One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

by Jim Fergus

(Fiction, 1998)

Author Jim Fergus was doing research for a biography on Little Wolf, chief of the Cheyenne, when he came across this bit of information: Little Wolf had proposed trading 1,000 white women for 1,000 horses as a peacekeeping gesture with the U.S. government. The idea captured Fergus’s imagination, and he wrote a novel as if the exchange actually happened. One Thousand White Women, a regional book award winner of the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association, is considered an “alternate-history” novel. It is the story of the 1854 western journey of the women as described by May Dodd, a high-society woman released from an asylum where she had been incarcerated by her family for an affair. 304 p. Also available to download as an audio book.