Hearts West by Chris Enss

refusal, he showed up on the doorstep of her new home, crying and begging for a second chance. “But alas for him,” Bethenia wrote in her journal, “He found not the young, ignorant, inexperienced child-mother whom he had neglected and misused, but a full-grown, self-reliant woman who could look upon him only with pity.”
    Bethenia divided her time between her son, her education, and her work. Her fine business sense enabled her to make a substantial living as a milliner and dressmaker, and with the money she earned, she was able to send her son to college and on to medical school. After acquiring a loan to further her own education, Bethenia entered a school in Philadelphia where she graduated with a degree in hydropathy medicine—a form of alternative medicine based upon the principle that water is the most basic element and also the most important aspect to good health.
    After receiving further medical training at schools in Michigan and Chicago, she returned to Clatsop County in 1883 and opened her own practice. She was the first woman doctor in the state of Oregon.
    In 1884, she married Colonel John Adair, but her duties as a physician took precedence over her duties as a wife, and the pair eventually divorced. Bethenia practiced medicine until she was sixty-five.
    What became of Legrand Hill, Bethenia’s ex mail-order spouse, is unknown. Some Jackson County, Oregon, historians speculate that after Bethenia’s final rejection he returned to his parents’ home and drank himself to death.

THE BENTON BRIDES Tales of a Trip to Matrimony
    I n the mid-1860s, more than one hundred women from the small town of Ellicott City, Maryland, favorably responded to a mailed advertisement to become wives of bachelors in Oregon. Two of the adventurous ladies who agreed to make the trip kept journals of their mail-order bride travels. Their entries describe their motivation to marry, what they were willing to endure, and their zeal to bring stability to the unsettled West.
    The hard, frost-covered ground cracked under Constance Ranney’s fast-moving feet. She pulled a wool shawl tight around her shoulders and buried her face in her chest. The winter air blowing off the water and over the town of Ellicott City, Maryland, was frigid and sharp. But the weather was not slowing the attractive, twenty-year-old woman down. She lifted the hem of her long Gibson skirt out of the snow and walked with great purpose toward Town Hall.
    Before entering the building, Constance unfolded a leaflet she had clutched tightly in her hand and reread the bold print. The words “Brides Wanted” were scrawled across the top. The advertisement, which had been mailed to every home in Ellicott City, encouraged marriageable women to consider sailing to Oregon’s Willamette Valley to meet and marry the eligible bachelor of her choice. Interested ladies were asked to meet at Town Hall to learn more about the particulars of the trip.
    It was December 1864 and the frontier beyond Kansas was sadly lacking in women. Drastic measures were being used by lonely pioneer men to entice single ladies from the East to relocate to the West. Women who considered making such a journey were promised security and happiness in a land rich with opportunity.
    Constance refolded the leaflet and tucked it into her pocket. As she neared the meeting place, she noticed a few other women heading in the same direction. The Civil War had left an abundance of unmarried ladies in Ellicott City and the number of available males was slim. Many of these women reasoned, as Constance did, that this might be their best chance to avoid spinsterhood.
    The women entered Town Hall and took a seat in the galley, speaking to one another in hushed tones, and comparing the leaflets they had received. Constance stood in the back of the room surveying the scene, debating whether or not to join the others. In a letter she wrote to her uncle after the meeting, she told