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First Book Club Book!
This is the reason why we picked 1,000 White Women to start our book club in 2001... Don’t you love it when you happen to pick up a book that lives with you for a few days, and almost like a fascinating stranger, invites you into a whole new world? I just finished reading one of those books that I loved so much I slowed down my pace toward the end wishing I would never have to turn the final page. Please . . . take a look at Jim Fergus‘ novel, 1000 White Women. ~talk with the preacher
One Thousand White Women begins with May Dodd's journey west into the unknown. A government program, in which women are brought west as brides for the Cheyenne, is her vehicle. What follows is the story of May's adventures: her marriage to Little Wolf, chief of the Cheyenne nation, and her conflict of being caught between two worlds, loving two men, living two lives. Jim Fergus has so vividly depicted the American West that it is as if these diaries are a capsule in time. ~authors website
Email response from Jim Fergus
In answer to your questions, I was researching what I thought would be a nonfiction book about the Norther Cheyenne when I cam across a reference to the fact that the Cheyennes went to a peace conference at Fort Laramie in 1854 and requested of the government authorities the gift of 1,000 white women as brides. The Cheyennes saw this as a perfect means of assimilating themselves into the white world. I thought it was a great jumping off point for a novel. All the rest of the story is fiction.
Most of my research materials are listed in the bibliography at the end of the book. I also traveled extensively in the great plains, spent time on the northern Cheyenne reservation in Montana, and read a number of journals written by women on the frontier in those years.
As to why I haven't written other novels, I guess I'm kind of a late bloomer and have been busy making my living as a freelance journalist for the past twenty years. I'm currently writing the screenplay to kww for a producer in Hollywood and working on another novel. This one is set in the 1930's in northern Mexico and southern Arizona and involves a band of wild Apaches who still lobed free in the Sierra Madre mountains. It's also based on a true story, though heavily fictionalized.
I'm not sure that any man can really write convincingly from the point of view of a woman. But I did try. I've always liked women, in many ways prefer their company to that of men, and I pay attention to them, which it strikes me is something that many w\men don't do. And I have a number of close women friends who I bounced some of this stuff off. Finally, the job of a novelist is to attempt to enter the skin of your characters and you can't let a little thing like gender get in the way.
Best regards,
Jim
