Weekend Read: One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus
One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
ISBN: 0312199430
St. Martin's Griffin (1999)
The story is based on an approach by the Cheyenne to the U.S. government during a peace conference in Texas. The Cheyenne thought to save themselves by assimilating into United States society through fathering children on white women. They would have traded, in 1854, when this proposal was made, beautiful horses for the thousand white women.
The government turned the offer down, of course, being both racist and puritanical, but Fergus's fiction permits the Episcopal Church to take it up as an "unofficial" mission to civilize the savages, (so what's old?), and establishes the scheme as clandestine U.S. policy under Ulysses S. Grant in 1876.
The women are a bunch of social misfits, lunatics, drunks, spinsters, con artists, unwed mothers, all of child-bearing age. This includes one ex-slave, despite the book's title. Euphemia Washington is drawn as a self-possessed and gorgeous creature who can run and ride like a Cheyenne, and barebreasted. The Cheyenne name her "Black White Woman." They bestow on her the unheard of title, for a woman, "Warrior."
All of the characters are well-drawn and the interaction of the races, classes and sexes is written as complicated and challenging, including those of Cheyenne wife and "white" wife in this polygamous, matrileanal system, exactly as might be expected in so intimate a meeting of civilizations.
The narrative voice belongs to May Dodd, a 23 year old, fresh out of a Chicago asylum, where she was imprisoned by her socially prominent family for having two children out of wedlock. She finagles her way out to the praries of Nebraska Territory by volunteering to marry a Cheyenne and give birth to a mixed-race child, and so earn her freedom in two years time. May Dodd is a clever and astute observer, but not a distant one. She has word from a recent lover, a U.S. Army captain, that war with the Indians is imminent, gold has been found in them thar hills and the reservation awaits. Rather than take the opportunity to flee, she chooses to stay with the group of women she came with, despite a drunken and horrifyingly violent spree by the men of the tribe, and her own clear and present danger as the loathsome half-breed, Seminole, gets closer and closer to having her.
This book has perfect pacing, an engrossing plot line, and impeccable characterization. One Thousand White Women
Jim Fergus has more recently, May 2005, published The Wild Girl : The Notebooks of Ned Giles, 1932
