Book #69: One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus

The title of this book sounds totally racist, right? Haha that's what Tommy said when he saw what I was reading. It actually refers to a fictionalized version of a historical event--or at least a "what if?" scenario for a historical event. Apparently, in the 1800s, a Cheyenne tribe sent messengers to the U.S. government during a peace conference, and made the proposition that they would make peace if they were given 1000 white women for their men to marry (and in exchange they'd give the U.S. 1000 horses). You can imagine the government's response: Protect white womanhood! Send the savages away! An insult to our fair maidens! And all that jazz.

But in this novel, Fergus explores the idea of what it would have been like if they had sent those white women to marry the Indians, through the journals of one of those women: May Dodd. And that's where my real problem came with this book--I just could not believe that May was a real nineteenth-century woman. She sounded far too modern--she wasn't racist, she wasn't interested in "conventional" marriage, she was independent, etc. Not to say that there weren't women back then who were like that, but May just wasn't very convincing as a character. She was ALWAYS the one who happened to be the first one to do anything ("I started singing, and everyone else joined in"), and said a BILLION times that she was a woman with "strong passions" and used that to justify her actions. It just didn't feel very realistic to me. I ended up skimming the last fifty pages or so just to finish it--I just wasn't that into the story.