Biddie's Reference Library

"You know the year, the day and the month, for literally millions of reasons: because the blanket you woke up under this morning may have been at least partly synthetic; because there is probably a box in your apartment with a switch; turn that switch, and the faces of living human beings will appear on a glass screen in the face of that box and speak nonsense to you....And because millions and millions of a million of still other such facts will confront you all day long....

The list is endless, all of it part of your own consciousness and of the common consciousness. And it binds you as it binds us all to the day and to the very moment when precisely that list and only that list is possible."

"If Albert Einstein is right once again—as he is—then hard as it may be to comprehend, " then ...still exists."

....quoted from Time And Again by Jack Finney.



Fans of "Here Come the Brides" enjoy reading about the real history of the places mentioned, the life and times of the 1800s, and other novels based upon the Mercer girls arrival in Seattle. This section includes some of these references.

If you do not see a reference that you would like to recommend, please email me and tell me about it.

To thoroughly reseach the background of the show, you may want to start with Scotland, where the Bolt family came from. You will also want to read up on the early history of Seattle and San Francisco.

In the show, the brides came from New Bedford, but the real life Mercer Girls came from Lowell, Massachusetts.

While there are many references to be found on-line, a lot of references are found in books. If a particular book that you want is no longer in print, the best resource that I have found has been www.abebooks.com.

If you decide to write your own stories based upon the show, you may wonder whether to how much research is really necessary. The show was so inconsistent with real-life history, that you will probably realize that the most important thing is the storyline!

History by location:

Olympia


History of:

Mercer's Maids-


Probably the most comprehensive information available is also free on the web at Peri's Mercer Girl's Website

Books

Mercer's Belles: The Journal of a Reporter by Roger Conant and Lenna A. Deutsch, ed. University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1960. "This often hilarious, always entertaining account is the shipboard diary of Roger Conant, a New York Times reporter who accompanied Asa Mercer and the famous Mercer Girls on their three month voyage from New York through the Straight of Magellan to Seattle in 1866.

Periodicals

The Women's Day, December-1948 had a nice overview, complete with copies of the illustrations from the Harper's Weekly article

Historical Fiction

Cargo of Brides by Helen Rucker, Popular Library, June 1977 (originally 1956) ISBN 0-445-08608-4
The girls were hand-picked from the best homes on the Easten seaboard. Each was beautiful, intelligent, willing and pure--or so they said.
They were leaving cities bereft of men after the Civil War, traveling to the only place on earth with a shortage of women. Each planned to find the husband of her dreams...
On a wild Western frontier, more than a thousand men anxiously awaited their cargo of brides. They were strong, outdoorsment who worked with their hands and fought Indians...men who hadn't touched a female in years...men who really weren't much worried about getting married--but let them at those women... (based upon Asa Mercer's second, less successful expedition).

Seattle Green by Jane Adams, Arbor House, 1987, ISBN 1-877961-19-1
When the steamer Continental sails into Puget Sound in the spring of 1866, fifteen-year-old Maddy Douglas is on board, a nervous mail-order bride destined to give her hand to one Blanchard brother an her heart to another. But with her blazing Yankee obsession for the raw, rich land of the Northwest, she soon begins to car an empire form the very heart of the Washington wilderness; a multi-generational story.
They were leaving cities bereft of men after the Civil War, traveling to the only place on earth with a shortage of women. Each planned to find the husband of her dreams...
On a wild Western frontier, more than a thousand men anxiously awaited their cargo of brides. They were strong, outdoorsment who worked with their hands and fought Indians...men who hadn't touched a female in years...men who really weren't much worried about getting married--but let them at those women... (based upon Asa Mercer's second, less successful expedition).

Chief Seattle


On The Web



Books



Periodicals

Daily life of:


the early Settlers




On The Web



Books

The following books are journals of the early explorers to the Northwest Territory. Not the Seattle area, per se, but I've included them here because of the time period and the fact that many of the explorers were Scottish. They provides good information about early meetings with the Indians as well as what the trip around the Horn and across the country was like.

The following is about early women settlers: The Lockley Files: Conversations with Pioneer Women by Fred Lockley, Mike Helm, ed., Rainy Day Press, Eugene, OR 2nd ed 1983.
"These oral histories of Pacific Northwest women...are action-packed, adventurous love stories of our forebears who trudged to the Oregon Territory in the mid-1800s. This one is a diamond." LA Times. Not a lot of stuff directly in the Seattle area, but some good day-to-day stuff of women settling the region at the right period of history, some as early as 1850s.

It is only organized by the interviews, no organization by topic, place, etc, and the index is not very good, so you sometimes have to do a lot of searching to find specific info. But an entertaining read, and definitely 1st hand accounts, practically verbatim from the interviews. ISBN 0-931742-08-0
Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Indians

Books



Periodicals

Logging




On The Web



Books