One Thousand White Women Read Free

have knocked the Great Father, drunk or not, to his knees for this behavior. Little Wolf was infamous among his people for his temper—slow to be aroused but grizzlylike in ferocity.
    Order was finally restored. The Cheyennes put their knives up, and the guards quickly ushered the Indian delegation out of the hall without further incident, the great chief striding proudly at their head.
    That night doors were locked all over Washington, shades pulled, wives and daughters forbidden to go outside as word of the Cheyennes’ blasphemous proposal swept the capital. The next day’s newspaper headlines further fanned the flames of racist fears and civic hysteria: “Savages Demand White Women Love Slaves!,” “White Brides for the Red Devils!,” “Grant to Swap Injuns: White Girls for Wild Horses!” In what must surely have been every nineteenth-century American man’s worst nightmare, those few citizens who did venture out with women on their arms over the next few days cast furtive glances over their shoulders, keeping an anxious watch out for the hordes of mounted redskins they secretly feared might swoop down upon them, wailing like banshees as they lifted scalps with a single slash of glinting knife blade, to carry off their shrieking womenfolk and populate the earth with half-breeds.
    Official response to Little Wolf’s unusual treaty offer was swift; a tone of high moral outrage dominated the proclamations of the Congress, while the administration itself moved quickly to assure a nervous citizenry that no , white women would certainly not be traded to the heathens and, yes , immediate steps were being taken by the U.S. military to ensure that the virtue of American womanhood would be well protected.
    Two days later Little Wolf and his entourage were packed inside a cattle car and escorted by armed guard out of the nation’s capital. Word of the Indians’ peace initiative had leaked out over the telegraph wires, and angry citizens wielding denunciatory placards turned out in lynch mob—like crowds along the way to taunt the Cheyennes as they passed, pelting their train car with rotten fruit and racist epithets.
    At the same time that the Northern Cheyennes were being booed from train platforms across the Midwest, another parallel, and far more interesting national phenomenon was gaining momentum. Women from all over the country were responding to the Cheyennes’ marriage proposal—telegraphing and writing letters to the White House, volunteering their services as brides. Not all of these women were crackpots, and they seemed to cut a wide socioeconomic and racial swath: everything from single working girls in the cities looking to spice up their drab lives with some adventure; to recently emancipated former slaves hoping to escape the sheer drudgery of post-slavery life in the cotton mills, sweat shops, and factories of newly industrialized America; to young women widowed in the War Between the States. We know now that the Grant administration did not turn a deaf ear to their inquiries.
    In private and after the initial uproar had abated, the President and his advisors had to admit that Little Wolf’s unprecedented plan for assimilation of the Cheyennes made a certain practical sense. Having already implemented his Indian Peace Policy, which gave over management of the Indian reservations to the American Church, Grant was willing to consider any peaceful solutions to the still explosive situation on the Great Plains—a situation that impeded economic progress and promised yet more bloodshed for frontier settlers.
    Thus was born the “Brides for Indians” (or “BFI” program, as its secret acronym became known in the President’s inner circle). Besides placating the savages with this generous gift of brides, the administration believed that the “Noble American Woman,” working in concert with the church, might also exert a positive influence upon the Cheyennes—to educate and elevate them from barbarism