Asa Mercer had decided to try again…

Asa Mercer had decided to try again for willing brides on a larger scale in 1865, and again collected donations from willing men.

He had asked for $300 to bring a suitable wife and received hundreds of applications.

H is next trip east had gone wrong in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, until speculator Ben Holladay had promised to provide transport for the women.

However, the New York Herald had found out about the project and had written that all the women were destined to waterfront dives or to be wives of old men.

Authorities in Massachusetts were not sympathetic, either.

Due to the bad publicity by the time Mercer was to depart on January 16, 1866, he had fewer than one hundred recruits, when he had promised five times that many.

His ship, the former Civil War transport S.S. Continental, had sailed for the West Coast around Cape Horn.

Three months later, the ship stopped in San Francisco, where the captain had refused to go any further.

Mercer had failed to persuade him otherwise, and when he telegraphed to Washington governor Pickering to ask for more money, the governor could not afford it.

Finally, he had convinced crewmen on lumber schooners to transport them for free.

Among the financiers of the trip had been Hiram Burnett a lumber mill manager for Pope & Talbot, who is bringing out his sister and wants wives for his employees.

A few of the women had decided to stay in California instead.

When Mercer returns to Seattle, he has to answer a number of questions about his performance.

At a meeting on May 23, public dismay softens, probably because the women are with him.

Mercer ends up marrying one of the women, Annie Stephens, a week later, and most of the others find husbands as well.