Virgins, Widows, and Whores: The Bride Pool of the John Wayne Westerns

Abstract

The topic of cowboy love in the Old West requires consideration of how the increasing male population obtained women to court and marry because the shortage of marriageable young women on the frontier led to the further competition among hundreds of bachelors to make the available virgins, including aging spinsters, as well as widows, widows with children, divorcees, and prostitutes, all part of the wifely domain. Figures vary regarding “the ratio of males to females in the nineteenth-century West [… from] ten to one” (Lackman 120) to “from three to thirty times as many unmarried men as unmarried women” (Dick 232). And an 1870 census cites a ratio of 172,000 women to 385,000 men west of the Mississippi (Poling-Kempes 49). Thus, the women in the West became “more concerned about male suitability than availability […]” (Luchetti, “I Do” 5). Indeed, the westering women often enjoyed the numerous choices placed before them as prospective marriage partners.