A Cultural History of Montana Weddings
by Martha Kohl

Weddings make for great stories—the woman who escaped from her bedroom window to run off with a neighboring rancher; the priest who planned to combine eighth-grade graduation with a wedding mass; the couple who courted for years by mail before managing to overcome the vast distance that separated them; the wedding guests who played cards while waiting for the bride’s grandparents to arrive on a delayed train; the mail-order bride who jilted the man who sent for her; the couple who married on the main pavilion of the 1905 Flathead County Fair; the couple who exchanged their vows at a Great Falls gun show.

Through these stories, I Do tells of wedding traditions as diverse as the couples who live and marry in the West: traditions of Finnish homesteaders, Chinese restaurateurs, Métis fiddlers, Irish miners, Blackfeet students, and Jewish merchants. But whether couples married in a cathedral or an isolated cabin, in 1860 or one hundred years later, their stories offer a unique—and intimate—view of the past.

256 pages, 50+ illus.; hardcover, ISBN 978-0-980129-21-2, $34.95; paper, ISBN 978-0-980129-22-9, $22.95