Enter to win a copy of two books about mail order brides of the Old West. The titles you can win are Hearts West: True Stories of Mail Order Brides on the Frontier
and
Object Matrimony: The Risky Business of Mail Order Match Making on the
Western Frontier.
A Husband Wanted
By a lady who can wash, cook, scour, sew, milk, spin, weave, hoe, (can’t plow), cut wood, make fires, feed the pigs, raise the chickens, rock the cradle, (gold-rocker, I thank you sir!), saw a plank, drive nails, etc. These are a few solid branches; now for the ornamental. “Long time ago” she was good at syntax. She can read Murray’s Geography and through the rules in Pike’s Grammar. Could find six states on the Atlas. Could read, and you can see she can write. Can – no, could paint roses, butterflies, ships, etc. Could once dance, can ride a horse, donkey or oxen, besides a great many things too numerous to be named.
Now for her terms. Her age is none of our business. She is neither handsome nor a fright, yet an old man need not apply, nor any who have not a little more education than she has, and a great deal more goods, for there must be $20,000 settled on her before she will bind herself to perform all the above.
Advertisement placed in the Marysville, California newspaper in April 1849 by Dorothy Scaraggs.
To learn more about mail order brides and the advertisements they placed in various publications read Hearts West: True Stories of Mail Order Brides on the Frontier and
Object Matrimony: The Risky Business of Mail Order Match Making on the
Western Frontier.
