One Thousand White Women, by Jim Fergus

A bit of fiction but based on an intriguing historical premise. In the 1870s a Cheyenne chief apparently suggested to a US Cavalry officer at Fort Laramie that if the United States wanted peace, it should supply 1,000 white women to marry Cheyenne men. Tribe membership was matrilineal – you belonged to your mother’s tribe. So, the next generation of Cheyenne would also automatically be white Americans, and problem solved! (In return for the women, in the spirit of fair play and to show no one was getting something for nothing, the Cheyenne would provide the Americans with 1,000 horses.) Needless to say this went down like a cup of cold sick and was never taken further. The premise here is that the same offer is made direct to Ulysses S. Grant, and he takes it up. Some women volunteer off their own bat but most are provided after a careful trawl of jails and insane asylums. The narrator is a woman from a wealthy Chicago family, incarcerated in an asylum on the grounds of “promiscuity”, i.e. having children out of wedlock with a man below her station. After that experience, life on the great plains has a certain allure.

Kerstin enjoyed it, so on that basis I assume the male author’s depiction of life as a woman is reasonably accurate. I enjoyed it because it had the ring of authenticity and it isn’t sentimental – life with the Cheyenne is every bit as harsh and unforgiving as you would expect. There is no Rousseau-esque noble savage nonsense here and the ending is brutal and realistic, based on a realistic assessment of a) human nature and b) the United States’s track record for square dealing with the Injuns. Great stuff!