She is not afraid to speak up or carve her own path (sometimes in the face of Cheyenne social customs,) and she will do what she needs to do to survive. Although raised fairly upper class, May generally seems to keep an open mind about the Cheyenne people in a very practical sense. May herself had been placed in an asylum by her family under the guise of deviant promiscuity, and the only way May saw a way out to ever see her children again is to join the bride program. Additionally, May has a brief liaison with Captain John Bourke, who was also a real person. For example, May is married off to Cheyenne Sweet Medicine Chief Little Wolf, who actually existed. Fergus frames the story as a set of May’s journals and letters found years later by an ancestor.įergus both skirts and integrates historical events and people in this what-if scenario. The latter of which is where the main character, May Dodd, comes from simply because she was in a relationship and had children with a man of lower socioeconomic status from her family. In reality, President Grant refused, but Jim Fergus crafts a scenario in which the proposal is agreed to but only with volunteers–mainly spinsters, scandalized women, or women in asylums. One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus is an alt-history novel, of sorts, in which the US government agreed to the true to life request of the Cheyenne tribe to send white brides to them in order to help integrate the Cheyenne into white society and thus survive.
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