Women for horses

Suppose the U.S. government under President Grant, in order to promote peace with the Indians, traded a thousand white women, all volunteers, to the Cheyenne for a thousand horses. This never happened, but in his 1998 novel One Thousand White Women Jim Fergus makes you believe that it could have happened.

The novel takes the form of a journal kept by one of these volunteers, an attractive young woman named May Todd. May comes from a prominent Chicago family, but she makes the mistake of falling in love with the wrong man and having two children. Embarrassed, her family sends her to an insane asylum, where she expects to spend the rest of her life. Volunteering to become an Indian bride offers her a means of escape. Other women have their own reasons for volunteering. Their numbers never come close to reaching a thousand, and so the deal is probably doomed from the start.

In a western fort just before she and the other women are turned over to the tribe, May falls in love with the fort's commander, a man already engaged to marry someone else. Their affair is brief, but it colors the rest of the novel.

May is chosen by Little Wolf, the tribe's chief, and she comes to love him, too. Like most of the other white women, she soon finds herself pregnant. Will the many halfbreed children help bring peace between the whites and the Indians? Fat chance, it turns out, especially when gold is discovered in the Black Hills and all the land promised to the Indians forever gets reclaimed by the U.S. government. May's former lover in blue is among those under orders to rid the area of hostile Indians. That term now includes May herself.

This makes riveting reading, and it's easy to see why after more than two decades the novel continues to draw readers.