Here Come The Brides

1 9 6 8 – 1 9 6 9 (USA)
52 x 60 minute episodes

Seattle, circa the 1870s, was a timberland boomtown. But even though business was good, logging camp operator Jason Bolt (Robert Brown) still had a problem – his lumberjacks were getting mutinous.

And not because of harsh conditions or unfair treatment either – but because there were no women! No women anywhere!

If Jason wanted to hold onto his beloved land on Bridal Veil Mountain, and the logging camp thereon, he needed a plan.

So, borrowing money from rival sawmill man Aaron Stempel (Mark Lenard), Jason sailed back to New Bedford, Massachusetts, and persuaded one hundred available girls – mostly Civil War widows – to come back to Washington with him.

Guided by their “straw boss” Candy Pruitt (Bridget Hanley), the girls returned with Jason aboard a ramshackle ship, the Shamus O’Flynn.

The only catch in Stempel’s money-lending proposition was this: if any of the one hundred girls left before a year’s time, Jason had to forfeit his land to Stempel. Of course, Stempel tried his darndest to make the girls miserable in their new home.

Based on the film Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), this Screen Gems sitcom launched the careers of many of its cast members. Bobby Sherman went on to become a popular recording star.

Fair-haired David Soul – who certainly got more exposure on this show than he did in his earlier television gig as the hooded “mystery singer” on The Merv Griffin Show from 1966 to 1967 – would be reincarnated as Hutch on Starsky and Hutch.

And he married, incidentally, one of the “brides” he met on the ABC series’ set, actress Karen Carlson. She didn’t leave within a year.

Jason Bolt
Robert Brown
Jeremy Bolt
Bobby Sherman
Joshua Bolt
David Soul
Lottie Hatfield
Joan Blondell
Candy Pruitt
Bridget Hanley
Aaron Stempel
Mark Lenard
Big Swede
Bo Svensen
Biddie Cloom
Susan Tolsky
Capt. Roland Francis Clancey
Henry Beckman