In the beginning episodes, you will be joining Steve in tracking, in his word witnessing, the brutal powers of the southern winds, backed for a while by six-guns but eventually tamed by the desire for a more peaceful way of life. You will feel the steady and irresistible winds from the east, driven by the craving for a place to raise families, and depositing communities along its westward path. These winds laid the foundation for the place we now call Nebraska.
There was a third wind stirring, one that was nearly too gentle to notice at the time, but which eventually softened the hard edges left by the previous gales.
If we need a name, call it a perfecting wind. I first felt its touch in the most unlikely place, while reading Michael Dorris’ novel, Cloud Chamber-
The nuns in Duluth were nothing like the Ursulines or Dominicans we knew. They ran a home for pregnant, unwed girls and daily visited the city courthouse in search of needy cases to shepherd. They took for themselves the names of energetic saints, busybody saints—Ann, Elizabeth of Hungary, Martha—not the doe-eyed Roman virgins who welcomed torture and waited for the angels to carry them up to heaven. They were tomboy nuns, exception-making nuns, nuns with wisps of hastily cropped hair escaping from their cowls. They ate spaghetti, wore knee socks instead of cotton stockings, were organized into a softball team that played in a secular league that included professed Lutherans and postal employees.
I wasn’t thinking about winds when I read that passage, but it strikes me now that it defined a point on the travels of that particularly indispensable piece of our story. The Corpus Christi Carmelite order was founded in Nottingham, England, in 1908 when Bishop Brindle invited Clare Ellerker to help him with the poor and suffering adults and children of his diocese. I learned of that from a newspaper article celebrating the 75th anniversary of Kearney’s Mt. Carmel Home. The article mentioned some of the other locales where their devotion to service to the poor led them: Trinidad, British West Indies; Duluth, Minnesota. I stopped reading at that point, amused and surprised that our Kearney wind had circled through and touched down in one of my favorite novels. The newspaper article further described other points on their call to service, among them the sugar beets fields of Scottsbluff, where they attended the children of migrant Mexican workers.
The earlier-mentioned Francis Keens had heard of their work and offered them the gift of his four flats, on the condition that they operate them as a home for the aged. On a trip from a teaching assignment in Oklahoma, on their way back to their Duluth headquarters- Duluth again-they inspected the property and accepted the offer. So, our perfecting wind, originating in England, had touched down on Trinidad, Scottsbluff, Oklahoma and likely a few other parts, before brushing our cheeks in Kearney. The attraction in all points on this map-service to the poor and needy.
Introduction
As I said, this is a story, more accurately, it’s a story about a story, about how a story comes into being.
I suspect that most times a writer begins with an idea for a story that cries out to be told. Then a title emerges. Not this time. I fell in love with this title, Radical Winds, early on. I needed a story worthy of such a fine title.
The tale that emerged, prodded by that title, is of a place, the Platte Valley of Nebraska; of a cast of disparate characters who were the players on that stage from the mid-1850s through the 1880s; and the radical winds that tossed these elements into the piece you are about to read.
First, definitions, as supplied by Webster’s New World Dictionary:
Radical, adj., Favoring basic change in the social or economic structure.
Winds, noun, figuratively, air as regarded as bearing information, indicating trends, influencing the environment.
As supplied by Bob Dylan: a hard rain’s gonna fall.
As supplied by the author: everything changes, by fate and by choice.
Radical Winds ~ by Steve Buttress, posted by Chuck Peek