One Thousand White Women

This evening I finished One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, a novel, by Jim Fergus. Tears in my eyes still.

Are you interested in the American West, life as it might have been on the wild Great Plains, women bucking mid-nineteenth-century social mores, fictionalized first-person writing, a new life in a completely different culture, or the beyond-tragic collision of whites with the native Americans? I invite you to read this book. Exciting in the beginning, a fascinating read throughout, extremely bittersweet in the end.

I have heard that Oklahoma, my adopted home, has more native Americans than any other U.S. state except Alaska -- because they were forcibly settled here at the end of the Trail of Tears, for example. I've mostly avoided the Big Subject of the native American experience with whites in North America; I think I'll dare to learn a bit more now.