well as a steady income. In the nineteenth century, when women were fighting for equal citizenship, the freedom that came from earning a good living of one’s own was a precious thing. I realized that I couldn’t tell the story of women’s history in early Seattle without delving into the prostitution issue, so I gave one of my fictional Mercer girls an aspiration to run her own brothel, with the hope that it didn’t tread too close to an accusation that any real Mercer girl was involved with such sordid affairs. In those days, operating an “establishment” was a viable career choice for an enterprising woman, and it would have opened the door to wealth, political power, and social clout.
But of course, no upstanding citizen of Seattle approved of the night flowers, in brothels or outside of them. Newspapers of the time printed vociferous oppositions to Asa Mercer’s first expedition; many who objected did so on the grounds that the only sort of single woman who would come to Seattle must be one of those types, and the town already had plenty of fallen women, thank you very much!
I wanted Dovey in this book so that she could represent the other side of the Seattle story. The upstanding, highly moral women who fought for suffrage were fascinating and admirable, but their ends were ultimately at odds with the interests of many female citizens. After all, as Dovey points out in this novel, Seattle’s prostitutes were women, too, and their livelihoods depended on a maintenance of vice. I felt I couldn’t tell the story of historic Seattle women without giving equal representation to the “seamstresses” who made its economy run.
But again, I must stress that Dovey is pure fiction. I colored her character with the intriguing tints and shades of two real-life Mercer girls, but nothing about her—especially her interest in prostitution—is representative of any real woman.
Annie May Adams was a girl of sixteen when she boarded the Illinois in New York City, intending to travel to San Francisco. But once she got to know Asa Mercer and the women who traveled with him, she decided to continue on to Seattle. I took Annie’s age, adventuresome spirit, self-determination, and interest in San Francisco and applied them to Dovey, but they are, of course, only surface features.
The other Mercer girl who added some of her gloss to Dovey’s facade was Anna Peebles.
Anna and her sister, Libbie (whom I especially admire for her ability to spell her name correctly), were members of Asa Mercer’s second expedition, which left New York City in January of 1866, arriving in Seattle on May 28.
The second expedition was a success in some respects and a failure in others. Mercer did manage to find more women willing to accompany him to Seattle—he returned with thirty-four single women, more than triple his 1864 cargo of eleven. But he was still far short of his goal. This time around, he’d hoped to bring home a whopping seven hundred women.
How could he dare to hope for such an extravagant success? On this second expedition, Mercer’s hopes hinged on convincing the United States government to fund the expedition itself, as well as a sort of promotional campaign to encourage single young women to set out for the West. He might have been able to achieve that lofty goal, too. Apparently he’d befriended Abraham Lincoln, and was scheduled to meet with the president on April 16, 1865, to discuss the importance of the expedition and how best to fund it. But of course, the president was assassinated on the night of April 15.
Mercer remained in the East for several months, scraping together as many women as he could. As with his first expedition, at least a few of them saw themselves as career girls, not brides-to-be. Anna and Libbie Peebles were tempted by the promised salary of seventy-five dollars per month for teachers, and had no interest in marriage. Anna wrote snappishly in her diary that Mercer “wanted to arrange plans for us.”
Anna did not consider herself to be a Mercer girl. Dead set on working rather than finding a husband, she dissociated herself from the Mercer party and wrote of how one Mrs. Garfield “occupied herself in making slighting remarks about the Mercer party before me, believing me to be one of them.” (One can see here the inspiration for Mrs. Garfield’s unfriendly reception of my Mercer girls.)
Somehow, Anna Peebles was unable to land a position as a teacher. Instead, her host family helped her find work as a deputy collector for the Revenue Service, which paid the monthly seventy-five dollars she sought. It was an unusual job for a woman. Anna rode about the Territory on horseback, collecting taxes and debts for two years, before finally ending up in both the teaching position she’d originally wanted and in the marriage she’d avoided. She and her sister, Libbie, both worked for the suffrage cause, and Anna hosted Susan Anthony for dinner in November of 1871, when the first campaign for the suffrage bill was afoot. Anna remained involved with Anthony’s campaigns, and appeared to have a friendly relationship with the famous suffragist.
One can see shades of Dovey in Anna’s biography.
As I researched the real women who would inform the development of my fictional characters, I was struck by one repeating theme in historic papers and journals. So many of Seattle’s upstandin
g women were vehemently opposed to both of Mercer’s expeditions. Exactly why was never made clear—at least, not as far as I could discern. It was obvious that some of Seattle’s citizens thought the Mercer girls to be prostitutes, or at least woman of low moral character who might take to prostitution at the first opportunity. But some detractors seemed to be motivated by envy. This anonymous diatribe was published in the Seattle Gazette on May 17, 1864—the day the Mercer girls arrived.
THE BEST SORT—The buxom, bright-eyed, full-breasted, bouncing lass, who can darn a stocking, mend trowsers, make her own frock, command a regiment of pots and kettles, feed the pigs, milk the cows, and be a lady withal, in company, is just the sort of a girl for a young man to marry; but you, ye pining, lolling, screwed-up, wasp-waisted, putty-faced, consumption-mortgaged and novel-devouring daughters of fashion and idleness, you are no more fit for matrimony than a pullet is to look after a family of fifteen chickens.
Although this colorful rant was not directed at the Mercer girls specifically, there is little doubt as to its intended target. It illustrates the vitriol these women faced as they attempted to settle into a divided society, and paints a clear picture of the state of Seattle’s social mind in the mid-nineteenth century.
It’s also rather amusing. My editor Jodi encouraged me to work it into the novel, as bits of ephemera like this one always bring color and flavor to historical fiction. I borrowed some of its inventive language for the scene where Mrs. Garfield “welcomes” the ladies to Seattle.
The presumption that the Mercer girls were women of poor character has clung to them over the decades—and a tarnish has fallen over Asa Shinn Mercer, too. Some accounts of his day were unfavorable, and painted him as a layabout or worse, though I think it’s worth noting that all negative depictions of Mercer date from his second expedition, when he was surely reeling from the death of his friend Abraham Lincoln as much as from the catastrophic financial failure of his mission. History has been unkind to this bright, hardworking young man, remembering him as a depressed drunkard with shifty morality. He may have been depressed in early 1866, but there is no good evidence that he ever comported himself poorly, and the mere fact that he went to great effort and expense to seek “true women” for Washington Territory speaks highly of his moral character. I would prefer that history remember Asa Mercer for the man he really was. He was a forward thinker, self-motivated and altruistic, willing to look for creative solutions to the serious social problems that faced the town he loved. He founded the college that eventually became the University of Washington, which is consistently rated in the top twenty universities in the world. His legacy is an admirable one.
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