A Bride for Donnigan

Prologue

This series of Women of the West has presented a number of different personalities in various circumstances that women of the past faced, and it seems right that a little attention be given to those who came, “sight unseen,” to the Americas to be brides of frontier men.

We know from history that these marriages did occur. But what do we really know about them? What would move a man to seek a complete stranger to be his lifelong mate? What kind of woman would respond to such a request? How might she feel as she traveled over oceans and frontiers to get to her unknown destination? Did the marriages indeed work?

I don’t pretend to have all the answers—but from a little research and with a little imagination, we can journey with one such couple to that significant first meeting and experience some of the emotions they must have felt on the way to that moment—and afterward.