One Thousand White Women ~ by Jim Fergus

1. Title, author, date of book, and genre?
One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, by Jim Fergus, 1998, historical fiction

2. Summarize the book without giving away the ending.
Jim Fergus got the idea for this novel from an actual historical event; at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army authorities the gift of 1,000 white women as brides for his young warriors. Because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to their mother's tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man's world, a world they already recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, this request was not well received by the white authorities, and nothing came of it. In the novel the women come west.

One Thousand White Women is the story of May Dodd's journey west in 1874. Committed to an insane asylum by her blueblood family for an affair with a man beneath her station, May finds that her only hope of freedom is to participate in a secret government program whereby women from the "civilized" world become the brides of Cheyenne warriors. She soon falls in love with John Bourke, a gallant young army captain, even though she has promised to marry the great chief Little Wolf.

3. What did you think of the main character?
May Dodd is a rebel, shown earlier by her living with a man who was unacceptable to her family and having two children by him. Not only is May a rebel, she is also a strong-willed person who does what it takes to have a life. She sounds like a woman of the 21st century, doesn't she? May must somehow survive in the harsh world of the Cheyenne, living on the Plains during the heat of summer and the blizzards of winter. She misses her two children and hopes to have a child with Little Wolf, her new husband.

4. Which character could you relate to best, and why?
Different ones at different times. May's friend Martha worked at the insane asylum and helped her forge papers, which her family would NEVER have signed, so she could escape the asylum and go west with the BFI program (Brides for Indians). Then Martha signed up to go with her! Probably May was the one I related best to, simply because she was the one whose motivations were most evident in her own journals. Writing out my life is another thing I can relate to, though I don't write my way straight through journals as May did.

5. Were there any other especially interesting characters?
All of the women in May's group were fleshed out very well by the author, and each in her own way was interesting. I like the artist among them, Helen, who laughed about being "discovered" by savages; she became someone prized among the warriors, who wanted her to paint birds on their chests before they rode into battle. The most notable of the brides, in my opinion, was Phemie who had been a slave and did NOT intend to be a slave ever again. She was fierce enough to become part of the group of hunters, even though she was a woman. Even more astounding, to the Cheyennes as well as the soldiers and their wives at the fort, Phemie rode her horse wearing nothing but a loin-cloth, as the men did. Let people think what they liked.

6. Did you think the characters and their problems were believable?
When May marries Little Wolf, she moves into a crowded tipi with his two other wives, their children, and an old crone who enforces the rules. Can you imagine sex in a tipi with your husband's first two wives ... and children ... present? And that was not the hard part; can you imagine the only opportunity to bathe being the icy river? Or "going" behind a bush? The women were the ones who were to pack up when the tribe moved, and it was a nomadic community. It was interesting to watch the women gradually discard high-heeled shoes in the wilderness and get over their squeamishness about all sorts of things.

7. From whose point of view is the story told?
May, who keeps the journal we read. Reading about life among the Cheyenne is spellbinding, especially when the women show up the braves at arm-wrestling, foot-racing, bow-shooting, and gambling.

8. Was location important to the story?
I usually had no idea where "we" were because the story moved across the Plains. The women were taken to Fort Robinson to be exchanged for the 1,000 horses (did I mention that?), so I looked up the place. As you can see by this historical marker, it was in Nebraska.
























9. Was the time period important to the story?
Yes, because this could have happened only in a narrow window of time, as the white soldiers and settlers were shoving the native tribes from their land by force.

10. Was the story told chronologically? Was there foreshadowing?
Yes, chronologically with May telling the story as it happened. Of course, there were "flashbacks," which were simply May comparing her life then and now. We all do that, telling the story of how we got to this point in our lives.

11. Did you think the story was funny, sad, touching, disturbing, moving?
Disturbing has to be at the top of the list, disturbing that Europeans invaded the "new world" and displaced people who were already here, disturbing that we never kept our treaties, disturbing atrocities we inflicted on a whole race of people. Yes, of course they fought back. I cannot but say that "we" spoke with forked tongue.

12. Share a quote from the book.
I'll share three, two of which "answer" the other, in a round-about way. First, some background. On the way to be exchanged for horses, the brides spent some time at a fort, where May had a brief fling with Captain John Bourke. (I was surprised to find out in the bibliography that there really WAS such a person, who wrote a book: On the Border with Crook, by John G. Bourke, 1891.)

"They are Stone Age people, May," said the Captain, "pagans who have never evolved beyond their original place in the animal kingdom, have never been uplifted by the beauty and nobility of civilization. They have no religion beyhond superstitution, no art beyond stick figures scratched on rock, no music besides that made by beating a drum. They do not read or write. ... Listen to me, May: they do not think as we do. They do not live as we do" (p. 80).

May: "Frankly, from the way I have been treated by the so-called 'civilized' people in my life, I rather look forward to residency among the savages" (p. 46).

May thinks that "possibly the reason the aboriginals have made scant contributions to world literature and art, is that they are simply too busy living -- moving, hunting, working -- without the luxury of time to record the process, or even, as Gertie suggested, to ponder it" (p. 186). (Gertie was another of the brides.)

13. What about the ending?
The ending was inevitable, when I thought about it. Not what I would call a happy ending, and yet there was something right about it.

14. What do you think will be your lasting impression of this book?
How difficult life was on the Plains, yet how right for the Cheyenne people. How difficult at first for the brides, yet how they learned to fit right in and enjoyed their new life.

15. Which readers are most likely to enjoy this book, and why?
Those who like strong protagonists (main characters), and those who want to know more about life in a fairly recent period of history. The older I get, the closer it seems the "past" becomes. From 1874 to my birth in 1940 is 66 years; we are now 67 years beyond 1940, meaning that someone from that time was probably still alive when I was born. The year of my birth will be as "ancient" to my grandchildren as 1874 seems to me. That's amazing, when I look at the differences between life in 1874 and life now. My mother's mother was born about that time, in 1880, and my daughter's daughter was born in 2000 ... that's a span of 120 years between my grandmother and my granddaughter, and I have known them both. Wow!

16. How would you rate the book?
Rated: 9.5/10, couldn't put it down.