One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
Author:
Genre: Literature & Fiction
Book Type: Paperback
Author:
Genre: Literature & Fiction
Book Type: Paperback
I received a free copy of One Thousand White Women by Colorado author Jim Fergus, and recommended it to my neighborhood book club. It is a strange read. The cover made me think I'd be reading something like the recent retelling of the Little House series through Ma's eyes, Caroline, by Sarah Miller. Not quite.
The premise of White Women is based in fact: a few years after the Civil War, a Cheyenne chief proposed that his tribe should exchange one thousand horses for one thousand white brides, so that they would bear his tribe's children and raise them in the white culture. This, of course, never came to pass, but Fergus asks, what if it had?
Our heroine, May Dodd, joins the band of white women (which ends up counting only about fifty women, not a thousand) in order to escape the asylum where she has been confined against her will for promiscuity. She meets a motley crew of other women who make up a blatantly stereotypical microcosm. It is as if Fergus gave these two-dimensional characters the most obvious names as placeholders while he wrote, then forgot to go back and change them. We have the brazen Irish twins, who share the last name Kelly; the impoverished and jilted Southern belle, Daisy; the stout Swiss maid, Gretchen; the proud, strong ex-slave Phemie; etc., etc.
The women meet and marry their braves and quite quickly (perhaps implausibly so) become enamored of their new culture. Like âDances with Wolves,â White Women presents a mostly positive portrait of the ânoble savage.â U.S. policy certainly deserves the critique, but the delivery is not what one might call nuanced.
The premise of White Women is based in fact: a few years after the Civil War, a Cheyenne chief proposed that his tribe should exchange one thousand horses for one thousand white brides, so that they would bear his tribe's children and raise them in the white culture. This, of course, never came to pass, but Fergus asks, what if it had?
Our heroine, May Dodd, joins the band of white women (which ends up counting only about fifty women, not a thousand) in order to escape the asylum where she has been confined against her will for promiscuity. She meets a motley crew of other women who make up a blatantly stereotypical microcosm. It is as if Fergus gave these two-dimensional characters the most obvious names as placeholders while he wrote, then forgot to go back and change them. We have the brazen Irish twins, who share the last name Kelly; the impoverished and jilted Southern belle, Daisy; the stout Swiss maid, Gretchen; the proud, strong ex-slave Phemie; etc., etc.
The women meet and marry their braves and quite quickly (perhaps implausibly so) become enamored of their new culture. Like âDances with Wolves,â White Women presents a mostly positive portrait of the ânoble savage.â U.S. policy certainly deserves the critique, but the delivery is not what one might call nuanced.
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