ATWOOD – A Toiler’s Weird Odyssey of Deliverance

From the moment that dark night in 1859 that Rabal Harrington and Ada Huse heard the sound of a goat outside their shack, battering against its enclosure, they knew that their world had turned inside out and would never be the same. It had been precursed by the arrival of the mysterious creature, who their dogs instinctively hated, which was followed shortly thereafter by that of the snarling Moritz Black. The Lakota, who pursued Black, called him “the devil”, and he was the first, out there in the isolation of Kansas Territory at “No. 12” station along the Leavenworth to Pikes Peak Express stage line: the first outward sign that the changes the Whites were bringing were fracturing reality as the few people existing in the region had known it.
To the tribes of the Great Plains, the Whites were the Vehoe, the spiders, who after the 1858 gold discoveries in the Rocky Mountains began crawling west from Missouri up the non-existent and deadly Smoky Hill Trail. They sought mineral riches and material wealth and in surviving their dream-guided sojourn across the soulless zone – buffalo hunting grounds between the Arkansas and Platte rivers – they infected the fabric of a native world. It was one that had been built from mystic connections that the seventy-plus tribes west of the Missouri River maintained with the spirit forces of nature.
The Vehoe had ancient spirit forces of their own, which they were bringing with them to the new land, and those of the European emigrants were the creations of worlds and life experiences inconceivable to the Native Americans. Villages sprang up in places where people had not lived before, and ground that had never before been broken for agricultural purpose was turned. There developed a new kind of people, the Kansans of the 34th state, established as a buffer to the expansion of slavery, and conceived as an engine of corporate agricultural commerce.
ATWOOD: A Toiler’s Weird Odyssey of Deliverance employs imaginative fic