About this ebook
The incredible destiny of May Dodd, the heroine of the One Thousand White Women trilogy.
1875 : Due to her non-conformist lifestyle, May Dodd, a young woman from the Chicago aristocracy, is separated from her children before being locked up in an asylum by her family. Her only way out: join a convoy of white women enlisted by the U.S. government to marry Cheyenne Indian warriors. Becoming the wife of Chief Little Wolf, May takes up the cause of her tribe in the face of the white man’s treachery.
1877: The end of the plains Indian wars finds May leaving the Cheyenne camp for Chicago, where she hopes to be reunited with her children. Accompanying her on this long, dangerous journey are her lover, the cowboy Chance Hadley; a young Cheyenne, Horse Boy; and May’s lifelong companion, Martha Atwood. After a series of harrowing adventures, this little troop finally arrives in the metropolis, where they are forced to adapt to a radically different way of life.
For May Dodd, and her reunited family, the adventure ends in 1889 in France: first in Paris where they perform in the Universal Exhibition with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and then in the wild horse country of the French Camargue region—in circumstances that no one could have predicted.
With May, Jim Fergus retraces the captivating journey of an extraordinary heroine. We find here all the empathy and sense of romance that made the grand success of the One Thousand White Women trilogy.
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About the author
Jim Fergus was born in Chicago in 1950 to a French mother and an American father. He graduated as an English major from Colorado College after attending high school in Massachusetts. Over the years, he has lived in various places, including Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Arizona, the French West Indies, and France. For a decade, he worked as a teaching tennis pro in Colorado and Florida. In 1980, he moved to North Park, Colorado, to become a full-time freelance writer. During the subsequent two decades, he published numerous articles, essays, interviews, and profiles in various regional and national magazines and newspapers. His first book, a travel/sporting memoir titled A HUNTER’S ROAD, was published by Henry Holt in 1992. In a review by Jonathan Kirsch for the Los Angeles Times, A HUNTER’S ROAD was described as “an absorbing, provocative, and even enchanting book.”
In 1998, St. Martin’s Press published Fergus’s debut novel, ONE THOUSAND WHITE WOMEN: The Journals of May Dodd. The book received the 1999 Fiction of the Year Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association. It has become a favorite among book clubs across the United States and has sold over one million copies in the country alone. The French version of the book, MILLE FEMMES BLANCHES, which was published in 2000, won the “Best First Foreign Novel” award and remained on the bestseller list in France for 57 weeks.
