Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
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.
"Jim Fergus knows his country in a way that's evocative Dee Brown and all the other great writers of the American West and its native peoples. But One Thousand White Women is more than a chronicle of the Old West. It's a superb tale of sorrow, suspense, exultation, and triumph that leaves the reader waiting to turn the page and wonderfully wrung out at the end." --Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump
Synopsis
Based on an actual historical event but told through fictional diaries, this is the story of May Dodd--a remarkable woman who, in 1875, travels through the American West to marry the chief of the Cheyenne Nation.
One Thousand White Women begins with May Dodd's journey into an unknown world. Having been committed to an insane asylum by her blue-blood family for the crime of loving a man beneath her station, May finds that her only hope for freedom and redemption is to participate in a secret government program whereby women from "civilized" society become the brides of Cheyenne warriors. What follows is a series of breathtaking adventures--May's brief, passionate romance with the gallant young army captain John Bourke; her marriage to the great chief Little Wolf; and her conflict of being caught between loving two men and living two completely different lives.
"Fergus portrays the perceptions and emotions of women...with tremendous insight and sensitivity."--Booklist
"A superb tale of sorrow, suspense, exultation, and triumph." --Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump