by Chris Enss
ATTENTION BACHELORS: Believing that our only chance for the realization of the benefits and early attainment of matrimonial alliances depends on the arrival in our midst of a number of the fair sex from the Atlantic States, and that, to bring about such an arrival a united effort and action are called for on our part, we respectfully request a full attendance of all eligible and sincerely desirous bachelors of this community assemble on Tuesday evening next, February 28th, in Delim and Shorey’s building, to devise ways and means to secure this much-needed and desirable emigration to our shores.
Asa Mercer
MUSEUM OF HISTORY & INDUSTRY, SEATTLE
Signed by nine leading citizens, the advertisement was picked up by other newspapers and reprinted across the country. Some of the resulting stories were humorous, but the wide coverage achieved the intent of the authors in broadcasting their need. They had hopes of attracting industrious young women to the rich and rugged Northwest, where a few thousand young men were working on making fortunes in timber, fishing, farming, and other endeavors. The lonely bachelors held several more meetings, but no solid plan to import the desired commodity was formulated, and few suitable women emigrated in response to the advertisement.
The pioneers in Washington Territory had, by 1860, established prosperous communities along Puget Sound and were busy carving out farms and ranches along the coast and toward the foothills of the Cascades. The temperate climate, rich fisheries, and timber resources provided the raw materials upon which to build a comfortable life. The one serious deficiency in this western Eden was that the “fair daughters of Eve” (as one newspaper editor described women) were scarce.
The topic had occupied many column inches in newspapers for several years. “There is probably no community in the Union of a like number of inhabitants in which so large a proportion are bachelors. We have no spinsters,” wrote the editor of the Puget Sound Herald. He went on to say that the prosperous and clean-living young men populating the area in 1858 were “eager to put their necks in the matrimonial noose.”
In 1860, Asa Shinn Mercer hit upon a scheme to take the next step in the recruitment effort: He would import the desired commodity by traveling to the East Coast, where women were in abundance, and actively promoting the unequaled advantages of Washington Territory. That idea and its sequel were part of the fascinating career of A. S. Mercer, who found his own bride among those he recruited for Washington Territory.
Fresh from college when he followed his older brother, popular Seattle pioneer Judge Thomas Mercer, to the Northwest, Asa slipped right into place in the ambitious new town. Asa worked enthusiastically to help erect a college, and he became a teacher at the Territorial University when it opened in 1861. He also served as the unofficial acting president when the first man recruited turned down the job, and he helped to recruit new students who could afford to pay the fees, which became part of his compensation.
The lack of marriageable women had become a serious detriment to progress. What good was a university if there were no wives to produce the sons to populate its halls? Seeing an unfilled need, Asa rushed to the rescue. He solicited private contributions to make a trip to the East Coast, and raised enough money to go to New England in 1863, with the hope of bringing back several hundred suitable ladies.
Unfortunately, a special committee had been appointed by the Massachusetts legislature to investigate the excess of females over males in that state, “amounting, according to the census of 1860, to 37,515.” The committee had examined the state’s needs for laborers in manufacturing businesses. Fearing that the end of the Civil War would see textile mills reopening, the report discouraged “any project from sending the surplus female population to such Western States as have an excess of males.”
Asa hoped to attract hundreds of people, mostly marriageable women, but he was doomed to disappointment. As a result of his efforts, eleven unattached women paid $225 for passage and boarded the S.S. Illinois when it headed out to sea in the spring of 1864 on that “maiden voyage.” The women were welcomed to Seattle, and all but two found husbands. Lizzie Ordway, who never married, was devoted to teaching and eventually became a county school superintendent. Another of the young ladies died, apparently of heart trouble.
Capitalizing on the buzz generated by his success, small though it was, Asa ran for a seat on the territory’s governing council. In May 1864, the Seattle Gazette enthusiastically endorsed his candidacy.
Mr. Mercer is the Union candidate for joint councilman for King and Kitsap counties, and all such bachelors, old and young, may, on election day, have an opportunity of expressing, through the ballot box, their appreciation of his devotedness to the cause of the Union, matrimonial as well as national.
He won the seat, and served in the Territorial Legislative Assembly through January 1865. Then he undertook another recruiting expedition to the East. “One of the most enthusiastic supporters of my contemplated ‘raid on the widows and orphans of the East,’ as he was wont to call it, was Governor William Pickering,” Asa later recalled.
The day before I started for New York the governor met me, shook my hand warmly, and said: “God bless you, Mercer, and make your undertaking a great success. If you get into financial trouble and need money, do not hesitate to wire me and I will give you help.”
A few months after arriving, Asa sent a letter to the folks back home from Lowell, Massachusetts. It was printed in the Gazette, and announced:
The 19th of August I sail from New York with upwards of three hundred war orphans—daughters of those brave, heroic sons of liberty, whose lives were given as offerings to appease the angry god of battle on many a plain and field in our recent war to perpetuate freedom and her institutions.
Asa asked the citizens of Seattle to prepare to house and care for the young ladies. He vouched for their intelligence and moral character. The papers reprinted his letter and communities immediately appointed welcoming committees, though some were dismayed at the number of women headed for their shores.
While the welcoming committees back home were meeting, Asa was running into rough waters. The New York Times endorsed the plan to ship widows and orphans to the new territory, and that sent would-be emigrants to Asa’s door. But others sounded dire warnings that Asa was a procurer for the dens of iniquity in the West, and cautioned that those who left the safety of their families and their communities would suffer unmentionable fates.
Newspapers weighed in on the topic all across the country. The “surplus sweetness of Massachusetts spinsterhood” would be wasted in Washington Territory, opined the LaCrosse Democrat. The editorial continued:
Dr. Mercer has arrived in Boston and perfected arrangements to return at once with a cargo of Bay State Virgins, in black stockings, candlewick garters, shirt waists, spit curls, green specs, false teeth and a thirst for chewing gum.
Meanwhile, a famous female lecturer, Anna Dickinson, made biting remarks about the scheme, pointing out the odd logic involved in bringing schoolteachers to Washington Territory when it was common knowledge that the northern regions were populated largely by single men. “How your Washington bachelors can be fathers is a subject rather for a hearty guffaw than for any serious debate,” Dickinson pointed out in an article reprinted in the Alta California. Her lectures in New England during the fall and winter of 1865 were widely attended and given a good deal of press coverage, which may have reduced the number of people interested in emigrating.
While the newspapers capitalized on the sensational aspects of the plan, Asa’s capital was shrinking at an alarming rate. As Seattle historian Clarence Bagley later reported, “He was ever prone to take whatever he urgently hoped for as certain of accomplishment.” Asa’s urgently-hoped-for voyage with hundreds of accomplished young women and families, however, was almost stopped on the docks of New York.
The ship that Asa said was to have been made available by the fe
deral government ended up in the hands of another schemer, who demanded a large sum to carry each of the passengers. The money he’d been given by young bachelors to cover costs of bringing back wives was long gone. Funds provided by others to be used for various investments had also been spent.
The delays, the loss of the ship, and finally, the negative publicity caused many of the young ladies and their families to cancel plans to join the expedition.
Five months late and several hundred ladies short, the S.S. Continental steamed out of New York Harbor January 16, 1866. Roger Conant, a New York reporter who traveled with the party, reported on the voyage. The departure was marred, says Conant, whose account was supported by several passengers, when some of those who had been promised passage were sent back before the ship left the harbor. Conant’s version of events, as related in his journal, tells of an old man with five children being escorted off the ship when he could not pay the passage. The man’s money had been used to cover hotel costs during the long delay.
Conant described the departure as though it were a theatrical farce:
The disappointed virgins screamed “Mr. Mercer! Mr. Mercer!!” The gray haired man hoarsely shouted “Mr. Mercer! Mr. Mercer!!” But no Mr. Mercer answered their appeals, and a thorough search of all the state rooms failed to discover his place of concealment.
Finally, the ticket-less would-be emigrants were escorted from the ship and the Continental edged out of the harbor.
Where was the hero of the day? Mercer was hiding in the coal bin. Conant describes the removal of the hatch cover once the ship was under way:
A heavy lumbering tread from below heralded the approach of the great benefactor of the virgin race. Soon a shock of red hair besprinkled with coal dust, bearing a strong resemblance to a zebra’s skin, appeared below the opening. Then a pair of red eyes lifted themselves to the light. And soon a pair of hands were thrown upward in an appealing manner.
Mercer was lifted from his hiding place by a couple of sailors.
Flora Engle, who was fifteen at the time and traveling with her mother and brother to join her father and sister in Seattle, later wrote a long account of the voyage. Both Conant and Flora said that Mercer paid court to one young lady, but was rebuffed. “Mr. Mercer, who had formed a second attachment and had been so fortunate as to have his passion reciprocated, married Miss Annie Stephens of Baltimore,” Flora reported. Annie’s father owned a hat factory in Philadelphia. She and Asa were the same age—twenty-six—and though she was Catholic and he Methodist, they were married in Seattle in July 1866.
The ship arrived in San Francisco Bay on April 24, 1866. Some of the passengers, apparently daunted by dismal descriptions of the Pacific Northwest, decided to stay in sunny California. Obligated to pay the fare to Seattle for his remaining passengers, but with only a few dollars in his pocket, Asa sent an urgent request for money to the governor. He later recalled:
I spent $2.50 sending him a telegram: “Arrived here broke. Send $2,000 quick to get party to Seattle.” The next day I received a notice from the telegraph office to call, pay $7.50 and receive a dispatch waiting for me. Having but 50 cents, I could not buy the message.
He went to the telegraph office, explained his penniless state to the superintendent, and suggested the man open the dispatch to see if it contained an order for money, which would allow him to pay. “He opened the envelope and read, then burst into a hearty laugh, and passed the message to me. It was made up of over 100 words of congratulation, but never a word about money.”
Thirty-six passengers left the ship and stayed in California, but the rest took passage on various ships heading to Seattle, where, according to Flora Pearson:
Seattle housewives received them with open arms and vied with one another in entertaining the newcomers in their humble homes. And the men, well, they would fain open their arms also had they dared to do so. As it was, there was “standing room only” at some of the windows.
The Mercer Maids, as they came to be called, found husbands and jobs in Washington, Oregon, and California. Only a few returned to the eastern seaboard.
Asa, with his Irish bride behind him, embarked on a series of promotional and career adventures that sent them from place to place all over the West. He authored a forty-page pamphlet, The Washington Territory: The Great Northwest, Her Material Resources and Claims to Emigration, which was the first of many tracts promoting the Northwest. Relocating to Oregon, he became a customs collector in Astoria, where he was accused of smuggling. The matter was eventually discharged following unsuccessful attempts to prosecute the case. He then became involved in shipping and real estate. It was in Oregon that he again displayed his knack for promotion and began writing for newspapers.
By the 1880s Asa, Annie, and their children were living in Texas, where he founded and edited several publications. Moving to Wyoming, he started the Northwestern Livestock Journal and was involved with the Wyoming Stock Growers Association.
Annie died in 1900. She had given birth to eight children, three of whom died in infancy and one as a teenager. She had followed her husband from place to place, never complaining publicly about his enthusiastic promotions and the failures and public criticism that seemed to follow almost everything he did. Asa died at his home in the Big Horn Mountains in 1917. Though his schemes and dreams may have been bigger than the means to properly carry them out, his activities add a richly colored thread to the tapestry of western history.
MATRIMONIAL NEWS
In the early days of westward travel, when men and women left behind their homes and acquaintances in search of wealth and happiness, there was a recognized need for some method of honorable introduction between the sexes. This need was readily fulfilled by the formation of a periodical devoted entirely to the advancement of marriage. Throughout the 1870s, ’80s and ’90s, that periodical, to which many unattached men and women subscribed, was a newspaper called Matrimonial News. The paper was printed in San Francisco, California, and Kansas City, Missouri. It was issued once a week and the paper’s editors proclaimed that the intent of the material was the happiness of its readers.
According to the Matrimonial News business manager, Stark Taylor, the paper would “bring letters from a special someone to desiring subscribers in hopes that a match would be made and the pair would spend the rest of their life together.”
Fair and gentle reader, can we be useful to you? Are you a stranger desiring a helpmate or searching for agreeable company that may in the end ripen into closer ties? If so, send us a few lines making known your desires. Are you bashful and dread publicity? Be not afraid. You need not disclose to us your identity. Send along your correspondence accompanied by five cents for every seven words, and we will publish it under an alias and bring about correspondence in the most delicate fashion. To cultivate the noble aim of life and help men and women into a state of bliss is our aim.
Unidentified mail-order bride poses for a photograph of the momentous day.
NEVADA COUNTY SEARLS HISTORICAL LIBRARY
A code of rules and regulations, posted in each edition of the paper, was strictly enforced. All advertisers were required to provide information on their personal appearance, height, weight, and their financial and social positions, along with a general description of the kind of persons with whom they desired correspondence. Gentlemen’s personals of forty words or under were published once for twenty-five cents in stamps or postage. Ladies’ personals of forty words or under were published free of charge. Any advertisements over forty words, whether for ladies or gentlemen, were charged a rate of one cent for each word.
The personal ads were numbered, to avoid publishing names and addresses. Replies to personals were to be sent to the Matrimonial News office sealed in an envelope with the number of the ad on the outside.
Every edition of the Matrimonial News began with the same positive affirmation: “Women
need a man’s strong arm to support her in life’s struggle, and men need a woman’s love.”
The following are a sample of advertisements that appeared in the January 8, 1887, edition of the Kansas City printing of Matrimonial News.
283 - A gentleman of 25 years old, 5 feet 3 inches, doing a good business in the city, desires the acquaintance of a young, intelligent and refined lady possessed of some means, of a loving disposition from 18 to 23, and one who could make home a paradise.
287 - An intelligent young fellow of 22 years, 6 feet height, weight 170 pounds. Would like to correspond with a lady from 18 to 22. Will exchange photos: object, fun and amusement, and perhaps when acquainted, if suitable, matrimony.
Men and women in hopes of finding a companion placed advertisements in a publication specifically designed for lonely hearts.
STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF MISSOURI, COLUMBIA
282 - A few lady correspondents wanted by a bashful man of 36, of fair complexion. 5 feet 5 inches tall, weight 130 pounds. Would prefer a brunette of fair form about five feet, between 18 and 25 years of age. Object, improvement, and if suited, matrimony.
278 - Wanted to correspond with a young lady matrimonially inclined who would make a young man a good wife: am of good standing and good family, strictly temperate, a professional man and will make a kind husband.
