One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

J. Will Dodd, a journalist in contemporary Chicago, reflects on his family’s history. He grew up hearing about an ancestor, May Dodd, who was considered mentally ill and a source of shame for the family. The Dodds, once wealthy, fell into decline after the family fortune was squandered, a process hastened by the death of J. Will’s brother in Vietnam and his father’s subsequent death from alcohol addiction.

While researching Chicago history, J. Will rediscovers May’s story. A letter she wrote from a mental healthcare facility prompts him to investigate her life, leading him to the Tongue River Indian reservation in Montana. There, he meets Harold Wild Plums, a Northern Cheyenne tribal historian, who shares the tribe’s oral history and gives Dodd access to May’s journals. The Cheyenne have preserved the journals for over a century. Through them, Dodd learns about the US government’s secret “Brides for Indians” program and realizes he has found a significant, unrecorded story of the American West.

In September 1874, the Northern Cheyenne leader, Chief Little Wolf, and a delegation arrive in Washington, DC, to negotiate peace. During the negotiations, Little Wolf proposes an exchange: 1,000 horses for 1,000 white women to become wives for his warriors, thereby merging their two peoples.