One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd: A Novel

Fergus, Jim

3.9

129,306 ratings by Goodreads

9781572705258: One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd: A Novel

ISBN 10: 1572705256 ISBN 13: 9781572705258

Publisher: BBC Audiobooks America, 2006

One Thousand White Women is the story of May Dodd and a colorful assembly of pioneer women who, under the auspices of the US 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 mans world. Toward that end May and her friends embark upon the adventure of their lifetime. Author Jim Fergus has so vividly depicted the American West that it is as if these diaries are a capsule in time.

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From the Publisher:

WINNER OF THE MOUNTAINS AND PLAINS BOOKSELLERS AWARD

"Jim Fergus's One Thousand White Women is a splendid, fresh, and engaging novel. Strikingly original." --Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall

"A most impressive novel that melds the physical world to the spiritual. One Thousand White Women is engaging, entertaining, well-written, and well-told. It will be widely read for a long time, as will the rest of Jim Fergus's work." --Rick Bass, author of Where the Sea Used to Be

"Jim Fergus knows his country in a way that's evocative of 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

"The best writing transports readers to another time and place, so that when they reluctantly close the book, they are astonished to find themselves returned to their everyday lives. One Thousand White Women is such a book. Jim Fergus so skillfully envelopes us in the heart and mind of the main character, May Dodd, that we weep when she mourns, we shake our fist at anyone who tries to sway her course, and our hearts pound when she is in danger." --Colorado Springs Gazette

"An impressive historical...terse, convincing, and affecting." --Kirkus Reviews

From the Inside Flap:

A Selection of the Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club

" I leave this record for my dear children, in the event that they never see their loving mother again and so that they might one day know the truth of my unjust incarceration, my escape from Hell, and into whatever is to come in these pages..." from the journals of May Dodd

Based on an actual historical event but told through fictional diaries, this is the story of a remarkable woman who travels west in 1975 and marries the chief of the Cheyenne Nation.

One Thousand White Women begins with May Dodd's journey west, into the unknown. Yet the unknown is a far better fate than the life she left behind: committed to an insane asylum by her blueblood family for the crime of loving 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. What follows is the story of May's breathtaking adventures: her 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 two worlds, loving two men, living two lives.

So vividly has Jim Fergus depicted the American West that May Dodd's journals are like a capsule in time.

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