One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

One Thousand White Women (1998) is a work of historical fiction by American author Jim Fergus. A work of revisionist Western fiction, the book was Fergus’s debut novel and received the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association’s Fiction of the Year Award. Fergus drew on his experience as a journalist and his interest in the American West to write the story. Presented as the discovered journal of May Dodd, the novel recounts her experience as a volunteer in a secret 19th-century government program that sends women to marry Cheyenne warriors in an attempt to foster peace and assimilation. The narrative addresses themes of The Hypocrisy of White Society, Female Agency in Patriarchal Systems, and Cultural Incomprehension and the Failure of Assimilation.

This guide refers to the 1998 St. Martin’s Griffin paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain depictions of racism, sexual violence, rape, graphic violence, child death, animal death, and substance use.

Language Note: One Thousand White Women contains offensive language reflecting dominant racial and cultural attitudes in 19th-century America. The novel includes harmful terms such as “Indian,” “squaw,” “gypsy,” “half-breed,” and “lunatic,” which were commonly used during the period. This guide reproduces such language only in quotations from the text.

Plot Summary

In September 1874, the Northern Cheyenne leader, Chief Little Wolf, travels to Washington, DC, to propose a peace treaty to President Ulysses S. Grant. Based on Cheyenne matrilineal tradition, Little Wolf requests 1,000 white women to marry his warriors, believing this will allow his people to peacefully assimilate into white culture. In exchange, he offers 1,000 horses. The US government and public react with outrage, but the Grant administration secretly creates the “Brides for Indians” (BFI) program as a covert means of pacifying the tribes. To meet the quota, the government supplements volunteers by recruiting women from prisons and mental healthcare facilities, offering them freedom for their participation. In March 1875, May Dodd, a patient at the Lake Forest Lunatic Asylum, is among the first group of women to depart Chicago for Nebraska Territory.

May begins her journal on March 23, 1875, her 25th birthday, explaining she is writing for her children, Hortense and William. In a flashback, she details the reasons for her institutionalization: She fell in love with Harry Ames, a man who her wealthy father deemed beneath her station, and had two children with him out of wedlock. After their relationship soured, her father’s agents abducted her, took her children, and had her committed for “promiscuity” (17). May describes her recruitment into the BFI program as an escape from Lake Forest Lunatic Asylum’s horrific conditions. She forges her father’s consent with the help of Martha Atwood, a hospital assistant who, facing dismissal, also enlists. On the train west, May introduces fellow travelers, including Phemie Washington, a formidable Black woman who escaped slavery, and Sara Johnstone, a young, nonverbal girl from Lake Forest Lunatic Asylum. The women travel across the prairie, witnessing the slaughter of buffalo from the train. Upon arriving at Fort Sidney, they are treated with contempt and witness the squalor of the drunken “fort sitters,” Indigenous Americans who live near the military posts.

The group travels by military train to Fort Laramie, where they are housed in barracks. May meets Captain John G. Bourke, a respected officer overseeing their journey who is engaged to the post commander’s daughter, Lydia Bradley. May and Bourke bond over a shared love of Shakespeare, but he privately expresses his strong disapproval of the BFI program, calling it “utter madness” (53). Their mutual attraction culminates in an evening spent reading Shakespeare together in his tent, with May describing their “mutual longing” (65). The women then depart Fort Laramie in a mule-drawn wagon train, during which May befriends the teamster, Jimmy, whom she discovers is a woman named Gertie in disguise. The party arrives at their destination, Camp Robinson.

A contingent of Cheyenne warriors, led by Chief Little Wolf, arrives to inspect the women. Little Wolf chooses May to be his bride. The women are formally traded for horses, and Reverend Hare, a corpulent Episcopalian missionary, arrives to accompany them. Before their departure, May and Captain Bourke’s long-suppressed attraction culminates in a night of physical intimacy, as she implores, “Will you show me now, John [...] how a civilized man makes love?” (77).

The women are integrated into the Cheyenne village, where May moves into Little Wolf’s tipi with his two other wives, the hostile Quiet One and the friendly Feather on Head. A mass wedding ceremony is held, combining Christian rites with a Cheyenne feast and dance. May has a dreamlike sexual encounter with Little Wolf, after which she feels she is pregnant.

Little Wolf takes May on a “honeymoon” trip, during which they bond. May is threatened by a menacing multiracial man named Jules Seminole. Upon returning to the main camp, they find Southern Cheyenne have arrived for summer festivities. Seminole returns with them and introduces whiskey to the camp, which leads to a night of drunken debauchery. Many Cheyenne men become violent, and May is attacked by Seminole but is saved by the tipi crone, Crooked Nose. Daisy Lovelace is raped by multiple men before being rescued by May, Phemie, Gretchen, and Gertie, who has just arrived with a message from Bourke. Gertie relays that the government is abandoning the BFI program due to an impending gold rush and plans to force all tribes onto reservations. Bourke warns of a military campaign and offers to help May escape, but she refuses to abandon the other women.

While bathing at a river, May, Martha, Sara, Helen, Gretchen, the Kelly twins, and Little Wolf’s daughter, Pretty Walker, are abducted by a Crow war party. At the Crow camp, a warrior attempts to rape Sara. She kills him with his own knife but is also killed in the struggle. The other women are raped, though May spares Pretty Walker by offering herself a second time. A Cheyenne war party led by Little Wolf attacks the camp, slaughters the Crows, and rescues the women, with Phemie fighting alongside the warriors. Back in the village, Sara is mourned and buried. The Cheyenne band later splits up for the winter, separating May from many of her friends.

May’s band travels to Fort Laramie and is met with scorn from the white residents. May has a painful reunion with Captain Bourke, who confesses his love and regret. He confirms the government’s plan to force all tribes onto reservations by a February 1, 1876, deadline and asks May to persuade Little Wolf to surrender peacefully. The band journeys north to their winter camp, joined by a Benedictine monk, Brother Anthony. On Christmas Day, May gets lost in a blizzard and is rescued by a young Cheyenne boy, Horse Boy, but develops pneumonia. During her recovery, she goes into premature labor and gives birth to a perfectly white baby girl, whom she knows is Captain Bourke’s child. The Cheyenne, however, believe the child is a divine savior, and Little Wolf accepts the baby as his own. Gertie returns with a final, urgent warning from Bourke about an imminent military attack. The situation worsens when a Cheyenne war party returns from a raid with the severed hands of 12 Shoshone babies as trophies, horrifying the white women.

On March 1, 1876, US troops attack the camp at dawn, acting on faulty intelligence from their chief scout, Jules Seminole, who misidentified it as a hostile Sioux village. Captain Bourke shoots and kills Horse Boy. The village is burned, and its people are slaughtered or driven into the freezing hills. May is shot in the back; her notebook absorbs some of the force, but the wound is mortal. As she dies from her wound in a shallow cave, she gives Martha a final message for Captain Bourke: “It is a wise father that knows his own child” (285).