One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

Genre: Fiction

This is the story of May Dodd, a spunky, out-spoken woman, who in the mid-1800’s ends up as part of a delegation of women who are given to the Cheyenne tribe as wives and prospective mothers in order to serve as emissaries of both the political and religious union of the Cheyenne and the US government. May and a slew of characters (including Martha, her best friend, the Kelley twins with fire-red hair and an unabashed love of gambling and, of course, Daisy, just one of the women there to help convert “the heathens”) meet their new husbands and slowly become a part of the tribe, learning the language and the ways of the Cheyenne people. Through May’s journals we learn how she becomes a part of this group, about life as a Cheyenne chief’s wife, how to make the best of a terrible situation and the strong bonds of family, sometimes not our birth families, that keep us going strong.

Before you begin reading this book, let me shout it from the roof tops so you don’t feel foolish like me: this story is fictional. It is VERY loosely based on an 1854 request from a group of Cheyenne chiefs for 1,000 white brides for their young warriors, but the request was never honored. Here’s what I do like about this book: that out of short a line in history, Fergus very creatively constructs this woman, May Dodd, and her entire life story. I also love that through story-telling, we learn so much about the Cheyenne tribe and their way of life. Fergus clearly holds them in high regards and I enjoyed learning about them. What I didn’t love is that the mostly female cast of characters are archetypes of personalities: the strong, the weak, the bad, the good. So much so that the female characters become almost caricatures of themselves. And of course, they all transitioned into life with the Cheyenne really well, most even falling in love with their new husbands. It was all a little too perfect, a little too undeveloped and a little too shallow.