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user-inactivated  ·  3794 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Lonely Colonist Seeks Wife: The Forgotten History of America's First Mail Order Brides

Timothy Egan's The Last Hard Time, about the Depression, tells a story of a woman in Oklahoma or Kansas who had heard a man in another county was seeking a wife. She asked after him and was told he was extremely fat. She picked up and went off to live with him on the presumed grounds that he had enough money to feed himself. So that's what I thought of.

Haven't read the article but I'll try to tonight.