Category Archives: Uncategorized

Taking a Chance on Love

Posted on by
To order click cover.

Wanted a Wife

I am looking for a lady to make her my wife as I am heartily tired of bachelor life.

I have a new mail-order bride book out in February. Mail Order Standoff has a fun twist.  The brides all get cold feet.   

My heroine has a good reason for taking a chance on love, but what about the thousands of other women who’d left family and friends to travel west and into the arms of strangers?

Shortage of Men—and Women

The original mail-order bride business grew out of necessity.  The lack of women in the west was partly responsible, but so was the Civil War.  The war not only created thousands of widows and grieving girlfriends, but a shortage of men, especially in the south.

As a result, marriage brokers and “Heart and Hand” catalogues popped up all around the country. Ads averaged five to fifteen cents and letters were exchanged along with photographs.

According to an article in the Toledo Blade lonely men even wrote to the Sears catalogue company asking for brides (the latest such letter received was from a lonely Marine during the Vietnam War).

Cultural Attitudes

Marriage was thought to be the only path to female respectability. Anyone not conforming to society’s expectations was often subjected to public scorn.  Also, many women needed marriage just for survival.  Single women had a hard time making it alone in the East. This was especially true of widows with young children to support.

Women who had reached the “age” of spinsterhood with no promising prospects were more likely to take a chance on answering a mail-order bride ad than younger women.

Not Always Love at First Sight

For some mail-order couples, it was love (or lust) at first sight. In 1886, one man and his mail order bride were so enamored with each other they scandalized fellow passengers on the Union Pacific Railroad during their honeymoon.

Not every bride was so lucky.  In her book Hearts West, Christ Enss tells the story of mail-order bride Eleanor Berry. En route to her wedding her stage was held up at gunpoint by four masked men.  Shortly after saying “I do,” and while signing the marriage license, she suddenly realized that her husband was one of the outlaws who had robbed her. The marriage lasted less than an hour.

The mail-order business was not without deception.  Lonely people sometimes found themselves victims of dishonest marriage brokers, who took their money and ran.

Some ads were exaggerated or misleading. Some men had a tendency to overstate their financial means. Women, on the other hand, were more likely to embellish their looks. The Matrimonial News in the 1870s printed warnings by Judge Arbuckle that any man deceived by false hair, cosmetic paints, artificial bosoms, bolstered hips, or padded limbs could have his marriage nulled, if he so desired.   

Despite these mishaps, historians say that most matches were successful.

No one seems to know how many mail-order brides there were during the 1800s, but the most successful matchmaker of all appears to be Fred Harvey. He wasn’t in the mail-order bride business, but, by the turn of the century, five thousand Harvey Girls had found husbands while working in his restaurants.   

Under what circumstances might you have considered becoming a mail order bride in the Old West? 

There Were Texas Rangers Before There Was Texas

Posted on by

The Texas Rangers have a long and checkered history.  In 1823 by Stephan F. Austin hired ten men to protect the frontier, but the Rangers weren’t formerly constituted until 1835. The Texas Rangers are the oldest law enforcement agency in the United States and have gone through many transformations through the years.

I’m on the last draft of the third book in my Haywire Brides series. My male protagonist is a Texas Ranger and, as some of you might have guessed, that’s my favorite type of hero.

Men worked as volunteers until after the Civil War and were disbanded as needed. Some served for days and others for many months. Companies were called various names including mounted gunmen, mounted volunteers, minutemen, spies, scouts and mounted rifle companies.  It wasn’t until 1870 that the term Texas Rangers came into use.

Maintaining law and order on the frontier wasn’t easy, but those early Texas Rangers still managed to move with quick speed, even over long distances, and were able to settle trouble on the spot. They were called upon to serve as infantrymen, border guards, and investigators.  They tracked down cattle rustlers and helped settle labor disputes.  They both fought and protected the Indians.

Being a Texas Ranger didn’t come cheap.  He was expected to provide his own horse and it had to be equipped with saddle, blanket and bridle.  A Ranger also had to provide his own weaponry, which included rifle, pistol and knife.  He would also carry a blanket, and cloth wallet for salt and ammunition.  To alleviate thirst, a ranger would suck on sweetened or spiced parched corn.  Dried meat, tobacco and rope were also considered necessities. What he didn’t carry with him was provided by the land.

As for clothing, a Texas Ranger wore what he had.  It wasn’t until the Rangers became full-time professional lawmen in the 1890s that many started wearing suits.  (Today, Rangers are expected to wear conservative western attire, including western boots and hat, dress shirt and appropriate pants.)

Those early Rangers received twenty-five dollars a month in pay and worked hard for it. An officer’s pay was seventy-five dollars. A man seldom lasted more than three or six months in the job.   

In the early days, frontier justice did not require a courtroom, and Rangers fought according to their own rules. Rangers learned to strike hard and fast.   This led to many excesses of brutality and injustice.  The Rangers were reformed by a resolution of the Legislature in 1919, which instituted a citizen complaint system.

Today, the Texas Rangers enjoy a stellar reputation, and recently did something that probably has legendary Rangers Tom Horn and Big Foot Wallace a-whirling in their graves; they recently hired women

So what kind of a hero do you like to read about?