Castle Valley America: Hard Land, Hard-won Home

This is American history told through the stories of an atypical, forUtah, region. Castle Valley is roughly conterminous with two counties, Carbon and Emery, which together formed a rural, industrial enclave in amostly desert environment behind the mountain range that borders Utah'sprincipal corridor of settlement. In Castle Valley, coal mining and therailroad attracted diverse, multiethnic communities and a fair share ofhistoric characters, from Butch Cassidy, who stole its largest payroll, to Mother Jones, who helped organize its workers against its miningcompanies. Among the last major segments of the state to be settled, itwas also a generally poor region that stretched the capabilities ofpeople to scratch a living from a harsh landscape. The people of Castle Valley experienced complex, unusual combinationsof both social cohesion and conflict, but they struggled throughpoverty, labor disputes, major mining disasters, and other challenges tobuild communities whose stories reflected the historical course of thenation as a whole. In order to convey her subject's both unique andrepresentative qualities, Nancy Taniguchi has written an epic historythat is not just local history, but American history written locall