One Thousand White Women

One Thousand White Women is a novel by the American writer Jim Fergus, published in 1998 and told through the journals of May Dodd.

May is committed to an asylum by her family and agrees to join the programme because it is the only way out, and she writes down what happens to her, from the journey across the plains to the village where she is married to a Cheyenne warrior and lives among his people. The other women who volunteer have reasons of their own, including poverty, scandal and a wish to disappear, and their separate stories come through May's account. Fergus frames the whole book with an introduction by a descendant who claims to have found the journals, which gives the invented history the shape of a family discovery. The assimilation policy in the novel is fictional, but the period, the politics and the treatment of the tribes are drawn from the record.

It was the author's first novel, and a sequel followed nearly twenty years later, once the story of the first group of women had been finished.