Wednesday Review: One Thousand White Women
One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
Jim Fergus
I’ve been caught up in historical fiction lately and find myself reading novel after novel of life in another era. It started with the life of Mary Todd Lincoln (reviewed here), segued into the guilty-pleasure of The Other Boleyn Girl, and recently landed in Indian Territory with One Thousand White Women.
Set in the late 1800’s One Thousand White Women is told in the voice of Mary Dodd, a woman from the Chicago business class who is unjustly committed to an insane asylum for living in a common law marriage with a working-class man. To escape the torturous life of the asylum, she agrees to be married to an Indian chief as part of a massive wedding-cum-peace treaty between the American government and the Cheyenne nation. The bulk of the book follows her experience living with the tribe in the final year of Cheyenne independence.
Although author Jim Fergus insists quite clearly in the prologue that this is almost entirely a work of fiction, his characters are so finely realized that readers continue to believe that Mary Dodd’s story is historically true. From the first pages of Mary’s journal, you are swept up into the story of a woman you’d like to know, and a life you can hardly imagine. Politically clever, spiritually astute, and carefully told, One Thousand White Women is an adventurous and inspiring tale of marginalized people working hard to find a place of freedom. Today’s Flavor: A history lesson from a creative mind.
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