One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd is historical fiction. Jim Fergus got the idea for this novel from an actual historical event; at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army authorities the gift of 1,000 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 world they already recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, this request was not well received by the white authorities, and nothing came of it. In the novel the women come west.Committed to an insane asylum by her blueblood family for an affair with a man beneath her station, May Dodd finds that her only hope of freedom is to participate in a secret government program whereby women from the "civilized" world become the brides of Cheyenne warriors. Along the way she falls in love with John Bourke, a young army captain, even though she has promised to marry the great chief Little Wolf.
