Fiction vs. Nonfiction

Reading a book of fiction that is based on facts, some call this historical fiction, creates the desire to know more about the actual historical event. I am presented with a story that has some historical setting, historical figures, and the historical event that may or may not have happened. I get so caught up in the story that all along I find that I don't really know the history behind the book. I want to know more, I want to expand my knowledge. So if I am lucky, I will read up on the historical facts of that time period and check it against the story itself, to see if the story is believable. This is not alternate history, when the novelist begins with the historical setting and plays a what-if game with himself and the reader. For example what if the North did not win the civil war back in the 1860's... what would have happened. An example that was used by Philip Roth last year in "The Plot Against America", what-if the U.S. Presidential election had been won by Lindbergh, not Roosevelt before World War II. How much is based on fact and how much is pure fantasy?
In this way I find I am reading fiction, followed by nonfiction. After I read "Dark Star" by Alan Furst I found that I wanted to read books on the Stalinst purges. This part of my history lessons I didn't remember. And the little that I did know needed some updates. The number of communists killed by the followers of Josef Stalin is mindboggling. And I began to wonder myself how the Soviet communists were able to stand up against the Nazis after so many leaders were sacrificed?
I am now reading "1000 White Women: The Journal of May Dodd" by Jim Fergus and I want to separate the fact from the fiction. I know very little about the 1875's in Cheyenne territory. I am totally captured by the story, itself written so well that Mary Dodd is alive to me. I am listening to the audio version, Laura Hicks reading aloud, even singing the songs of Phemie, former slave/now Cheyenne. I love when Laura Hicks speaks the Cheyenne language, and relates how the character is soon enchanted herself with the sounds. And after the book is over, what will I read that tells me more about the facts of the actual 'Brides For Indians" plan offered to U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant by the great Cheyenne "Sweet Medicine Chief" Little Wolf? Will it Be the newspaper's written in 1874? Based on our own newspaper accounting's I know those will not be the facts. Where can I find the transcript of the audience of Little Wolf and Grant? Hummm...and the treaties? Are they still out there for our perusal? What will be the nonfiction account that I will read just to answer some questions that came to me while I read?