The Book Club Cookbook

One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

Jim Fergus

………

ST. MARTIN’S, 1998

(available in paperback from St. Martin’s, 1999)

JIM FERGUS’S inventive novel is based on a true historical incident: the 1854 proposal by a Northern Cheyenne chief that the United States Army trade one thousand white women (to be wives for his warriors) for one thousand horses, to assist with the Cheyenne’s assimilation into white culture. In One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, Fergus imagines that President Ulysses S. Grant approves the deal.

The women sent to the Cheyenne are a collection of misfits, criminals, and the mentally ill. Among the volunteers for the Brides for Indians program is May Dodd, who records the journey west in her journal. Raised in an affluent Chicago home, May was sent by her father to an asylum after she became the mistress of one of his employees. May pens the adventures of the colorful group of new brides and shares intimate accounts of her new life as the wife of Chief Little Wolf. Through May, Fergus gives a sometimes whimsical, often tragic portrait of Native American history, politics, and religion in the old American West.

Jim Fergus offered his thoughts on the role of food in One Thousand White Women:

I suppose it’s been done, but it seems unimaginable to me that anyone could write a novel that did not include at least some mention of food. To me this would be like writing a novel without weather, or landscape. For my part, I’m always worried about what my characters are going to eat, which is a metaphoric as well as an actual concern. On the most fundamental level, if they don’t eat, how can they live, either in the imagination (both the author’s and the reader’s) or in the world they inhabit?

The matter of food and sustenance seemed particularly acute in the case of One Thousand White Women. In sending May Dodd and the other women into the wilderness to live with Cheyenne Indians, I felt a responsibility to understand intimately how they would be fed and nourished. At the same time, May and her friends were charged with instructing the Cheyennes about the white world; they had a responsibility to teach their hosts a little something about our culinary arts. So food and the conviviality inherent in the activities of cooking and eating serve as a great common denominator and cultural bridge.

But of course, food is much more than that. All hunter-gatherer societies lived in constant fear of a sudden scarcity of game and wild fruits and legumes as a result of drought and other natural disasters. For this reason, the acquisition, preparation, and consumption of food held tremendous spiritual and practical significance to Native Americans. It is important to remember that the Plains Indian tribes were subdued, finally, not so much by the white man’s superior military strength, as the decimation of the great buffalo herds they depended on for their livelihood. One Thousand White Women describes a brief summer of bounty in those last days of the free Cheyennes. Knowing how things must end for them, and for my women, I wanted them at least to eat well.

As Fergus describes, food is a significant part of the cultural exchange in One Thousand White Women.

At first, Cheyenne food does not suit May’s palate. She writes that sometimes the “cooking scents are actually appetizing, at other times, the stench rising from the pot is so perfectly revolting that I can hardly bear it.” At a wedding feast for May and other brides, the Cheyenne wives prepare boiled dog, much to the horror of the new brides. But May soon becomes accustomed to regular meals of buffalo, deer, and antelope.

She is also initially reluctant to participate in the tribe’s communal cooking activities. Although she has an interest in culinary arts, she envisions preparing a “lovely little French dish” such as coq au vin for her tentmates. But she soon forgets such fancies. May’s new life means constant physical effort. Food preparation for the tribe involves digging roots, and May becomes “competent in all aspects of skinning, butchering, scraping and tanning hides, drying meats and cooking over the fire.”

INDIAN FRY BREAD

Brother Anthony, a Benedictine monk sent to live with the Cheyenne, teaches the white women and the native women to bake bread, and their passion for bread leads to calamity, and important realizations. When Quiet One, a wife of Little Wolf’s, bakes bread, she confuses arsenic powder with baking powder. The mix-up is not fatal, but many tribe members fall ill, and the event is the catalyst for a tribal council to discuss arsenic, which the tribe had been using to poison predatory wolves. At the end of the meeting, Chief Little Wolf, who has consumed the bread, proclaims his belief that the Great Medicine Man himself delivered the poison so Little Wolf would understand its perils, and he bans use of arsenic in the camp.

Food writer and culinary historian Mary Gunderson, author of American Indian Cooking Before 1500: Exploring History Through Simple Recipes (Blue Earth Books, 2000), told us that corn was the grain most often grown and used by Native Americans over the centuries. As settlement pushed west, the United States claimed more land, and by the late 1800s, most Indian tribes were moved to reservations. In place of traditional hunting and gardening, tribes were given such commodities as wheat flour and lard.

“Indian tribes across the country hadn’t grown wheat,” says Gunderson. “It was an Old World grain. Tribal people figured out ways to use the commodities, and fry bread was a marrying of American Indian and European food cultures.”

Fry bread is a staple of Native American meals. The bread is fried until it’s crispy and brown on the outside, yet soft on the inside. Fry bread can be served hot with sugar, honey, or jam, as a complement to stews or soups, or it can be used to make tacos with a variety of fillings.

3 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1 cups warm water

Canola oil for frying

Yield: 8 servings

NOVEL THOUGHTS

Stacy Alesi started the Boca Bibliophiles, a contemporary-fiction reading group, while working for Borders Books and Music in Boca Raton, Florida.

A voracious reader, Alesi devours several books a week and regularly scours the Internet, publishing-industry journals, and publishers’ catalogs to find new authors or unusual books to introduce to her book club. One Thousand White Women was one of these “virgin” novels that appealed to Alesi. “The novel’s journal format is unusual—worthy of discussion in and of itself,” says Alesi.

The Boca Bibliophiles discussed the clearly delineated roles for women in 1875. “Women were good or bad, wives or whores, and that’s the way they were treated by society and the men in their lives,” says Alesi. “For instance, the main character, May Dodd, was committed to an insane asylum by her family because she was living with a man without the benefit of marriage.” Learning about the lives of Native Americans, how they treated their women, and how whites treated them fascinated the group. The Bibliophiles also speculated on whether the events depicted could really have taken place.

Alesi frequently recommends One Thousand White Women to other book clubs. “It has everything a good discussion book should have,” says Alesi, “an intriguing premise, fascinating characters, a diverse culture, and a historically interesting time period and setting. And it’s well written and a fast read. It’s a book club winner!”