Come for the gold, stay for the coal

"Pioneers may have been lured west by gold, but they stayed because of coal," says Sandra Dallas in her Denver Post review of Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War. A good point to be sure, developed with precision and grace by Andrews, whose geo-historical (is that a word yet?) approach has elicited much comment.

Killing for Coal is part and parcel of a slew of Western history books we have done or are doing (see also Jared Farmer's On Zion's Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape and Katherine Benton-Cohen's forthcoming Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands), in what's becoming an increasingly strong field for us. A westerner through and through, it seems, Andrews admits in this talk to the Colorado Yale Association that he never felt quite at home here on the east coast -- seems that the siren song of the Rockies was destined to call out for a native son's return.