“I leave this record for my dear children, Hortense and William, in the event that they never see their loving mother again and so that they might one day know the truth of my unjust incarceration, my escape from Hell, and into whatever is to come in these pages…”   — from the journals of May Dodd

Based on an actual historical event but told through fictional diaries, this is the story of a remarkable woman who travels west in 1875 and marries the Chief of the Cheyenne Nation.

ONE THOUSAND WHITE WOMEN begins with May Dodd’s journey west into the unknown. Yet the unknown is a far better fate than the life she left behind. Committed to an insane asylum by her blue-blood family for the crime of loving a man beneath her station, May finds that her only hope of freedom is to participate in a secret government program whereby women from the “civilized” world become the brides of Cheyenne warriors. What follows is the story of May’s breathtaking adventures: her brief, passionate romance with the gallant young army captain John Bourke; her marriage to the great chief Little Wolf; and her conflict of being caught between two worlds, loving two men, living two lives.

So vividly has Jim Fergus depicted the American West, that May Dodd’s journals are like a capsule in time.