20 Brutal Truths About Mail Order Brides Who Ran Away

Thanks for watching. If this brought back a memory or taught you something Hollywood never would, subscribe and share it with someone who needs to hear the truth about the real American frontier. 20 Hard Truths About the Brides Who Fled the Frontier They answered a stranger's advertisement, packed one trunk, and crossed a continent for a husband they had never seen. Some of them didn't stay. This documentary follows the mail order brides who walked away, and asks what they were running from, what leaving cost them, and why so few left any trace behind. We open in eighteen seventy three with a Gilroy schoolmistress named Eleanor Berry, riding toward a wedding in the California gold country. Her story is one of the rare ones that survived. From there we count down twenty truths drawn from matrimonial newspapers, courtroom records, voyage journals, and the letters of women who lived these bargains firsthand. You'll meet picture brides on the Pacific docks, Mercer women on the shores of Seattle, and homestead wives on the northern plains. Hollywood gave these women a happy ending. The record tells a very different story. The History Behind It This video draws on the legal and social history of nineteenth century American marriage. Under the doctrine of coverture, a married woman's legal identity was absorbed into her husband's, which shaped what she owned and what she could do. In eighteen eighty nine the Commissioner of Labor, Carroll D. Wright, delivered the first national study of American divorce to Congress, and his data reveal patterns that ordinary diaries rarely mention. Legal historians such as Michael Grossberg and Marcia Zug trace how courts treated engagements, custody, and desertion. Glenda Riley's research into western divorce petitions and Yuji Ichioka's study of Japanese picture brides show the same pressures across different communities and decades. Together these sources explain why the women who left are so hard to find, and what that silence says about who got to write the record. Sources and Further Reading Wright, Carroll D. A Report on Marriage and Divorce in the United States, 1867 to 1886. U.S. Bureau of Labor, Government Printing Office, 1889. Ichioka, Yuji. "Amerika Nadeshiko: Japanese Immigrant Women in the United States, 1900–1924." Pacific Historical Review 49, no. 2 (1980). Zug, Marcia A. Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches. New York University Press, 2016. Riley, Glenda. Building and Breaking Families in the American West. University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Grossberg, Michael. Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America. University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Engle, Flora A. P. "The Story of the Mercer Expeditions." Washington Historical Quarterly 6, no. 4 (1915). Conant, Roger. Mercer's Belles: The Journal of a Reporter. Edited by Lenna A. Deutsch. University of Washington Press, 1960. Calof, Rachel. Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains. Edited by J. Sanford Rikoon. Indiana University Press, 1995. Stewart, Elinore Pruitt. Letters of a Woman Homesteader. Houghton Mifflin, 1914. Enss, Chris. Hearts West: True Stories of Mail-Order Brides on the Frontier. TwoDot, 2005. About This Channel What They Buried West makes educational, informative documentaries meant to widen your understanding of frontier history and the people Hollywood left out. Every script is written by a human and researched against primary records and published scholarship. Our visuals and storyboards are brainstormed and developed by our own team. Our goal is to give you history worth your time, told with care and accuracy.