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The Empty Quarter
DOWN AT the Blyth & Fargo Co. mercantile, where he takes payments on the credit sales of groceries to ranchers and puts the cash into an Antonio y Cleopatra cigar box, Harry Bodine talks about the Wyoming frontier as if it were yesterday. He really does.
"We had two barns in town to house these horses to do our delivering with. We'd go from town to town, sometimes, with these horses. You had to have just as stylish a horse, just as nice and useful as you would an automobile or truck today.
"Being a nucleus here in Evanston with the sheep-raising, maybe in the fall of the year some man would come in and he'd trade in his horses and wagon, and we'd keep them over the winter and sell them to a different man next spring. Because they'd go fifty or sixty miles from Evanston, that's where their sheep would be. We don't have as many Basques as we used to, but they were good men. The Basques were by far the best sheep men that they could ever get.
"We'd stock two railroad cars full of sugar and maybe one of flour, but the rest of the space in our warehouses would be for oats. All the road projects were done with horse power, so oats was the gasoline of that time."
We?
"Blyth and Fargo, the store here. It was originally Blyth and Pixley, but that didn't last long; it's been Blyth and Fargo almost from the beginning. It's a general merchandise store. The country demanded a store of this kind about every hundred miles along the railroad when it was coming east, and you'll find them dotted all over Wyoming. James Cash Penney takes credit for the first chain store. But before J.C. even began to get his first store started, fifty miles over here in Kemmerer, Wyoming, we were going.
"We had ten or twelve stores operating out of this place. Now, this was before automobiles and trucks. The only access you had was the railroad. So things came in by railroad and we had little stores we'd job to around here."
When are we talking about?
"Oh, this would be, I imagine, eighteen ninety, eighteen ninety-five. The railroad came through in 'sixty-eight, and the store started in 'seventy-two."
How long have you been working here, anyway? "I've been in this store fifty years."
Bodine is a gaunt man with an initially gruff manner that hides his real sense of wryness in front of strangers. He wears a red and green plaid shirt-jacket and a string tie fixed by a giant, honey-colored stone. He has his desk and his cigar box at the mezzanine landing. From that little cubbyhole perch behind a wrought-iron railing, he can keep an eye on most of the store, from the quarts of 7-Up to the Stetson hats and Levi's overalls.
His town, the town of Evanston, is one of the biggest in western Wyoming. Population 4462, elevation 6748, it says on the sign at the top of the bright, dusty road. Bodine continues:
I was born in Evanston. My grandfather came here when the railroad came, eighteen sixty-eight. I started here in nineteen twenty-nine, no relation to anybody, and just stayed here ever since. I was a senior in high school. The very day school began that year there was a sign down there that said, "Boy Wanted." It was almost like a Horatio Alger book. The man said come down after school. And I did and here I am yet.
I've done everything that I think I wanted to do. I got to be the general manager fifteen or twenty years ago. You know, I started out as a kid, and they always thought I was a kid. I'm afraid I'm the culprit who's made all the changes. In those days, you had counters and clerks to wait on you. You didn't have a chance to have free access to merchandise like you have now. We had a horseshoe-shaped counter. We had maybe twelve or thirteen people working, excluding the grocery department. We had seven or eight over there.
All we can do is do what we're doing and get a little bit farther behind every day, seems like. Help is scarce, and like I say, we can't compete with oil-field wages. They're siphoning off a lot of women in the oil fields.
There are jobs out there they can do, on insulation and stuff like that. And the bankers down here. One day I went in there and they had five tellers! Terrible!
You want to go upstairs and see all that stuff, you go ahead, but I can't show it to you. I'm too busy. I got two boys who are down here struggling. They can't hire any help. Bookkeepers last maybe a month, two months, five months, then they get lured away by the competition. I can't let these books pile up; they've got to be done every day.
It's toward closing time, and people are bustling along on the sidewalk outside, but there is not a single customer in the store. Up the stairs, on the echoing floorboards, back behind the stack of mattresses, the Old West still lives.
One of the first things to catch the eye is the Wheeler and Wilson sewing machine, in a hand-carved wooden case, foot-pedal operated. It used to be the centerpiece of the Blyth & Fargo millinery department. Next to it is a Conformateur-proudly labeled "Paris, France" - a black metal torture device with hundreds of parts that shaped and fitted bonnets. It gathers dust, along with hundreds of other items stacked haphazardly in this back room. Someone, back a ways, recorded, on now-yellowed file cards, the uses of some of these devices to preserve that knowledge before everybody who remembers them has passed on.
An advertising display for Munsingwear Union Suits has a picture of two children, fittingly attired, on the lap of a young mother whose beauty fits an image decades, perhaps a century, old. A white camisole hangs near a case of button hooks - for your high-button shoes. Free-standing, not far away, is the foot-shaped platform and the big lever of the "Scholl Manufacturing Company, Chicago, Arch Fitter."
Ouill pens, a curling iron with a green handle, a two-handled scythe, a horse collar, horseshoes, a horizontal butter churn with wooden paddles that roll back and forth along a shallow tray when cranked. A tin case, handsomely lettered "National Bisquit Company," still displays its glass front before which an earlier generation drooled at the sight of cookies. Another tin box stands about five feet high and contains six bins. Its gilt legend reads, "Howard W. Spurr Co., Coffee Importers and Roasters. Boston, Mass." Next to it is a two-bin Simpson hand-crank coffee-grinder of about the same height.
In the middle of the room stands an "Estey Organ Co., Brattleboro, Vt., USA" pedal organ. It has five octaves. Many of its wooden knobs are broken, but there are remaining ones, with such labels as Harp Aeolienne, Diapason, and Flute. I wonder what a Harp Aeolienne sounded like.
On top of Mr. Blyth's original desk is a stack of ledgers. Inside the one with " 1888" imprinted on its spine, the beautiful but almost unreadable ornate script shows that Mike Dacey was one of the mercantile's big customers: $109.70 in purchases that year. August was his big month: $11.45. The ledger tells us that he paid off his bills, month by month. James Davis ran up a total bill of $19.55, making charges about once a season.
An Evanston town map, 1898, shows a Chinatown. The Chinese, who came to build the railroad, stayed on to mine coal for the locomotives. It was the biggest Chinatown east of San Francisco, they say. Some photos show the store clerks lined up for a formal sitting, wearing three-piece suits, with their hair parted in the middle and slicked back. A perpetual calendar from Becker Brewing & Malting Co., Evanston, counts the years.
There is an enormous, elaborately scrolled, silvery cash register on a wooden base that holds four drawers. It stands atop one of the fifteen-foot oaken counters that Mr. Bodine removed from the lower floor. An old steel tub sports a stained and peeling sticker that reads, "Old Maytags Never Die."
We don't think of any value tied up in that stuff [Bodine says]. Some people tell us it should be incorporated in some of our displays. They say it would make good conversation pieces. We did bring down a few, but the local people don't pay much attention to them, because they've grown up with them. The new people might appreciate them, but we don't get many new customers, because they're attracted to the chain stores. They know Safeway, because there's been one wherever they've been, and the stores are more or less standard. I think, in this town, those grocery stores are cutting a fat hog-that tape machine of yours don't pick up no swear words, does it? Look, here's a store without a customer in it. That isn't natural, this time of day. As the old-timers pass on, when you see a funeral pass by, you know that's one of our good customers going on down the line.
From the street, the store looks almost like a museum or a carefully designed movie set. On the green street-floor facade and the brick upper stories, there are black-on-white signs in nineteenth-century lettering:
THE BLYTH & FARGO CO.
Drygoods - Clothing - Boots & Shoes
Furniture Hardware Stoves, Groceries &c.
It is not the only place of its vintage in Evanston. Mel Baldwin, the monosyllabic editor of the Uinta County Herald, located on the other side of Main Street, sits at his old desk in the front of his office. It is a hand-carved rolltop, furnished with dozens of tiny pigeonholes, the very desk that the founder of the paper lugged here from the East in the last century. California antique dealer offered him $6000 for it the other day. Didn't take it, though. Sat at it for a long time now. Doesn't see any reason to change.
But change is Evanston's tomorrow - change so torrential that in the next few years Evanston will be swept from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first, with only the briefest pause for some oil workers' chair-swinging bar fights in the Whirl Inn disco in between. For Evanston is becoming the Intermountain West's newest energy boom town.
"This is the most exciting place in North America!" says Milt Hoesel, expressing a sentiment that would undoubtedly leave Harry Bodine utterly baffled.
Hoesel is sitting on the couch over by the plate-glass window in the office of Alan Graban, just up Main Street. Graban is the president of the First Wyoming Bank, Evanston. He has been here two years. Hoesel is the senior drilling foreman for Amoco in these parts.
"Where else," continues Hoesel, "would I have had the opportunity to serve on the board of directors of a bank? Was the furthest thing from my mind. All I ever knew was oil. I was born in Mandan, North Dakota. I have the same feeling Al does." "Yeah," says Graban, "the opportunities to be made here are, well, they're just fantastic.
"I thought all this big equipment would be coming through town and they'd see it and it would finally sink in to the people in this town. Look out there. Halliburton. Oil-field pump truck. Oh, now this should be interesting. Wonder if he can make it past that gravel hauler. Look, you're seeing millions and multi-multi-multimillions of dollars out there.
"We've got five percent of the total oil and gas reserves of the entire United States sitting right underneath us. We're saying it's Prudhoe Bay size. They just hit a well yesterday, that - what was it. Milt?"
"It flows twelve hundred and ninety barrels of oil a day. And five million cubic feet of gas. And that's just one well. e've got seventeen fields, and they're all giants."
"Ten trillion cubic feet of gas. Write that down on a piece of paper some time. Ten thousand billion. You see, it's beyond . . . It's hard for people to even comprehend . . ."
Added Hoesel: "If you can stand the challenge, boy, it's all right here."
All right here. In Evanston, Wyoming, about a hundred miles east of Promontory, Utah, where the golden spike was driven to connect the continent's first coast-to-coast railroad, just a tad over a hundred years ago. Exactly one hundred miles due west of Rock Springs, Wyoming. Exactly one hundred miles because that's how often the Union Pacific needed a town. The train east needed more fuel, more water to make steam, and a fresh crew. And, of course, a mercantile. A hundred miles to Evanston, then Rock Springs, then a hundred miles to Rawlins, a hundred miles to Laramie, then through Cheyenne, and on into Nebraska.
Precious little sign of humanity in between, even today. Evanston is still a mind-scarring distance from anything except Salt Lake City, which is across the Wasatch Range. It's a steep climb of an hour and a half by the interstate, during which you can still see, in the breakdown lane, a cowboy on a horse, followed by a pack mule on a short lead. Above the lobby desk at the Dunmar Motel there are five clocks, each one with a label - Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London, and Evanston - and each one an identical ten minutes slow. A list there shows that even within Wyoming, the distances are menacing: Gillette, 456 miles.
Cheyenne, 372 miles.
Sundance, 515 miles.
Then comes what is repeatedly referred to by the roughnecks, the oil workers, as "the real world":
Albuquerque, 770 miles.
Amarillo, 855 miles.
Bismarck, 874 miles.
Chicago, 1313 miles.
Denver, 438 miles.
Dodge City, 788 miles.
Great Falls, 596 miles.
Las Vegas, 513 miles.
San Francisco, 832 miles.
Seattle, 877 miles.
Sioux Falls, 912 miles.
Vancouver, 1006 miles.
Evanston is not even near a commercial airport.
The only thing Evanston is near is the Overthrust Belt. And that's three miles. Straight down. Through the rock of tectonic plates that intertwined and rode over each other as the continent was formed 150 million years ago. Land 140 miles wide was compressed into 70 miles wide, leaving behind some of the most baffling but productive geology oilmen have ever had to face. The Overthrust Belt reaches from British Columbia, Canada, to Guatemala, up and down the Rocky Mountains. But it is here, where Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming meet, with Evanston its de facto capital, that the Overthrust Belt is first being conquered.
Evanston was, until recently, Mormon by an overwhelming majority. The strait-laced Latter-Day Saints greased their wagon wheels with the oil that bubbled through to the surface in 1847, when Brigham Young brought his disciplined and suffering bands west. He even left a colony behind here before he pushed through to the valley of the Salt Lake and declared, "This is the place."
But now, Evanston is becoming a boom town of a kind south-western Wyoming has never seen before, not even in the earliest days of the frontier. An energy boom town.
"This is not the worst energy boom town I've ever seen," Hoesel muses. "Now, Gillette!"
Gillette, in northeast Wyoming, was the town around which preparations were made to extract vast quantities of highly valuable low-sulfur, strip-mined coal in the late seventies. Absolutely no provisions were made for the problems of the boom. Alcoholism, violence, crime, child-abuse, wife-beating . . a bouquet of modern urban pathologies bloomed overnight in the high country. Today, you can't reach for your keys in Gillette without elbowing an amazed sociologist, come to witness this phenomenon. In fact, there is now a neurosis recognized as the "Gillette syndrome." It's found among women stuck, day in and day out, in mobile homes literally forty miles from nowhere, with zero to do except watch men poke holes in the ground. They go crazy.
"Gillette was the worst," says Hoesel, "but the horrible example around here is Rock Springs. We don't ever want to have as many prostitutes as they have, or the killings, or the drugs. Rock Springs is the emotional word in Evanston."
A short time after CBS's "60 Minutes" televised a take-no-prisoners expose of the lawlessness in Rock Springs, a police officer who had been brought in from Brooklyn to do antinarcotics undercover work was shot right between the eyes. In a patrol car. At pointblank range. In front of two witnesses. By his boss. The sheriff. One Ed Cantrell. Testimony indicated that the victim never touched his own firearm. Yet Cantrell's case was self-defense. He saw in the deputy's eyes, he said, that he was going to draw, so he plugged him, claiming that it was perfectly possible to get the jump on a man twenty years his junior in the flicker of an eye. Expert testimony was introduced that Cantrell was one of the fastest guns in the West. He was acquitted. This was in 1979.
Either justice was done in this case, or it wasn't. You pick which thesis you find more staggering.
"Yeah, you know, Evanston isn't really that bad, yet," Hoesel and Graban agree.
"But wait till next year."
Graban, who is from Seattle, and Hoesel are traveled, educated, sophisticated men by the standards of Evanston. Although both cultivate what a New Yorker might consider country ways - come by more or less honestly - they are from a completely different world from that of the "old-timers." "Why, you talk to some of these people," says Graban, "and find they've never been on an airplane. One old guy has never been out of Evanston. Not even to go to Salt Lake City!"
So these two don't see things the way many locals do. The locals, thoroughly a part of the pickup-truck-and-television generation, nonetheless still eat dust in the fall, rounding up cattle from horseback. ("Well, how would you propose to do it?" I was asked.) They still heat heavy branding irons in their campfires.
"They were told about it,'"' says Graban. "They heard it. But they didn't quite believe it. And there's thirty percent of the people in this town who still don't believe it. They think that now it's going to get cold, and it's been a busy summer, but it's going to quiet down next year and all those people are going to go away."
Of these erroneous fantasies, Hoesel says, "If you've lived in a little community of four thousand people all your life - well, I can see how they think this is so unreal."
But as long as energy controls destiny in North America, "this" is not going to go away in Evanston. After an isolated and sleepy century, the town and its region will never again be the same.
Graban is an amiable, dynamic, six-foot-tall, kind-of-over-weight, straight-faced-joking, hell-of-a-man-if-you-take-him-on-his-own-terms kind of character. He is also a serious banker. He begins to tell a story by starting in the middle:
"I got a note on my desk here to call the mayor and the chief of police. We've got to sit down and resolve the problem of our driveway. It's not my problem. We're doing everything according to the law. But, last Saturday—"
Hoesel begins to chuckle, and Graban goes on:
We brought the entire downtown area of Evanston to its knees and traffic didn't move for an hour and a half. Lining up at our drive-in windows. You see, they're building a plant for Milt out there. Will separate the hydrogen sulfide from the natural gas. Got to before you can ship it. Three hundred million dollars. Two hundred and fifty construction workers.
Well, it just happens that we're very fortunate because there's an outstanding, intelligent, handsome, honest bank president in this town who has gone out and called on all these companies in Houston. So we have all their bank accounts.
And, all right, where do those two hundred and fifty guys come at six o'clock on Friday night to cash their paychecks? You wouldn't believe it. Look at these pictures. This is what upsets the locals. Three lanes into the bank. You can't even drive through town.
And then, Saturday. The policemen came out. Two of them walked out of the police station there, stood and looked at the mess. One guy took off his hat, scratched his head, turned round and walked back in, and never came out again.
The point I'm making is that this is happening with two hundred and fifty people. And Milt's drilling so much, they're probably going to start the second phase of construction before the first is finished. So now you're talking four or five years of construction, at least, and adding another three hundred million dollars. And Chevron is saying the same thing. So you've got by spring six hundred construction workers in one camp. Add in Chevron, that's nine hundred to twelve hundred. A billion dollars worth of construction. So on Friday night at six-thirty, you're going to see fifteen hundred people trying to cash their paychecks . . .
I mean, look. That's the total assets of the bank, here, those figures. We've got ninety percent of the construction loans in town. Just approved a huge loan for a five-hundred-pad mobile-home park just outside of town.
All the girls downstairs love doughnuts. Eighty percent of them are Mormons, and they all weigh nine thousand pounds more than they should, like myself, but they have great doughnuts down at the bakery here. So when we hit thirty million dollars in assets, I said, okay, doughnuts on the bank. Guess we can afford it.
When we hit thirty-one, Janet comes in here, and says it's doughnut time. Well, I said, you just had doughnuts the day before yesterday. Basically, last Tuesday they came in and said we just passed thirty-seven million dollars, can we have doughnuts? That's two days ago. And they came in today and said we had seven hundred thousand dollars more than two days ago, and they asked if they could have doughnuts today again. I said no way. Not until you hit thirty-eight million. You heard me. No doughnuts.
And this is in a town where the first cut the nineteen-eighty census took at us said we still had only four thousand people. Well, hell, we've had twice that many gas hookups. Turns out they completely missed a subdivision and a trailer park. So new they didn't even know they were out there! We've got to be at least seven thousand, eight thousand.
"Our internal figures at Amoco show that we expect things to not level out until eighteen or twenty thousand," says Hoesel. That would bring Evanston from not-even-on-the-charts to the fourth-largest city in Wyoming in well under a decade. Probably five years.
The signs of the boom are everywhere. Out in the sagebrush, a weathered old barn leans picturesquely into the never-ending wind in a fashion usually reserved for calendars or checkbooks called something like the "Scenic America Series." Right next to it, grading equipment operating at full bore planes the empty land for the cement mixers and earth movers, creating a vast and dusty trailer court, the other end of which is already being occupied. And those aluminum boxes, their silver roofs reflecting rows of glare, in turn, are right next to a thumping diesel generator, there because the utility company simply hasn't had time yet to run power lines out. It is impossible to get a motel room without reservations weeks in advance. Fifteen-thousand-dollar bunga-lows in town are fetching $75,000 apiece, if you can get one. People live in cars, campers, tents, old school buses. Even the shrubbery is slept under. "I got me a nice big bush," one Jerry Williams was quoted as saying. "If I could just get a little satisfaction on the love scene . . ." The week I was there, the Uinta County Herald had raised a stir by writing about the town's brand-new whorehouse. But for some reason, they'd protected all the identities, so the biggest game in Evanston was trying to figure out, from the cryptic clues in the story, where in hell the thing was.
One of the proudest possessions in town was a baseball cap with the legend "Caught in the Evanston Underpass." It seems that the historic main line of the Union Pacific cuts right through town, and the only way across the tracks is a two-lane cut under them in the middle of town. (You wouldn't want to try running your four-wheel-drive over the tracks, what with the coal trains ripping through with great but unpredictable frequency.) The traffic jams at the underpass are becoming legendary. "There's coming the day when the only way you're going to be able to get to the other side of town is to be born there," said one old-timer. The pleas for widening the underpass have been ignored or snarled in red tape for so long that the police are now being urged to get the Union Pacific's attention by posting a ten-mile-per-hour speed limit for these trains as they come through town. Ticket them if they don't obey. Although that begs the question of how you pull a mile-long train doing eighty miles an hour over to the side.
The Whirl Inn ("and stagger out," say the locals) called for police help seventy-nine times in the first ninety days of 1980. At the back of the bar, there's a corkboard with names written large with Magic Marker on construction paper, like the honor roll in some third-grade classroom. But this is the list of people who are permanently banned from the premises. I couldn't get a straight answer about what on earth it takes to be banned from the Whirl Inn, but I did notice an unusually large number of women's names. And there are decidedly not that many women in Evanston.
Workers from all over the world are streaming in to get the hard, dirty oil-field jobs, many of which are worth $2500 a month. Well out into the rutted hills, where good-looking Herefords graze on the meager growth, past the A & G Oilfield Maintenance workers putting up fences to keep said cows from getting into the waste-recovery water pits next to the Lufkin pumping jacks, along a solid gravel road built up four feet above the surface so that the winter snow will drift off, beyond the stacks that flare off bright orange plumes of natural gas against the azure, cloudless sky, stands Urroz No. I. That well is being worked by a blue number labeled "Star Drilling Co., Inc., Rig No. 1 I." It's so big that even the thought of moving it from location to location is exhausting.
Trailers are parked around the rig. In one of them, where computer display screens set into thin wooden paneling monitor geological events thousands of feet underground, half a dozen people are having a bull session. The senior geologist, Ted Solar•., has recently been based in London and has just come here from the North Sea.
Jim Crow is from Ogden, Utah. He's the twenty-four-year-old Oilind Safety Engineering supervisor who handles the equipment that guards against accidents associated with the highly poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas that is mixed in with the natural gas. Before the bottom dropped out of the housing market, he had been a plumbing apprentice and never dreamed of working in the "oil patch." But when he was laid off, he visited his brother, working the Overthrust Belt, for three days. Then he wandered into an office to see if they were hiring, got a job, drove back to Ogden, packed his stuff, and moved. "Just like that," he says. Now his father, who is in construction, is thinking of joining him to build 125 houses.
Eugene (Butch) Connor is driving a rig, hauling water to the site for the Big K Company. A bull-shaped man, with a dusty cowboy hat of astounding size, and a mouthful of very big white teeth, Connor is from Eastern Montana up by Canada. What he really wanted to do, he said, is ranch, but there are just no jobs for a cowboy, so he's in Wyoming with his wife and two small children.
Bill Perreault grew up in Santa Monica, California, but now considers Flagstaff, Arizona, home. In fact, he works a two-week-on, two-week-off schedule as a geologist, monitoring the computer screens, and when his two weeks off comes up, he drives the sixteen hours one way to Flagstaff, where he's got a girlfriend.
"Yeah, there's virtually nothing to do here except drink," says Crow. "There ain't even any women to dance with. A gal this wide who's been beaten with an ugly-stick can come up here from Ogden and be a queen."
"In fact, they're fought over," says Perreault.
"You can see a guy pass out on a table with the change to a hundred-dollar bill underneath him," adds Crow. "I've seen it a number of times."
There are few opportunities for peaceful recreation in southwestern Wyoming. There were two separate reward notices on the wall of the Whirl Inn. One was for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anybody breaking up the furniture. The other was for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anybody shooting livestock. "That last one is the one they're real serious about," said one pool player, observantly.
Crime of all sorts has taken quantum leaps. "Five years ago nobody locked their houses," I was told. "Now you damn well better. There was this one gal, did you hear this one? She came in to the hospital for tests and went into Dr. Morris' office just absolutely doubled up, broken up, laughing so hard. It seems that she was expecting, and for one of the tests she needed a urine sample, and the only thing she found around the house was a little half-pint whiskey bottle. And so she filled the whiskey bottle about two-thirds full and it was sitting in the front seat of the car, and she came into the hospital, laughing till she cried. The nurse asked her what in blazes had happened, and when she finally got control of herself enough to explain, it turned out that somebody had stolen the bottle."
The growth is occurring so fast that Evanston needs half a dozen more of everything. Schools, police cars, office buildings, garbage trucks, sewer lines, restaurants, shopping centers, doctors, planners, clerks . . .
Evanston is unusual at this point, however, in that, after a little prodding, Amoco and Chevron started acting like the model corporate citizens they always claimed to be and coughed up a million bucks up front, which was instantly spent on modular school classrooms, police cars, police officers, the hospital, the sheriff's office, a new ambulance, and a mental health clinic. In virtually every other energy boom town, the companies have acted as if they had nothing to do with the problems of growth, and merely pointed out that once production started, the locals would be drowning in tax revenue. Of course, that resulted in every single problem showing up two to four years ahead of the tax money to combat it. But in Evanston's case, the companies even went one step further. Amoco, Chevron, and Champlin Petroleum (a subsidiary of Union Pacific) set up the Overthrust Industrial Association, designed to sort out and struggle with the effects of the boom.
"We are unique," said Amoco's Bob Bizal, in announcing the group's formation, "because we want . . . not to hide the symptoms of growth-related problems, but to solve the underlying causes."
And what gives you pause is that he's right. This is unique. And look where it's got Evanston.
For this is hardly the isolated concern of a small town in Wyoming. Evanston's name could be Craig, Rifle, Crested Butte, Lynndyl, Denver, Calgary, or Fairbanks. They are all in the nation of the Empty Quarter, the nation that, in the coming decades, is facing the most spectacular and profound assault on its ways and means of any of the nine.
In 1980, Exxon issued a study of energy futures. It repeatedly stressed that the study was not meant to be seen as Exxon's plan for what is the Empty Quarter. It was merely Exxon's view of the inevitable,
led to [by] a growing conviction that rapid development of a synthetic fuels industry in [North America] is a critical . . . need.
Known recoverable reserves of coal and oil shale - even after deducting coal to be used conventionally and the energy to be consumed in the process - are capable of providing synthetic fuels equivalent to one trillion barrels of oil.
That's three times as much energy as the U.S. Geological Survey estimates can be provided by the country's rem to the idea of stewardship, taken from scriptural references to man being given dominion over the land, from which he is to bring forth plenty.
Seventeen thousand irrigated acres are going out of production near Lynndyl. The farmers have sold their waters to the Inter-mountain Power Project. They've traded futures.
Northwestern Millard County is the valley of the Sevier River, a valley of jagged mountains to the left, right, front, and back. Dawn and dusk are the prettiest times, when the phrase "purple mountains' majesty" becomes quite real, and in the foreground the golden stalks of barley offer a striking palette.
At other times, when the sun hangs huge, this is gray, brown, unforgiving desert, startling to an Easterner who is used to seeing his planet in its natural state, covered by vegetation. Fat cattle find nourishment in the blue-gray greasewood, sheep grass, buffalo grass, four-wing salt bush, and particularly the Indian rice grass, but the Lord knows how. In the sand hills and the sheer mountain rock, trees can't find a home. The most unnatural color in the Empty Quarter is deep, rich alfalfa green. It's as eye-catching a shock as browns and violets in a polluted industrial river. It's the absolute sign of man. The only evidence of wildlife in this valley is the plastered tufts of fluff on the asphalt road every few hundred feet, testimony that there are an awful lot of slow jack-rabbits in the 150 miles between Salt Lake and Delta.
In Lynndyl, Phill Nielson runs eight hundred head of cattle on fourteen hundred acres, six hundred of them irrigated. His grand-dad came here from Denmark in 1870, one of the very first settlers.
Phill Nielson, a bishop of the Mormon Church, is the man who has been instrumental in organizing local farmers to sell out their water rights to the four mammoth power belchers of IPP, 750-megawatts each.
"The water is directly related to the land," he says. "If you take out a fifth of the water, you take out a fifth of the land. The Sevier River is the most used river in the United States and maybe the world. We start at the top of the Sevier River and water the ground and the water comes down, through, and comes back out. You go down to another dam and you catch the water and rewater. We're not exactly sure how the IPP sale will affect this farm yet, but I sold forty percent of my water, and I'll probably cut forty percent of my operation. Maybe fifty. Six hundred acres to three hundred, three hundred and fifty. It would cut my cattle [herd] in proportion."
Some parts of the Empty Quarter are luckier than others in their water supply. When it comes to the choices of agriculture, industrialization, urbanization, and wilderness, places like the Front Range of Colorado get to pick three out of four. In some parts of Montana, the choice is two out of four. But in Lynndyl, it's one out of four. The sad little trickle called the Sevier "River" can serve either a power plant or agriculture, but not both.
Nielson sees his water sale as a way of getting out of the farmer's chronic problem - debt. But he also sees it as a way to regain his children. "We export about ninety percent of our young people out of this area. Only about ten percent stay. With IPP, we hope to reduce that until we're down only to about forty or fifty percent.
"Six hundred and fifty full-time jobs when it's operating. But we figure with the multiplier effect, that will create three times that. Eighteen hundred jobs. Supermarkets and barber shops and movie-show houses and everything else." Although he can't say what makes him think local kids, rather than boom-town immigrants, will get all those jobs.
He says he has one son-in-law, trained to operate the control board of a power plant, who's living far away. He wants to return to Lynndyl, and this IPP project is the chance. Nielson just doesn't know about the future of another son-in-law, who wanted to farm.
He also doesn't know where California and Japan are going to obtain the alfalfa that came out of this valley at the hefty price of $100 a ton. They're just going to have to get it somewhere else. This last drives Nielson's neighbor, Bernard Jackson, wild.
Jackson has been one of the most vociferous, if lonely, opponents of the sale of water rights to IPP. He almost drags a visitor out to his fields, digging his hand into the crops, talking about the six tons, eight tons of food per acre his desert garden will produce. "What's a higher use than food?" he sputters. "You've got to eat!" But he's sued the bastards and sued the bastards, and he's not willing to admit it to anybody but an outsider, but he's pretty sure he'll lose. Agriculture will lose. The future is going off in a different direction.
"They're making a lot of money!" protests a Utah planner. "It's not as stark as that! Some of the lands they're giving up are marginal. With the money the family makes from the water sales, the kids can do anything they want. They can raise thoroughbred racehorses if they want. There are going to be a lot of millionaires coming off that thing!"
All true. And if, in exchange, they give up a way of life, that's just the way it is. Life can be tough in the Empty Quarter. Lord knows, the riches are tempting.
The Empty Quarter has at least half of North America's coal, with Montana alone having three times the proven reserves of West Virginia, and Wyoming, twice that of Kentucky.
Much of the stuff is near the surface. The Rawhide Mine, near Gillette, has been called "the coal-miner's dream," with seams running 110 feet thick, thinly covered by sand. Coal companies consider that fortunate for several reasons, not the least of which is that fewer people get killed stripping dirt off coal than they do when they're thousands of feet underground, as is common in the Appalachians. Also, the towering draglines that actually do the work are a great deal less expensive than an army of United Mine Workers, who tend to get their lungs clotted with coal dust and then demand pensions.
In fact, the coal companies are very pleased with the union situation, or lack of it, in the western coal fields. Many of the strip-miners aren't organized at all, and others have signed up with such diverse organizations as the Operating Engineers and the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. The United Mine Workers' position was so weak in the West that during the crippling hundred-day national coal strike of 1977, UMW locals in the western states agreed to a separate contract when the strike began, and missed only one day's work.
The best news is that this coal is relatively low in sulfur, the most notorious pollutant associated with coal burning. Sulfur in the air causes rain itself to turn acidic, killing the rivers, lakes, and cropland on which it falls. If United States law, which fails to recognize the distinction between high- and low-sulfur coal, is finally altered, this western coal will have a significant economic advantage over its eastern competition. Eastern coal is impossible to burn cleanly without the use of expensive and temperamental anti-air-pollution devices called scrubbers.
In fact, the main thing wrong with Empty Quarter coal is that it isn't even remotely near anybody who can use it.
But the coal companies are working on this problem. One idea is the unit coal train. A unit coal train has five locomotives and a hundred or more coal cars, each car with a hundred tons of coal in it. A mile or so long, the coal train clips along at maybe fifty miles an hour through every little Empty Quarter town between the mine and wherever it is going, since many U.S. Empty Quarter towns were railroad-oriented.
When these trains are ripping through town, or across your backyard, should you have decided that you liked the looks of the Big Horn Mountains in your front yard, they represent a substantial hazard to your livestock and your children. If the trains slow down, they can be even more troublesome, because a train a mile long does not quickly clear a highway crossing. A house can catch on fire, or a person can get a heart attack, and if the responding fire truck or ambulance finds a unit train between where it is and where it's got to go, there's nothing to do but wait.
Outfits like the Burlington Northern or the Chicago and North Western railroads currently plan to push one of these trains through little two-thousand-population burgs like Lusk, Wyoming, once every half-hour or so, around the clock for the rest of time or until the coal runs out. The local smart money is betting that the coal will last longer.
But that doesn't mean there is no other choice. There are slurry pipelines. Slurry pipelines take millions of gallons of the water that is so scarce in this part of the world, load it up with as much crushed coal as it will take and still stay liquid, stuff this mixture into a long tube, and pump it where it's going. If that should be Arkansas, for example, you may not have brought coals to Newcastle, but you have introduced a great deal of dirty water to a place that, inasmuch as it borders on the Mississippi River, does not consider the commodity a novelty.
Incidentally, railroad companies view slurry companies as competition. Therefore, they tend to frown on slurry companies who want right of way over or under their tracks, which is why you shouldn't hold your breath for the arrival of pipelines. Okay, there's got to be a better way, right? What about all this synfuel stuff. The Germans in World War II made gasoline from coal. What's wrong with that? Isn't the country's stated goal the production of over a million barrels a day of oil equivalents from coal by 1990?
Yes, well, that's true. The only hitch is that synfuels from coal cost about twice what Saudi sweet does, and there's a question about that gap closing in the near future, since coal conversion is a high-technology-dependent process, and technology is inflation-ridden. Thus, as long as the price of oil goes up, the price of making a replacement for oil goes up. It will be a while before coal-dependent synfuels can compete, unaided by Moral Equivalent of War (MEOW) grants.
Furthermore, there are enormous medical questions that surround coal gasification. Tar and ash are inevitable by-products of all coal conversion. Coal tar is one of the most potent cancer-causing substances known to man. It's so virulent that in the early days of cancer research, coal tar was exactly what they spread all over the white mice, knowing that if this didn't kill off the little buggers, nothing would. No one has even begun to grapple with the question of how the waste from a million-barrel-a-day coal-conversion industry could be kept out of the environment in perpetuity.
And, of course, there's the ever-present problem of water. A synthetic fuel plant requires as much as ten billion gallons of water a year, and current plans are for a dozen or more plants in the valleys of the Yellowstone, Big Horn, Tongue, and Powder rivers in the coal-rich eastern plains of Montana and Wyoming.
If all the water goes to synfuels, ranching may disappear. Ranching has been the bedrock of this land for a century. It's the very symbol of the West. But, then, no one is completely sure that this fragile, arid land can be reclaimed well enough to support cattle economically after it has felt the bite of the strip-miner. So the question of whether there will be enough water to sustain this way of life may be moot.
All right, forget about exporting the coal or the coal products. Why not burn the coal right where it is, and export the electricity? Well, this gets you back to the Lynndyl situation and the questions it raises about water and air. But the future of this region is not completely tied to coal. The Empty Quarter is also richer in oil shale than the Middle East is in crude. In the seventeen-thousand-square-mile area at the intersection of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, for example, lie the world's largest known deposits of shale, containing about six hundred billion barrels of oil. If you take this area - more than twice the size of Massachusetts, with deposits as much as fifteen hundred feet thick - and every day mine the equivalent of the dirt moved to dig the Panama Canal, crush it in a large still, and then refine it, you'd have enough gasoline to last you almost a century.
What's more, this promises to be the cheapest alternative to Arab oil, only a few dollars a barrel more expensive than the highest priced stuff from Iraq.
Of course, oil-shale processing requires so much water that it may have to be piped in from Canada or the East at a dollar or two a barrel.
But more interesting are the questions raised about what to do with the trillion tons of tailings that would be left behind after the oil was separated from the shale. That's literally mountains of waste. Apart from what it would do to the scenery, when it is hit by rain, it would leach off minerals, from boron to molybdenum, into the Colorado River, which is already so saline that by the time it hits Arizona, it can poison farmland. Also released into this river, which provides the drinking water for millions, would be as-yet undetermined quantities of petroleum-related carcinogens like benzo(a)pyrene (BAP).
Furthermore, the process gives off lots of sulfur, the substance that produces the acid rain. One of the more thought-provoking decisions that will have to be considered concerning oil shale is how high the smokestacks associated with the process should be. The higher they are, the farther up into the atmosphere pollutants are released. The farther up they start, the farther downwind they come down. Downwind from the Empty Quarter is the Breadbasket.
"If the synfuels program becomes operative," notes historian K. Ross Toole, "the effect on the lush farmlands to the east is very frightening to contemplate." But, then again, there's the question of what happens when the wind hits the tailings, much less where the wind takes the pollutants. The dust from the tires of trucks working on these projects has occasionally been so bad that the Environmental Protection Agency has had to shut down operations temporarily because of the choking conditions. No one knows how much dust could come off a trillion-ton mountain of oil-shale tailings.
Many hundred miles north of Rifle, Craig, and the other Colorado towns at the center of the oil-shale concerns is Fort McMurray, Alberta. Once, Fort McMurray was the last outpost of civilization, where the road ended and trappers and traders began to make their way by boat up the Athabasca River through connecting lakes and waterways all the way to the Great Slave Lake. Now, Fort McMurray is the center of yet another source of Empty Quarter riches: tar sands. Again, there's more oil up here than there is in the Persian Gulf. In Alberta, it has actually been turned into synthetic fuel since 1978. But, again, a few factors give one pause. Up here, the good news is that you don't have to worry about screwing up farmers and ranchers, because you're north of where agriculture and stock-raising are even a marginal way of life. The bad news is working with an asphaltlike substance mixed with grit at temperatures that hover around 40 below for weeks. At Fort McMurray, the stuff is strip-mined, and reclaiming the land in a climate with a growing season of twelve weeks or less is a neat trick. Syncrude, the company running the operation, has set aside three cents per barrel for the job.
Meanwhile, this town of seven hundred people living close to the land, with only occasional contact with the outside world, has overnight become a city of twenty-seven thousand, with hotels, a municipal pool, three indoor skating rinks, a golf course, a Sears, a Safeway, movies, bowling alleys, regularly scheduled commercial airline service, banks, inflation, pollution, crime, juvenile delinquency, drugs, and a Kentucky Fried Chicken stand. The Good Fish Indians have gone into the cleaning business. Everybody's making a lot of money.
What else? Well, there's heavy oil. One famed energy writer likes to characterize it as the chocolate mousse of petroleum. It's about as easy to pump.
There's uranium. The Empty Quarter has very nearly all of North America's uranium. Coincidentally, it has more than its share of radiation-related problems. The Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, which builds "triggers" for hydrogen bombs, is located right on the edge of the most heavily populated area in the region - Denver. There are those who think this unwise, and they periodically gather together in groups of several thousand, storm the gates, mix it up with the local constabulary, and. get themselves arrested. They then try to politicize their trials, and the judge tries to stop them, and this goes round and round.
There's St. George, Utah, which is just downwind from the Nevada nuclear bomb test site. Everyone's appalled at the number of cancer deaths there, and equally upset by the way the federal government repeatedly denied that there was a connection between the bombs and the deaths, although they knew damn well that it was so.
In the desert of central Washington state, there is the Hanford nuclear reactor and disposal site. The facilities are central to the area's economy, but even the locals get upset when sloppy procedures, occasionally associated with the way nuclear waste is handled as it is trucked long distances across the Empty Quarter, are discovered.
If you prefer your radiation to come directly from the sun, the Empty Quarter has significant solar potential - and geothermal, too. In fact, the federal government likes Empty Quarter exotic energy so much that it wants to use solar and geothermal exclusively to run one of the most deadly weapons systems the world has ever seen - the MX missile system. No, they don't want solar and geothermal to fire the missiles. They want solar and geothermal to run the railroad on which the missiles will ride all up and down Nevada and Utah.
Why, you may ask, does the Pentagon want missiles on railroads? Well, it seems that the MX is the Pentagon's idea of the old shell game. They want each missile to have several widely separated launch sites, and a railroad to drag it from one site to another. The theory is that with such a system, the Soviets will never know which launch site contains a missile and which is empty, and thus won't know which one to attack.
This is an ambitious concept. In fact, it's the largest public works project in the history of man, dwarfing the Pyramids. Whenever a North American planner thinks in terms like these, it's almost inevitable that this thinking will sooner or later center on the Empty Quarter. There is no chance, for example, that such a project would ever be considered for New Jersey. It seems impossible enough to get Interstate 95 completed through New Jersey, let alone an MX missile program. So there you are, five hundred empty miles of Utah and Nevada - Salt Lake to Reno (covering a distance equal to that from Buffalo to Chicago). But Nevada and Utah won't mind. If thev do, who cares? It's not that they have many votes in the House of Representatives.
But suppose they were to make a stink? Suppose that the Empty Quarter were to point out that this large a construction project would demand unheard-of amounts of water that should be used some other way? Suppose it were to point to the dust and the pollution? Suppose it were to observe that the construction jobs would be short-lived, going largely to outsiders, like those which were created by the Alaska pipeline? Suppose it were to object to the idea that when these military installations were finished, they would be manned by Alabama crackers with a hitch in the Army, rather than locals? Suppose, for that matter, that it questioned the wisdom of causing every pointy-nosed missile on the Soviet side to be turned toward the vicinity of Salt Lake City?
Well, the Pentagon figures, you'd just have to sweeten the pot. That's where geothermal and solar come in. Not only are they secure energy sources; they're attractive ones. Utah and Nevada are being told that they will be the hotbeds of development of these razzle-dazzle industries. It is being put as if they will be the new Silicon Valley.
Interestingly, there is some local opposition to the MX. It comes from people who are afraid that if the missile system is constructed, the land for hundreds of miles around it will be locked up in a military reservation. If that were to happen, they point out, it will never be possible to exploit the alumina reserves.
The alumina reserves could be chewed up and spit out to produce aluminum. In fact, they could close the circle for Utah, catapulting it into the advanced, industrial world. Remember the coal-fired electrical plant in Lynndyl? Well, if you figure things right, you could take the power from that plant, and, instead of feeding it to L.A., you could use it to process the alumina reserves of Utah into aluminum. And if you did that, you could take this light, versatile metal, which has such great potential in the twenty-first century, and make it the cornerstone of a bright, job-rich, industrialized land, producing airplanes and automobiles. You could avoid the mistakes that the people who managed the gold rush in Colorado of the mid- 1800s made. You could avoid the mistakes that the people who ran the copper rush in Butte, Montana, in the early part of this century made. You could avoid the mistakes the people who ran the molybdenum mines quite recently made. Theoretically.
Westerners [said one very thoughtful and sincere observer], don't go along with a lot of this living in harmony with the elements. That was a notion that the Indians had. The earth lived. It was a being. Gouging it hurt. Beautiful Indian poetry.
There's a notion here that the resources were made to be developed, are to be developed. That's part of our optimism. One thing that disturbs me about the East is the notion that they've lost their nerve. They've lost their confidence. You don't have that out here. People are aggressive about the land. I don't believe they want to spoil it; that wouldn't be palatable public policy. But by the same token, they're not offended if a power plant goes up. What they can be outraged by are some incredibly silly regulations about visibility requirements - environmentalists' pipe dreams about vistas.
I see us having a pretty shiny region. There's just an optimism out here, that you can change things, that you can fashion and shape the way things are going. We're not pushed around by forces. We recognize that they are there, but you can screw it up, or you can catch the wave.
In the course of writing this volume, I've tried to stay fair. I've tried to let the voices of the North American people come through. But the fact is that I've spent my adult years in the Foundry, and I must, in all candor, admit that that affected my perceptions of the Empty Quarter. I couldn't help myself. I found myself asking folk, again and again: Have you ever been to Cleveland, South Bend, Trenton? Have you ever seen what an industrialized nation can look like? Are you sure you know what you're doing? 1 couldn't get over the enthusiasm I met in this, the land of the proverbial wide-open spaces, for coal mines and steel mills and boom towns. Is it that this land is so big that its inhabitants just flat can't believe that it can be seriously altered by the works of man? Could it be they're right?
Even Alan Graban, the Wyoming banker whose professed motivations are "avarice and greed," sensed what I was saying.
I guess the toughest thing is the rancher, comes in to buy his groceries. Got a nice car, a zillion acres, the mineral rights under it. Along comes Milt [the drilling foreman] and a bunch of his guys and says gee whiz, we'll give you a hundred bucks an acre if you let us drill and it takes him about a month to think about it because goddamn, this is ranching country and you're not going to come in and mess it up.
But they come in and drill a few wells, maybe three miles out of town, one on each side of the house, and one flows seven million cubic feet of gas a day, and the other flows five hundred barrels, and he's a millionaire overnight.
And then he comes in with momma and he sits down with his banker and hands you a check for a hundred and fifty-eight thousand dollars for the first month's royalties. And he hasn't the foggiest notion what to do. We're set up where we take them down to Arthur Andersen, who has an expert in oil depletion and oil accounting; we take them bodily down there and they are most happy and this guy is a tremendous person and he introduces them to the tax ramifications and what have you and turns them over from that point to the First Security Bank and Trust so that they can set up living trusts and that sort of thing and maybe protect . . . Well hell, they've got more money now than they'll ever need, but then he comes in with the next month's check and he sits down and smiles and says, "This is the first time in my life that I can afford to be a rancher.'
The nice thing is that the people who are getting the royalties are the old-timers who struggled and lived here all their lives. But the thing that scares me is that they don't have the knowledge. You see, they got the ranch from their father, and their father from their grandfather, and now the father gives it to the son. The only difference is that there's a thousand acres, and when they transferred it from grandpa to their father at a buck an acre, it was nothing.
There's no way you're going to tell Internal Revenue that with two producing oil wells on both sides of your house that that's worth a dollar an acre. Or there's a housing development on three sides, or a mobile-home court. With the land selling for five thousand dollars an acre.
All of a sudden, the guy's land is worth five million dollars. And the guy dies and Uncle Sam says, okay, in the next six months now we need a check for three quarters of a million dollars, and you tell them that and they don't believe you. The kids say, but Dad! God! Make your will! Get your trust set up! Protect Mom! What if you pass away? She's got to sell half the ranch just to settle your estate tax! Well, I'll think about it, he says. You know, kids don't know anything. They're dumb. Every one of them, as far as tile old man is concerned. Dumbest things that ever walked on legs. Useless as tits on a boar. It's just a whole other world for them.
I hope we're not making these people look like idiots. Some of them are very smart. Very, very clever. They're great at ranching. It's Evanstonitis, somebody called it. It's a feeling that they have been here, there's no need to go anywhere else, they've raised their family, they've retired here, they've enjoyed it, and why has all this happened?
I mentioned my concerns to Jerry Mallett, of the American Wilderness Alliance in Denver. You're obviously optimistic about the future of the wilderness, I said. Why? Where's the constituency for saving the land?
Well, he explained, there are ranchers out here who are eager to keep the federal lands surrounding their spreads from roads and development. It will keep the price of land down and save their way of life. One shouldn't underestimate the number of elk hunters either, he said. There are far more applications for hunting licenses than there are "harvestable" animals, and no politician in his right mind wants to cross them, and they are numerous. But, he candidly admitted, the bottom line is the Easterners, and the people hugging the West Coast. They're the ones who have seen what can be done and has been done to the land around them. The Wilderness Alliance is in fat city, he suggested. As long as the majority of the continent's votes are in the places that have been most screwed up, the wilds have a fighting chance.
But the other thing I wondered about were the Latter-Day Saints. The Saints are the fastest-growing church in North America. Their organizational abilities are formidable. When floods hit Idaho, semi-tractor-trailers loaded with relief supplies were rolling out of Temple Square in Salt Lake before the Red Cross had received the first phone call from national headquarters. It's a wealthy church. Tithing 10 percent of income is still a highly respected tradition. It actively proselytizes, and it takes care of its own.
And if one were to map the stiffest concentration of Saints in North America, from Nevada to Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Alberta, and set it next to a map of the most intensively assaulted energy portions of the West, those two maps would be identical.
Karl Snow is a Utah state senator and a professor at Brigham Young University. Named after the man who brought the Mormons west, BYU, in Provo, is right at the base of the towering Wasatch Range, with sheer cliffs pushing straight out of the backyards of some dorms. Speaking of straight, whatever you've heard about BYU is probably true. Coca-Cola is not sold on campus, because of its caffeine content, which makes it strong drink. I watched a colleague reach for a cigarette behind closed doors in the office of a political science professor. The professor, who is Mormon but not overly devout, blanched. He didn't himself mind the reporter smoking, he said, but somebody might smell it, and "eyebrows would be raised," as he put it. (Jeans are not acceptable dress for women going to class. So dresses are the order of the day. Thank the Lord that fashion, as I write this, favors longer hemlines. When I finished my set of interviews at BYU, I went out of my way to find the nearest place to get a beer. I wasn't all that thirsty. I just felt an overpowering need to sin. There may be another campus in North America where the nearest bar is three miles away, and is very lonely, at that; but if there is, I don't know where. But I digress.)
Karl Snow is a thoughtful, liberal Republican, not the most common breed in the Empty Quarter.
We've worked for a long time to shift from dependency on agriculture. People think of us as a rural state, which we are not. We are highly urbanized. But you're right. There's a real shift going on. At the outset, Brigham got here and he wanted the people to be farmers. He didn't want too much preoccupation with mining. He wanted to keep the people in cohesively knit groups. Miners were the outsiders, the Gentiles, the explorers. We can't say he kept them from mining entirely, because he sent a mission to southern Utah to mine iron. The Iron County Mission. But that was in the direction of self-sufficiency.
I'd like to think it's not naive, but I'm not so sure we know exactly what we're doing, either. Although I do believe that the development of our resources, particularly coal, and maybe oil shale and those kinds of things, are deliberate. Those are clear-cut statements of public policy, not only in speeches, but in legislation that would facilitate and back up that kind of move. We've fought to bring industry in here for at least twenty-five years.
Yes, we've been concerned with what kind of industry. But that goes more to the concern over outsiders coming in. We have a project over on the mountain called Four Seasons. There's been more litigation over that project in the forest over there than anything else that's gone on in the state of Utah. It's a ski resort. And Provoans are concerned about the change in life style that it will bring. Because you get a ski resort out here and it's a lot different from a Brigham Young University. I mean, ther
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