(upbeat music) - What kind of man are you, where are you taking us?

Where is Seattle anyway?

- Washington Territory.

- In the 1960s, there was a TV show called Here Come the Brides.

About a bunch of plucky gals in calico dresses, who came out to civilize the loggers of a fictional version of Pioneer Seattle.

You might've heard the theme song sung by Perry Como that went * The bluest skies you've ever seen are in Seattle * That lyric is a bunch of BS.

Our skies can be very dark.

And so to some of the story about those brides, commonly known in history as the Mercer Girls.

* Look out everyone here come the brides * In the Northwest of the early to mid 19th century, there were very few white women and many more men.

Settlers and sailors, trappers and traders, loggers and miners.

Seattle was an early magnet for these guys and indigenous women were used to bait them to come to town.

A steam sawmill might've been Seattle's first industry but the Budding Town became famous for its brothels staffed by native women.

One infamous spot was a brothel known as the Elahi and there was a 19th century folk song that Perry Como never sang that boasted of the towns, supply of venison, clams, and all night sex with a klootch-man the Chinook jargon word for native women.

There was another frontier phenomenon at the time, intermarriages between settlers and indigenous women.

Country marriages they were called.

Couples made homes together.

Bonds form between settlers and tribes.

Trade relationships could be enhanced and the women provided free labor.

The British Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Vancouver, encouraged them as being good for business and morale.

But as more whites came and as Americans took over the old Oregon country, such racial mixing was increasingly frowned upon.

Some missionaries declared the country marriages to be invalid.

Homestead law favored white men married to white women.

It doubled the amount of property you could get.

Washington Territory did ban marriages between whites and native people.

Another problem was white settlers marrying children.

Under age girls white and native as young as 13, were sometimes illegally wed.

In Seattle a notorious case was enabled by Seattle founder David Doc Maynard.

Maynard had an eloping 14 year old girl stand on the number 18, so he could swear as a witness to the minister that she was over 18 and be married in a 6:00 AM ceremony to an older man.

Seattle founder, Henry Yesler fathered a daughter with a native girl aged 15.

It's in this context that a 20 something young man who had helped construct Washington's Territorial University and was appointed its first president got the idea to bring marriageable white women to Seattle from back East.

He was Asa Mercer, The son of a prominent local judge, Thomas Mercer.

If the lack of such women in Seattle was acute, the civil war had produced a tempting surplus of war widows and other women who might be eager to come to Puget Sound for a husband, Asa hatched a plot to lure some of them to Seattle, to teach, to sew, to wed, and hopefully help the ambitious young settlement grow.

Men were enthusiastic about ASA Mercer's scheme.

Some paid him $300 to bring them a bride from back East.

He promised a ship full of respectable potential brides.

And in fact, he made two journeys to acquire them.

The first was a flop, only 11 eligible women came out.

On a second trip in 1865, he advertised in Eastern papers that he intended to bring back 700 war orphans to be brides.

Transporting them via a steam ship named the Continental, which would round Cape Horn.

He did bring back some 80 people, but only 34 fit the category of marriageable white females.

When the press learned of his efforts, they had a field day.

They said he was recruiting a cargo of heifers.

A petticoat brigade.

That he was engaged in being a Moses of this Exodus of women.

One paper called it a Mercer-nary effort.

Mercer's mission was mocked.

Worse some suspected it was a ruse to traffic women to establishments like the Elahi and that no proper woman would ever make such a voyage.

His honesty in financial mismanagement came under question.

Men who thought they had paid for wives did not necessarily get them.

Men who entrusted Mercer with their savings did not get their money back.

Many of the women who made it to Seattle did get married to men around Puget Sound.

So not to loggers so much as men of more means such as sea captains and a judge.

Many took jobs as school teachers.

Some women took pride in the venture.

A few wanted to escape any stigma with having been a Mercer Girl.

One of the most impressive of the Mercer Women was one who steadfastly refused to marry or be a frontier help me for a pioneer husband.

Elizabeth Lizzy Ordway came with Mercer from Lowell, Massachusetts in the first wave of recruits.

She was the oldest in her group at 35.

She became Seattle's first public common school teacher in 1870.

When Ordway first arrived in Seattle, she lived with Henry and Sarah Yesler.

Henry was the most successful businessman in Seattle, famous for his mill.

And Sarah had a tremendous social influence.

Ordway joined with Sarah to found the Female Suffrage Society.

She lobbied in Olympia for women's rights and when Susan B, Anthony came to the territory to speak, Ordway traveled with her as Anthony's personal secretary.

Most of the women did marry and have families but the sex trade in Seattle grew to an almost industrial scale into the 20th century despite Mercer's efforts.

One brothel on Beacon Hill had 500 rooms.

When women got the vote here in 1911, reforms began to kick in.

- There she is, Seattle - It's Seattle.

The so-called Mercer Girl's story however, has been sugarcoated.

Still it's good to know that at least one of the girls used Mercer's strange and exploitive enterprise to help launch a local fight for women's rights.

That is a bit of blue sky in the whole affair.

- Mossback's Northwest is made possible by the generous support of Bedrooms & More.