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."
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