One Thousand White Women - Jim Fergus

May Dodd, born to wealth in Chicago in 1850, left home in her teens and through a family disgrace is imprisoned in a monstrous lunatic asylum. In 1875 Little Wolf, chief of the Cheyenne nation, comes to Washington to seal a treaty with President Ulysses S. Grant and suggests that peace between Whites and Cheyenne could be established if the Cheyenne were given white women as wives, and that the tribe would agree to raise the children from such unions. Grant secretly recruits 1,000 women from jails, penitentiaries, debtors` prisons, and mental institutions offering full pardons or unconditional release. May, who jumps at the chance, embarks upon the adventure of her lifetime, along with a colourful assembly of pioneer women. She keeps the fictional journal we read, marries Little Wolf, lives in a crowded tipi with his two other wives and their children and lives the life of a Cheyenne squaw.