One Thousand White Women

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd is a 1998 historical novel by Jim Fergus. Stretching from the year 1874 onwards, its title refers to a series of political stirrings caused by the Cheyenne Sweet Medicine Tribe when they offered a thousand horses in trade for one thousand white women. The tribe’s chief, Little Wolf, believed that an intermixing of white and Native American blood would quell the race conflict between the US government and the tribal communities. Chief Little Wolf envisioned a country in which cultural and genetic hybridity led to a new American identity. Allegedly, President Ulysses S. Grant fainted when given the proposal. Though the proposition was ultimately refused, the President acknowledged the discourse it provoked and awarded the chief the Presidential Peace Medal.

One Thousand White Women deals with the historical evidence that Little Wolf’s proposition was not as well received as depicted in popular historical representations. It provides a fictional account of how anger and resentment spread through white populations when news of the proposal reached them. Further, it describes the Grant administration’s covert attempt to create a project called “Brides for Indians,” officially referred to as the “BFI.” The government rounded up a large number of women from mental asylums and prisons to experiment with the idea of creating brides for the Cheyenne Sweet Medicine Tribe. Knowing that this experiment was unethical by any normal standards and would probably not be well received, the officers in charge of the program, and Grant himself, added a provision that the brides must all be volunteers. The BFI program’s overarching rationale was that if these women could lead improved lives in the West outside of their confining institutions and manage to quell violence at the same time, the project would cause more good than harm.

The BFI project had an important weakness that was recognized from the start. Since the government was sourcing its “one thousand white women” from different types of prisons and asylums, it would inevitably run out of willing participants. It soon dawned on the government that the tribe they were dealing with interpreted agreements literally, actually expecting one thousand women, and intending to give one thousand horses in trade. As a result, the government offered a number of felons and people considered mentally insane early release from their institutions in exchange for their “volunteerism.”



The first group of women was transported via train in the spring of 1875. It passed from Washington D.C. to the northern Great Plains and was followed by a number of others from areas including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. Fergus focuses mainly on one woman, May Dodd, who left the Lake Forest Lunatic Asylum outside of Chicago. At twenty-five years old, she was near the average volunteer age for the BFI. Her cohort traveled to the tribal territory of Camp Robinson in Nebraska. May Dodd, from an elite family in Chicago, seems to have been committed erroneously for being rebellious towards her family, as well as American social norms, which she viewed as oppressive. Dodd’s children were stripped from her, and she was classified as “morally perverted.”

Through May’s voice, as she writes in her journal on the train west, Fergus describes the horrible conditions Dodd lived under in the asylum, depicting the institution itself as, ironically, what drove many of its residents actually insane. Dodd sees in the BFI project an opportunity to escape her involuntary commitment. Martha, one of her overseers at the asylum, sympathizes with Dodd, believing that she was wrongfully institutionalized. She forges voluntary release documents under Dodd’s family name and helps her prepare to escape. Eventually, realizing that a discovery of her actions would lead to a serious forgery charge, Martha decides to join Dodd in the BFI. At the reservation, Dodd is selected to be the bride of Chief Little Wolf. Her journal covers a year in his company, ending the following spring in 1876.

Fergus’s fictionalized diary of a real historical figure provides richness and realistic emotional texture to the plight of institutionalized women in the late nineteenth century. It also shows how the vision of peaceful cultural hybridity might have manifested, if only briefly, in a rare union between the United States and the people they ravaged and colonized. Ultimately, Fergus’s story is a validation of the stories of individual women, showing how they managed to understand that there is beauty, value, and promise in Native American life.