Tuesday, November 24, 2009

One Thousand White Women by Jim Fergus


I'm finally back to reading for myself...it felt really good. This was a great book to get me back to reading!! It was the October entry for the KE book club, Booker Babes. The club is meeting tonight... as you can see I'm not a part of it. It's just really hard for me to follow their schedule...

Back to the story.
First of all - this is a work of fiction...but the way the Indians are handled is not a fiction.

May Dodd was the first wave of a group of white women to be given to the Cheyenne tribes to bear children who would be welcome in the white world. May had been sent to an insane asylum due to her love of a man below her means, her life in sin with him, and her families overwhelming disapproval.

When a government agent arrived at the asylum to invite her to join this experiment...she didn't even hesitate.

Thus began her next life. A life that she could not even imagine. Her train ride across the plains, her love encounter with an army officer, and her subsequent marriage to the chief of a Cheyenne tribe called Little Wolf.

The book is told in a series of journal entries tracing May's life across the west. You can easily fall in to the story Fergus weaves, questioning if it is real or if it is fake.

This was a great read...a 1:00 am read!

1 comment:

Kim said...

I'm so glad you liked this book! I tried to get you (and Booker Babes) to read it last year and didn't have any takers. I'm so glad I persisted as everyone has enjoyed it. Just goes to show you SHOULD listen to me once in a while!! We missed you tonight. Are you ever going to get on our schedule?