One Thousand White Women is a work of revisionist Western fiction, a genre that challenges the romanticized myths of the American frontier. Unlike traditional Westerns that often glorified westward expansion and portrayed Indigenous peoples as monolithic “savages,” revisionist works like Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964, a novel explicitly compared to Fergus’s on the book’s jacket) offer more critical perspectives on colonialism, violence, and cultural conflict. Fergus subverts the genre’s traditionally masculine focus by centering the narrative on the experiences of women who are themselves outcasts from “civilized” society. The novel’s power is amplified by its epistolary form, presented as the private journals of May Dodd. This was a popular literary medium for 19th-century women. May explicitly states that her journal is a personal record intended to correct the official family history, written so her children “might one day know the truth of my unjust incarceration” (15). This format allows for a candid critique of both white and Cheyenne patriarchal structures from a perspective that is vulnerable and defiant. By combining the critical lens of a revisionist Western with the personal intimacy of an epistolary novel, Fergus creates a story that not only reimagines a historical footnote but also gives voice to the marginalized figures often silenced in traditional accounts of the American West.

The novel also participates in a broader literary trend of reexamining American myth through hybrid narrative forms. Fergus merges documentary realism with imaginative reconstruction, echoing works like Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997) and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (1985) in its blend of historical accuracy and emotional subjectivity. The journal framework blurs the line between history and fiction, inviting readers to question whose accounts are preserved and whose are erased. In doing so, Fergus contributes to a feminist and postcolonial reorientation of the Western, transforming a genre once defined by conquest into one concerned with witness, survival, and moral reckoning.