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.
Wow, what different place the U.S. might have turned out to be. I had no idea the attribution of Quebec's women went back this far. All in all, I found that article fascinating. I wonder if a similar situation will arise in the future, if humans colonize space.In 1608, when disease and starvation wiped out nearly a third of the original Jamestown colonists, including many of the first female settlers, a number of the male survivors married Indian women. The number of these marriages increased rapidly and by 1612, the Spanish ambassador to England reported to Madrid that “between 40 to 50 Englishman were living in Pohawaten’s [Pocahontas’s father] villages and had married Indian women.”
Shortly thereafter, the colonial government decided that such intermarriages
needed to be stopped.
The women were also pretty. In fact, the beauty of the filles du roi is legendary. Among Canadians, the renowned beauty of Quebec women supposedly derives from the fact that the boats carrying the King’s daughters arrived first in Quebec. This gave the Quebec men the first chance to woo and marry the women, and the men chose the prettiest women. This legend explains why Quebec women are considered better looking than their sisters
located upstream in Trois-Rivieres and Montreal.