One Thousand White Women

Jim Fergus, “One Thousand White Women,”, 1998 Kindle edition.

One Thousand White Women is my book club's May 2018 selection.  It is the fictional story of May Dodd and thirty-nine additional women who, under the auspices of the U.S. government travel to the western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians; the original proposal was for 1,000 women, hence the title.  There is historical evidence that the Northern Cheyenne Indians in the 1850s did seek a way to assimilate into white society and proposed that the US provide one-thousand white women to enable this assimilation, enabling the two cultures to blend naturally.  This historical real-proposal went nowhere but became the premise of this book describing how such an assimilation would possibly play out had the offer been accepted.  

The protagonist of the story, May Dodd was born in Chicago into a wealthy family.  She fell in love with a man who was "beneath" her, and bore his two children out of wedlock, so her family had her institutionalized in a mental asylum and had her children taken away. The "Brides for Indians" program sounded like a way out of the asylum, so she joined and started a life of adventure.  She wasn’t the only woman of the thirty-nine in the story to come out of an asylum.  (Many people who were not insane could be incarcerated by their families, usually because they were an embarrassment to the family).

I was impressed by the author’s ability to capture what it would be like to live with the Plains’ Indians, at least the Cheyenne, just before Custer’s 1876 Last Stand. 

I have one serious problem with the book and it has to do with babies-hands and the Cheyenne.  I will not go into further detail so as not to ruin the book for anyone who may want to read it.  However, even a book of historical fiction, in my judgment, must remain true to cultural facts and I cannot find evidence to support this part of the story about the Cheyenne.  I assume it is true but cannot find evidence.  I fault the author for not backing-up this part of the story.