How Mail-Order Brides Helped Settle the American West

When news got out in 1848 that gold had been discovered in California, Americans began the largest mass migration in U.S. history. Some fortune hunters arrived with little more than a knapsack. Others brought wagonloads of mining supplies, camping gear and enough food for the long journey west.

What most of these men neglected to bring was women. The resulting shortage fueled the rise of America's so-called mail-order brides—women who agreed to marry frontier men after courting by letter.

In some communities, the imbalance became extreme. Historian Elliott West calls it “a truly bizarre skew” in his 2023 book Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion. “Some mining camps in Idaho in 1870 had nine men for every woman, and in Nevada City, California, in 1850, the ratio was forty-four to one.”

Many of these men never intended to settle in the West. They just wanted to get their share of the riches and head back home. Some had left wives and sweethearts behind on the understanding that they’d soon return. But in the end, few struck gold and many struggled simply to survive. “Quickly they learned how much they had relied on wives, mothers and sisters for life’s basics,” West writes.

For many lonely men, finding a wife became the obvious solution. But eligible women in the region were few and far between. That meant persuading a woman to make the arduous trip west, often without even seeing a photograph of her future husband.

Although these women are often described as mail-order brides, historians say the label is misleading. These marriages typically followed weeks or months of courtship by letter, and women remained free to reject a proposal.

For that reason, many scholars use terms like “correspondence bride” or “letter bride.”

The men and women came together in several ways. They might already know each other from back home or be introduced by mutual friends and begin to exchange letters. A lonely miner could place an ad for a wife in a newspaper in another city, or an unattached woman could advertise in one likely to reach lonely miners. In some cases, they would advertise in foreign-language newspapers catering to their particular ethnic group.

Most of these ads wasted no time on flowery prose, getting right to the point. Men emphasized their value as breadwinners while women touted their domestic skills. “It was much like applying for a job—the job of husband or wife,” says Marcia A. Zug, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and author of the 2016 book Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Matches. “They saw marriage as a partnership. A companion for love was great, but that was just icing on the cake.”

An entirely new type of publication sprang up to carry marriage ads. They included titles such as Matrimonial News, published out of Missouri, and Cupid’s Messenger, out of Maryland.

Along with individuals’ solo attempts to find a mate, there were collective efforts. Groups of men, and sometimes entire towns, would pool their money and send scouts back East to try to round up potential brides. Or they could hire professional matrimonial agents to do the hunting for them.

Mail-order marriage was also seen as beneficial for American society. Women were expected to be a civilizing influence on the wild and woolly frontiersmen. The men, in turn, could help absorb what were unromantically referred to as “surplus women”—those with limited marriage or job prospects where they were currently living. The problem was exacerbated by the Civil War, which between 1861 and 1865 resulted in the deaths of some 700,000 soldiers.

The effort to attract more women even shaped politics in the West. The mail-order bride phenomenon found an unexpected ally in the feminist movement of the era, particularly among women’s suffragists, who were battling to win the right to vote. While they wouldn’t succeed on the federal level until 1920, with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, suffragists discovered that many Western states and territories were open to the idea. Wyoming gave women the vote in 1890, Colorado in 1893, Utah and Idaho in 1896.

“That’s not a coincidence,” Zug says. “They realized that one way to attract more women was to treat them better than they were treated back home.”

By contrast, most Eastern states wouldn’t give women the vote until after the adoption of the federal law. Some states also changed other laws to further sweeten the deal. In much of the country, under what were known as coverture laws, any property a woman owned before marrying or acquired afterward belonged to her husband, as did any income she brought in. Women also couldn’t enter into contracts without their husband’s consent. By 1881, West writes, most of the new states and territories “gave married women control over their estates and of any independent earnings while also guaranteeing their right to engage in contracts and business.”

These marriages didn’t always go according to plan. Human nature being what it is, there were criminals who attempted to take advantage of the lovelorn. A common scam was for a woman (or a letter writer posing as one) to request a railroad ticket from a male suitor and simply cash it in. A Chicago man who ran a matrimonial paper was charged with fraudulently selling lists of “beautiful heiresses” at 25 cents apiece or three for half a dollar. And in uncountable instances, one party or the other would fib about their physical charms or financial situation, resulting in serious disappointment once they actually met in person.

There’s no reliable way to know how many of these marriages succeeded. Government census takers didn’t ask couples how they met, and some men and women might have been too embarrassed to answer truthfully if they were asked. But from anecdotal evidence, Zug says, “it appears that these marriages were just as likely or even more likely to succeed as any other marriage.” Far from being women who were simply "ordered" through the mail, many correspondence brides became partners in building farms, families and communities across the American West, helping transform a transient frontier into a settled society.