Moon Over Manifest

I decided to change the name of the town to allow more flexibility in what I could include in it, but other than being a bit smaller and having fictional churches and schools, Manifest is basically the same. Frontenac was a mining town that in 1918 was made up of immigrants from twenty-one countries. In fact, at that time, only 12 percent of the people living in Frontenac had parents born in America. Coal mining was the main industry in Frontenac, and family stories tell of company vouchers and the control of the mine in the town.

The Bone Dry Bill of 1917 made Kansas a “dry state.” This meant alcohol was illegal in Kansas well before Prohibition took effect nationwide. However, the two counties in the far southeast corner of Kansas, Cherokee and Crawford, often called the Little Balkans, were known to be the bootlegging capital of the Midwest.

Orphan trains. Ned arrived in Manifest on what was known as an orphan train. Many orphaned children found themselves on trains heading from the East Coast to the Midwest, where they were adopted by families they didn’t know. Some children, like Ned, were adopted into loving homes; however, not all were as fortunate. Some children were adopted to be used primarily as hired hands on farms or to help out as domestic servants.

Spanish influenza started out as a highly contagious flu that could infect hundreds of people in a matter of hours. Experts believe that it originated at Camp Funston, a military base near Manhattan, Kansas, in March of 1918. Initially, it was not known to be fatal, but after troop ships carried the illness overseas during World War I, the virus mutated into a much deadlier strain. The same troop ships carried the virus back to the United States, and this began the first wave of a worldwide pandemic that took millions of lives before it ran its course.

Immigrants. In my research into immigrants passing through Ellis Island, I did not come across any story like that of Ned and Miss Sadie. However, Ellis Island has been called both the Island of Hope and the Island of Tears. There are countless tales of heartbreak and hardship that immigrants encountered when making their journey to America, not unlike the one I have imagined in this story.

The rest of the story …

Of course most of the story is fiction. But even fiction has to come from somewhere. Many elements in the book were inspired by family stories and newspaper articles from regional papers of both 1918 and 1936.

The boot with Finn’s foot still in it came from a story my dad told about his work investigating airplane crashes. Among the wreckage at one crash site, he found a boot “with the foot still in it.”

The free ice water Mrs. Dawkins gave out came from the story of the couple who started the famous Wall Drug Store in Wall, South Dakota. They advertised free ice water during the Depression, and cars started streaming into town, bringing new business to their struggling community.

The gate to Perdition

is based on a real gate that I came across on my research trip to Frontenac. It didn’t say Perdition, but it did have an assortment of metal objects welded onto it: horseshoes, a pitchfork, a shovel, a spade, and two wagon wheels. I was there in the fall, so it even had two jack-o’-lanterns propped on top.

Real people. There are four characters named in the book who are real people. On the last day of school, Sister Redempta calls the names of students to give them their grades. Two of those students are my grandparents—Mary Hughes and Noah Rousseau. There are only two other relatives from that area whom I knew personally—my grandfather’s cousins Velma and Ivan DeVore. They were brother and sister, and neither ever married. I remember them as simple and good-hearted people. I came across Ivan’s name in a newspaper article announcing his new position as the Frontenac postmaster in 1934. So Ivan DeVore is the postmaster in the book, and Velma became Velma T. Harkrader, the chemistry teacher.

Galettes. Finally, galettes are a buttery French cookie that my mother made and her mother before her. My grandmother used a heavy cast iron waffle iron set on an open flame. It is a labor-intensive endeavor to bake one or two cookies at a time, but as anybody who has tasted one can tell you, it is well worth the effort.

SOURCES AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Mackin, Elton E. Suddenly We Didn’t Want to Die. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1993.

Minckley, Loren Stiles. Americanization Through Education. Frontenac, KS: 1917.

O’Brien, Patrick G., and Peak, Kenneth J. Kansas Bootleggers. Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1991.