One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

So much potential. So disappointing.

The premise of Jim Fergus’s One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd is fascinating: President Grant has acquiesced to a Cheyenne chief’s request for 1000 white women brides to come West, marry Cheyenne braves, and teach the Indians how to assimilate into white culture. The request was actually made; Grant, of course, did not acquiesce, but Fergus envisions how it might have gone down, if he had.
 

So, Grant agrees to send the volunteers – a hodge podge of fallen women, war orphans (this being 1875), former mental patients, and the like – to the Cheyennes. Among them is our protagonist, May Dodd, daughter of a wealthy Chicago family who incarcerated her for promiscuity.  May is only too eager for any means out of the institution and remarkably seems to be friend all of the other women, from the former Southern belle to the escaped slave and the identical twin Irish prostitutes. Together they must create a life for themselves with a nomadic people in a harsh land – and with the U.S. Army in pursuit.

Again, the premise is fascinating. The execution, however, was marred by Fergus’s over-reliance on stereotypes – caricatures, really – to depict virtually every single character. It was as though he made a game of fitting as many circa-1875 stereotypes into a single book. The former slave escaped via the Underground Railroad, but not before she had been branded by a cruel master. The Southern belle saw her plantation burned as is reduced to a racist, drawling, laudanum-sipping stupor. The Irish twins run ever scam known to man and invent a few along the way. Ugh.

Perhaps my disgust with One Thousand White Women is a bit overblown, coming fast on the heels of Astoria, which describes both real Indians, and real frontier hardship. (Look up Marie Dorian and then dare to complain about pretty much anything.) I won’t go so far as to call it completely awful, but I can’t recommend it, either.