1880’s Mail Order Bride

Lottie looked down at the pile of letters as the postmaster placed them into her white-gloved hand. She shivered inwardly. She had not expected a response such as this.

"Thank you, Mr. Humphries." She managed a smile, the courtesies instilled into her psyche by her straitlaced and unemotional mother winning through her terror and discomfort.

She turned and walked across the wide distance of the knotted and faded Post Office floorboards towards the door, the letters weighing heavily in her hand. She now carried with her a decision she'd never expected to have to make.

"Lottie!" Her friend Amy, her plain and broad face wreathed in a welcoming smile, stepped back as Lottie placed her small foot on the pockmarked and weather-beaten step of Post Office building. "Oh, look at all your letters!" Her friend's pleasant expression hardened into one of envy and suspicion. "Someone must love you very much."

Lottie looked again at the wad of letters clasped within her gloved fingertips and her heart stopped beating for just a moment. To her, they represented a prison she had no wish to enter. She pushed the fat envelopes into her purse, out of sight but unfortunately not out of mind.

Amy watched Lottie fasten the clasp on her bag, her eyes avid and hungry. "Aren't you going to tell me who they are from?"

Just then, a horse and carriage careered down the rutted dirt road, flinging up clods of dirt and muck in its wake as the driver frantically pulled at the reins and shouted at the sweat-streaked back of the galloping beast. The girls expertly ducked and retreated.

"Well?" Amy was not about to let her query go unanswered.

Lottie sighed. She imagined, just for a moment, that she was someone else, someone with an entirely different life. Finally, she said, "Mother told me that I must write away to the matrimonial agency set up by the church. She said that she and father can no longer support me and that at 23 years of age I should be married. She insisted that I apply to be a bride for the men who have traveled west, the men who left the east coast to seek their fortunes in the goldfields. She told me that there is a severe shortage of women on the new frontier and that many men over there are desperate for a wife. These letters are the replies to my application." Her words sounded hopeless and empty to her ears.

Amy's eyes widened. She leaned forward, her plump rolls creasing around her middle as the seams of her dress struggled to contain them. "You mean that we have a chance for marriage? Despite the lack of men here in the east?"

Lottie pictured the stack of letters in her purse and her heart sunk right down into the confines of her little leather boots. "Yes. We have a chance to be married if we are willing to accept the hand of a man whom we have never met." 

Amy almost bubbled over in excitement, her eyes full of romantic dreams and elevated hopes.

And Lottie kicked her booted toes into the grit, grime, and manure of the street and understood with complete certainty that her future held no hope at all.