arrived, and Lizzie Ordway, the oldest of the ladies who was 35 when she arrived in Seattle with Mercer. Mercer was subsequently elected to the Territorial Legislature. Second trip Mercer decided to try again on a larger scale in 1865, and again collected donations from willing men. He asked for $300 to bring a suitable wife and received hundreds of applications. However, in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, his next trip east went wrong, until speculator Ben Holladay promised to provide transport for the women. However, the New York Herald found out about the project and wrote 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 100 recruits, when he had promised five times that many. His ship, the former Civil War transport S.S. Continental, sailed for the West Coast around Cape Horn. Three months later, the ship stopped in San Francisco, where the captain refused to go any further. Mercer failed to convince him otherwise, and when he telegraphed to Washington governor Pickering to ask for more money, the governor could not afford it. Finally, he 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 was bringing out his sister and wanted wives for his employees. A few of the women decided to stay in California instead. When Mercer returned to Seattle, he had to answer a number of questions about his performance. At a meeting on May 23, public dismay softened, probably because the women were with him. Mercer ended up marrying one of the women, Annie Stephens, a week later, and most of the others found husbands as well. See also History of Seattle Bigelow House Museum References External links Original Mercer Girls, Mercer Girls chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution Seattle at 150: Ordway, the unwed 'Mercer Girl,' was still well-loved James R. Warren, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 16, 2001 History of Seattle 1864 in the United States History of women in Washington (state)