Wyoming State Law Library

"In the 1940s coal camp of Stansbury, Wyoming, life revolved around the underground mine, community, and family. In many ways, it was the idyllic model town Union Pacific Coal had built it to be. Families had homes with indoor plumbing, children enjoyed friendship and freedom, and the men had a steady income. But demand for coal waned, and then one day unexpectedly the whistle blew and Wood's life turned upside down. Wood writes honestly and compellingly...

Relates episodes in the life of eleven-year-old Ellie and her family who live in a coal mining town in West Virginia.

On a bone-chilling New Year's Day, when all the mountain roads are slick with ice, Clay's mother, Anneth, insists on leaving her husband. She packs her things, and with three-year-old Clay in tow, they inch their way toward her hometown along the treacherous mountain roads. That journey ends in the death of Clay's mother. It's a day that comes to haunt her only son, who's left without a family and a history. This is the story of how Clay Sizemore,...

Apprehensive about spending the summer in Washington State with his Aunt Ethel when his parents get an overseas job, twelve-year-old Josh soon finds adventure when he meets the ghost of a coal miner.

When their hard-drinking, but loving, father dies in a car accident, teenage brothers Kyle and Klint Hayes face a bleak prospect: leaving their Pennsylvania home for Arizona and the mother who ran out on them. Then their town's matriarch, a wealthy eccentric whose family once owned the county coal mines, decides for reasons even she doesn't understand to offer them a home - a mansion home full of artwork centered, oddly, on bullfighting.

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolize the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted "Germinal! Germinal!" While it is a dramatic novel of working life and everyday relationships, Germinal is also a complex novel of ideas, given fresh vigor and power...

Every year the Coal Man works hard to mine enough coal for Santa's naughty list, but this year Santa tells him that he has decided that he no longer needs coal.

Rose is a wonderfully rich and intricate novel set in nineteenth-century Wigan, a town located in the coal country of Lancashire.  Its protagonist, Jonathan Blair, is a mining engineer who has been chased out of Africa for "stealing" from the missionaries' Bible Fund in order to pay off the porter of his expedition into the interior of the Gold Coast; he is now down and out in London.
Blair's employer, Bishop Hannay, promises...

The Coal Camp Reunion gives those who lived, worked or attended school, an opportunity to gather with "old" friends, renew friendships, and re-live the special times shared while living in Dines, Reliance, Stansbury or Winton coal camps between the years of 1931 to 1959.

Two sisters can't stand to live together, but can't bear to be apart. One worships the flashy world of Nashville, the other is a devout Pentecostal. One falls into the lap of any man, the other is afraid to even date. One gets pregnant in a flash, the other desperately wants to have child. This is what's at the heart of Silas House's third, masterful novel, which tells the story of Easter and Anneth, tragically left parentles as children, who must...