One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

Summary (from the publisher): One Thousand White Women is the story of May Dodd and a colorful assembly of pioneer women who, under the auspices of the U.S. government, travel to the western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians. The covert and controversial "Brides for Indians" program, launched by the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, is intended to help assimilate the Indians into the white man's world. Toward that end May and her friends embark upon the adventure of their lifetime. Jim Fergus has so vividly depicted the American West that it is as if these diaries are a capsule in time.


Review: The author terms this novel "semi-historical" in that it conjectures what would have happened if the U.S. government had agreed to the Cheyenne's proposal to trade one thousand white women for one thousand horses to broker peace. It is told in diary entries and letters by May Dodd, a woman pulled from an asylum to become part of the program. 


Despite the author's note that it's up to the reader to suspend belief, I was unable to do that with this novel and I take issue with this being the reader's concern. As an author, you need to make your reader's buy into the tale you're spinning, and Fergus' voice was too inauthentic in numerous ways for me to suspend my belief. It's always risky for a man to write from a female perspective and vice versa, and I do not think Fergus entirely pulled it off. May was placed in an asylum for having a relationship and two children out of wedlock. She is sexually abused in the asylum and later among the Native Americans, yet her lost children and abuse is barely dealt with and doesn't seem to bother her at all. This is flat out unbelievable. No woman would be able to merrily go on their way and have a voracious sexual appetite and be ready to procreate again without a second thought after those type of experiences.  Plus the bargain struck among the women was that they agreed to have children with their Cheyenne husbands and then were allowed to leave after two years. But what woman agrees to have some kid and then just leave them to their fate without at least considering what that would mean as a mother??


Additionally, May uses vocabulary throughout that I have a hard time believing was in use at the time. Words like hermaphrodite just would not have been known to a woman at the time. I also have a hard time believing that a woman raised in that historical time frame and cultural/social setting would have had such liberal and modern viewpoints on issues such as female sexuality and race, no matter how much a modern reader/writer may wish them to. The bottom line is I just didn't buy that any, let alone many, white women during that time period would have given up their culture and society to put themselves in a dangerous situation and another culture, which was at the time viewed with distaste and distrust. Plus the ending was horrible. 


An interesting premise that failed to deliver. A more authentic voice and a more realistic female perspective would have vastly improved this read.


Stars: 3