The Wailing Wind

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While The Wailing Wind is fiction, the Fort Wingate Army Ordnance Depot is real. It sprawls over forty square miles east of Gallup adjoining transcontinental rail lines, old Highway 66 and Interstate 40, causing generations of passing tourists to wonder about the miles of immense bunkers. These once sheltered thousands of tons of bombs, rockets, and missiles, but now they are mostly empty. Antelope graze along abandoned railroad sidings—as do a few buffalo left over from a breeding experiment and the cattle of neighboring ranchers, some of whom are accused of cutting fences to facilitate this. TPL, Inc., is at work in some of the bunkers converting rocket fuel into plastic explosives, and Paul Bryan, Brenda Winter, and Jim Chee of that company earned my thanks by helping me with this project.

The fort began in 1850, moved to its present site in 1862. It became a depot for immense amounts of military explosives at the end of World War I, grew with World War II and the Korean War, and became the principal depot for explosives used in Vietnam. Now decommissioned, it is occasionally used by the army to fire target missiles over its White Sands anti-aircraft base, and a few bunkers and other buildings are occupied by government offices. My old friend James Peshlakai, Navajo shaman, singer of important curing rituals, and director of the Peshlakai Cultural Foundation, has allowed me to use his name for the fictional shaman of Coyote Canyon, and my thanks also go to Lori Megan Gallagher and to Teresa Hicks for helping me research mining legends.

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