Americans expected to create civilization in the wilderness; they just felt that they could skip Castle Valley. From the beginning of history, no one really liked the area: not the Utes, not the Spanish, not the Mexicans, nor the mountain men, nor the federal surveyors—not even the pioneers who eventually settled there. When Oliver Huntington penned his views in 1855, the valley’s name and its unattractive reputation were both well established. Its dry, alkali soil and gullied landscape initially made only a convenient passageway in what became the American West. From the mid-thirteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, however,...

What was the significance of a primeval frontier? Frederick Jackson Turner, the seminal western historian, decided the very existence of an American frontier, progressively “civilized,” created our national democracy. He imagined an orderly parade of types striding westward from the Appalachians, bringing “the process of civilization, marching single file . . . the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle raiser, the pioneer farmer.”² Like so much else in Castle Valley, local facts did not quite fit the theoretical pattern. By the time Turner’s parade reached Utah’s last frontier, the cowboys had gotten somewhat out of line and came...

Pratt’s legal problems arose from new federal laws, spawned in a new national era. According to historian John Garraty, from 1877–1890 “American civilization underwent a basic transformation.” This change included “greatly expanded reliance by individuals upon group activities” and “Industrialization with its accompanying side effects—speedy transportation and communication, specialization, [and] urbanization.”² In Congress, Republican and Democratic control see-sawed with dizzying speed. College professor and future U.S. President Woodrow Wilson claimed, “a man who has served a dozen terms in Congress is a curiosity.”³ Historian Matthew Josephson added, “a slight movement of public opinion, the smallest turn of a...

Historian Walter Nugent claimed, “The transformation of America from the frontier rural society of the eighteenth and nineteenth century to the metropolitan society of the twentieth was the major change in American history.”¹ Castle Valley, too, made this all-American change, but modern industry crowded in side-by-side with vestiges of the old frontier. The area reached its glory days in the late nineteenth century, as residents tamed the land, formed lasting institutions, and made a comfortable living from farming, stockraising, mines, and railroads. Growing prosperity also attracted outlaws, among them Butch Cassidy, whose mine payroll robbery was the largest haul in...

As the twentieth century arrived, America’s Industrial Revolution boomed. According to historian Samuel Hays, all of American history from 1885–1914 was a simple reaction to industrial growth.² Certainly, Castle Valley fit this model, as coal mining grew in importance. Farmers still struggled to get enough water to raise their crops, and stockmen still tended their flourishing herds, but coal became king. As a handmaiden industry for smelters spewing metals, for locomotives hauling goods nationwide, and for home heating, coal danced to tunes whistled elsewhere. Increasingly, so did Castle Valley’s residents. Their daily lives changed as metals, smelted with coke...

Industrial America often startled newcomers, who embodied the high tide of American immigration—a total of roughly nine million new arrivals from 1901–1910.² Many, like the Slovenian Marolt family, had come from green, flower-filled rural districts and had rarely seen a factory or mine. The Marolts settled down in coal-blackened Sunnyside and learned the rhythm of an isolated company town, while around them, older, independent settlements enjoyed private telephones, better roads, and expanding markets. Thrown together in this still-isolated valley, its spectrum of residents seemed to reflect historian Robert Wiebe’s vision of early twentieth- century America: an original “society...

World War I, also called the Great War (for its size, not its glory), eventually brought an end to America’s Progressive Era optimism. Before the reform spirit died on bloody, distant battlefields, Castle Valley developed the national hallmarks of progressivism: town-building boosterism; anti-vice crusades in warring newspapers; and, most of all, political reform as commercial rivalry between the railroad mines and independents soon came to a head in politics. In his introduction to The Progressive Movement, historian Richard Hofstadter spoke of a diversity of “issues, and the diversity of social classes and social interests that were at play in the...

For many, the 1920s was a roller coaster ride, some of which felt distinctly uncomfortable. Historian Robert Wiebe claimed that World War I made America “tough and plural . . . [facing the] unfamiliarity of new relationships and the ambiguity of new principles.”² Everywhere, people felt drawn to new ideas and modern lifestyles. Expectations rose for the “good life,” and many plunged headlong into a round of fun sparked by movies, spread by automobiles, and spiked with bathtub gin. At the same time, a gathering depression in both mining and farming drove Castle Valley residents first to private organizations, then...

Studs Terkel, famous for his books of collected oral histories, had his own unfocused memories of the 1930s, of his youth. “That there are some who were untouched or, indeed, did rather well isn’t exactly news,” he wrote. “This has been true of all disasters. The great many were wounded, in one manner or another. It left upon them an ‘invisible scar,’ as Caroline Bird put it.”² Castle Valley, scarred already by the mining and farming depression of the 1920s, suffered further from spreading poverty and cyclical drought. Depression conditions became so severe, money so scarce, and human suffering so...

World War II ushered in another chapter in Castle Valley’s saga of extractive industry. The American military machine needed more and more minerals to fight Nazism, Fascism, and later the Communist threat. Castle Valley had plenty—some known, some forgotten. The transition from a diversified economy—stock-raising, farming, and mining—to almost complete mining domination marked the mid-twentieth century, spurred by the Great Depression, intensified by World War II, and solidified during the Cold War. Particularly World War II firmly entrenched new, government-sponsored corporations that gradually acquired local wagon mines (now truck mines) and bent Castle Valley industry to national...

In 1938, Roy Cook and his wife had built a store and service station at Woodside, roughly twenty miles northwest of Green River and twenty-five miles southeast of Price. Their backyard geyser gushed forth about every thirty minutes (in those days), and the Cooks charged fifty cents (twenty five cents for children under twelve) to enter a rock crystal and fluorescent mineral museum, a desert zoo, and to watch the geyser erupt. The attached gift shop sold Indian jewelry, pottery, Navajo rugs, and other items. They allowed people to camp for free in the trees south of the service station....

In 1994, Kent Petersen, Ferron native, Army veteran, and former Utah Power and Light (UP&L) environmental engineer noted, “When I was traveling the world I always knew Emery County was one place the air was still clean. But that was because nobody lived there.”² He was right. As Castle Valley got sucked into the vortex of international price wars and market fluctuations, the energy industry on which it traditionally depended entered a new period of volatility. By the twenty-first century, farming the valley’s alkaline soil no longer offered an adequate living, and ranching suffered from increasing environmental pressures. The federal...