On June 4,1871, Sara Baines hopped down from a wagon at Fort Bridger, a remote military and trading outpost at the crossroads of several pioneer trails in what would one day become Wyoming. Baines, a 24-year-old seamstress from Louisiana, had just spent several months traveling 1,500 miles through roadless territory, alone. But she wouldn’t be alone for long — she’d come to Fort Bridger to get married.
The groom was Jay Hemsley, a 48-year-old farmer who’d left Ohio some years before to seek his fortune out west. The two had met after Hemsley responded to an ad placed in the matrimonial pages of the October 12,1869, edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. They corresponded via letter for more than a year before Hemsley proposed. The day after Baines arrived at Fort Bridger, they were married by the fort’s minister in a small ceremony on the banks of Groshon Creek. The next day, they left to open a general store in Placerville, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The Hemsleys were married for 51 years.
It seems like a tremendous risk — traveling thousands of miles into lonely territory to marry a person you met drrough an advertisement in a newspaper — but it was a gamble that many men and women in the 19th century were willing to take. It’s not quite the same gamble today, but that approach to finding companionship, a partner in a life that can otherwise be lonely, is still important in 21st-century rural life.
The rise of personal and matrimonial ads — appeals for companionship in newspapers and magazines, Put another way, without personals, Manifest Destiny — flawed, damaging, racist doctrine that it was — couldn’t have, well, manifested.
