One Thousand White Women

One day when I was looking for birthday gift ideas in the YA section of a bookstore owned by a local children's writer, Bonnie Pryor, she recommended a novel to me, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, by Jim Fergus.  I added it to my pile of books, brought it home, and let it get buried underneath books from the library and others with more urgent deadlines.  Then a few weeks ago, looking for something different to read, I unearthed it and read it in a couple of sittings.

The premise of the novel is taken from an actual historical event; in the preface, we are told that
"in 1854 at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army authorities the gift of one thousand white women as brides for his young warriors. Because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to their mother's tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man's world--a terrifying new world that even as early as 1854, the Native Americans clearly recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, the Cheyennes' request was not well received by the white authorities--the peace conference collapsed, the Cheyennes went home, and, of course, the white women did not come. In this novel they do."

At the beginning, I thought the novel was going to consist of Chief Seattle-type propaganda about the noble Native American.  The Cheyenne Chief who asks President Ulysses S. Grant for the women explains that "we have never been numerous because we understand that the earth can only carry a certain number of the People" and proposes the idea of intermarriage so that the white women can "teach us and our children the new life that must be lived when the buffalo are gone."  But the novel becomes more a portrait of a vanished way of life, with the character of May Dodd as interpreter, rather than apologist.

Although I grew up near a state park called Trail of Tears in memory of the Cherokee who died crossing the Mississippi River in the winter of 1838 (including the "Princess Otahki"), I've never had any experience of prejudice against Native Americans, and have always regarded it as something that existed only in the past.  This novel explains some of the prejudice on both sides by showing how May, who grows to love the Cheyenne, experiences hatred from both "civilized folks" and "savages."

Although May does continually praise things like "how cunningly and perfectly these native people had folded themselves into the earth" and criticizes "the white man" for "his flimsy fortifications against the vastness and emptiness of earth which he does not know to worship but tries instead to simply fill up," she doesn't venerate the Cheyenne blindly, but frequently challenges their "male only" rules and laments their "pitifully low tolerance" for alcohol.

Both the love affair May has with a white man, Captain Bourke, and the love she feels for her Cheyenne husband, Little Wolf, help her see the deep gulf that lies between their different views of the world:
"According to Captain Bourke...the only true hope for the advancement of the savage is to teach him that he must give up this allegiance to the tribe and look towards his own individual welfare. This is necessary, Bourke claims, in order that he may function effectively in the 'individualized civilization' of the Caucasian world. To the Cheyenne such a concept remains completely foreign--the needs of the People, the tribe, and above all the family within the tribe are placed always before those of the individual. In this regard they live somewhat like the ancient clans of Scotland. The selflessness of my husband, Little Wolf, for instance, strikes me as most noble and something that hardly requires 'correction' by civilized society.  In support of his own thesis, the Captain uses the unfortunate example of the Indians who have been pressed into service as scouts for the U.S. Army. These men are rewarded for their efforts as good law-abiding citizens--paid wages, fed, clothed, and generally cared for. The only requirement of their employment, their allegiance to the white father, is that they betray their own people and their own families...I fail to see the nobility or the advantage of such individualized private initiative..."

The way the story is told--with an introduction by a fictional male descendent of May Dodd's, a prologue based on the historical meeting of President Grant with a Cheyenne Chief, and an afterward about the journals kept by May-- gives the story a feeling of authenticity and preserves some of the flavor of the antiquated diction that Fergus uses so well for "Dodd's" writing.  I was surprised to be reminded, at the end, that this novel was written by a male author, so deeply had I been immersed in the female point of view.

The greatest strength of this novel is characterization; these well-realized characters will live in your memory for a long time after you've been drawn into their stories.