The East African country of Tanganyika in 1960 was something of a backwater of the British Empire in which the traditional character of wild Africa still held pride of place. Concurrently however, the winds of political change were, not least in the country's urban centres, promoting an ever-accelerating headlong rush towards a state of national independence or uhuru. It was against a backdrop of transition between the "old" and the new "Africa" that a nation-wide campaign of exploration aimed at discovering deposits of diamonds was carried out in Tanganyika under the auspices of the country's fabled diamond producer, Williamson Diamonds Limited. The campaign involved the mobilisation of thousands of African workers and a few hundred specially engaged white supervisors into a nation-wide network of field camps, many of them set up in remote regions of trackless bush where the only rules were subject to vagaries of climate, the incidence of tsetse flies and the rights of passage of prolific numbers of big game. The white supervisors were as raw in matters pertaining to bush craft as they were wet behind the ears. Their complement contained more than its fair share of misfits, cowboys, adventurers, opportunists and gung-ho celebrants. This book tells their story as it was seen through the eyes of one among them who wouldn't have missed a minute of the experience. The like of such a campaign will never be seen again.

Relating the story of a tiny town pitted against a strong corporation, this account strives to voice the concerns of local communities when they come into conflict with corporate profits. With the help of Erin Brockovich, the small town of Yarloop in Western Australia is fighting its powerful neighbor, Alcoa World Alumina. Their struggle is over social, health, and environmental concerns surrounding Alcoa's Wagerup alumina refinery. The stories told here are shared by communities around the world amidst ongoing industrialization and resultant collisions between social and economic interests. Depicting life under corporate influence, this study explicitly illustrates that profits matter--but not more than people and place.

Beginning on Valentine's Day, 1981, when twelve-year-old Todd Domboski plunged through the earth in his grandmother's backyard in Centralia, Pennsylvania, The Day the Earth Caved In is an unprecedented and riveting account of the nation's worst mine fire. In astonishing detail, award-winning journalist Joan Quigley, the granddaughter of Centralia miners, ushers readers into the dramatic world of the underground blaze. Drawing on interviews with key participants and exclusive new research, Quigley paints unforgettable portraits of Centralia and its residents, from Tom Larkin, the short-order cook and ex-hippie who rallied the activists, to Helen Womer, the bank teller who galvanized the opposition, denying the fire's existence even as toxic fumes invaded her home. Like Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action, The Day the Earth Caved In is a seminal investigation" "of individual rights, corporate privilege, and governmental indifference to the powerless.

As early as the eighteenth century, Spanish explorers left place-names, lost mines, and legends scattered throughout Colorado's San Juan Mountains. In 1869 and the early 1870s the legends lured hopeful prospectors to the area, ushering in its greatest mining era and transforming it into one of the country's most celebrated mining districts. Faced with a boom-bust economy, unpredictable weather, and the risk of violent death, mining camps and towns nevertheless struggled to institute local governments that would address issues such as sanitation, the maintenance of schools, and the enforcement of law and order.
As the economic boom headed toward its inevitable decline, towns like Silverton, Ouray, Telluride, Creede, Lake City, and Rico found themselves seeking visitors and tourists who wanted to experience the historical West and its accompanying folklore and legend. The pioneers and mining communities were supplanted in that rugged and unforgiving terrain. In this history of the San Juan mining region, Duane Smith's text and John Ninnemann's photographs offer a glimpse into the lives of towns that sprang up in remote canyons and mountain plateaus in southwestern Colorado and the settlers who attempted to recreate the eastern communities they had left behind.

The Dreiser Committee, including writers Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and Sherwood Anderson, investigated the desperate situation of striking Kentucky miners in November 1931. When the Communist-led National Miners Union competed against the more conservative United Mine Workers of America for greater union membership, class resentment turned to warfare. Harlan Miners Speak, originally published in 1932, is an invaluable record that illustrates the living and working conditions of the miners during the 1930s. This edition of Harlan Miners Speak, with a new introduction by noted historian John C. Hennen, offers readers an in-depth look at a pivotal crisis in the complex history of this controversial form of energy production.

In 1930, almost 13,000 African Americans worked in the coal mines around Birmingham, Alabama. They made up 53 percent of the mining workforce and some 60 percent of their union's local membership. At the close of the twentieth century, only about 15 percent of Birmingham's miners were black, and the entire mining workforce had been sharply reduced. Robert H. Woodrum offers a challenging interpretation of why this dramatic decline occurred and why it happened during an era of strong union presence in the Alabama coalfields. Drawing on union, company, and government records as well as interviews with coal miners, Woodrum examines the complex connections between racial ideology and technological and economic change. Extending the chronological scope of previous studies of race, work, and unionization in the Birmingham coalfields, Woodrum covers the New Deal, World War II, the postwar era, the 1970s expansion of coalfield employment, and contemporary trends toward globalization. The United Mine Workers of America's efforts to bridge the color line in places like Birmingham should not be underestimated, says Woodrum. Facing pressure from the wider world of segregationist Alabama, however, union leadership ultimately backed off the UMWA's historic commitment to the rights of its black members. Woodrum discusses the role of state UMWA president William Mitch in this process and describes Birmingham's unique economic circumstances as an essentially Rust Belt city within the burgeoning Sun Belt South. This is a nuanced exploration of how, despite their central role in bringing the UMWA back to Alabama in the early 1930s, black miners remained vulnerable to the economic and technological changes that transformed the coal industry after World War II.

Do, Die, or Get Along weaves together voices of twenty-six people who have intimate connections to two neighboring towns in the southwestern Virginia coal country. Filled with evidence of a new kind of local outlook on the widespread challenge of small community survival, the book tells how a confrontational ""do-or-die"" past has given way to a ""get-along"" present built on coalition and guarded hope. St. Paul and Dante are six miles apart; measured in other ways, the distance can be greater. Dante, for decades a company town controlled at all levels by the mine owners, has only a recent history of civic initiative. In St. Paul, which arose at a railroad junction, public debate, entrepreneurship, and education found a more receptive home. The speakers are men and women, wealthy and poor, black and white, old-timers and newcomers. Their concerns and interests range widely, including the battle over strip mining, efforts to control flooding, the 1989-90 Pittston strike, the nationally acclaimed Wetlands Estonoa Project, and the grassroots revitalization of both towns led by the St. Paul Tomorrow and Dante Lives On organizations. Their talk of the past often invokes an ethos, rooted in the hand-to-mouth pioneer era, of short-term gain. Just as frequently, however, talk turns to more recent times, when community leaders, corporations, unions, the federal government, and environmental groups have begun to seek accord based on what will be best, in the long run, for the towns. The story of Dante and St. Paul, Crow writes, ""gives twenty-first-century meaning to the idea of the good fight."" This is an absorbing account of persistence, resourcefulness, and eclectic redefinition of success and community revival, with ramifications well beyond Appalachia.

The Navajo Nation covers a vast stretch of northeastern Arizona and parts of New Mexico and Utah. The area is also home to more than one thousand abandoned uranium mines and four former uranium mills, a legacy of the U.S. nuclear program.

In the early 1940s the Navajo Nation was in the early stages of economic development, recovering from the devastating stock reduction period of 1930. Navajo men sought work away from the reservation on railroads and farm work in Phoenix and California. Then came the nuclear age and uranium was discovered on the reservation. Work became available and young Navajo men grabbed the jobs in the uranium mines.

The federal government and the mining companies knew of the hazards of uranium mining; however, the miners were never informed. They had to find out about the danger on their own. When they went to western doctors, they were diagnosed with lung cancer and were simply told they were dying.

A team of Navajo people and supportive whites began the Navajo Uranium Miner Oral History and Photography Project from which this book arose. That project team, based at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, recruited the speakers who told their stories, which are reproduced here. There are also narrative chapters that assess the experiences of the Navajo people from diverse perspectives (history, psychology, culture, advocacy, and policy). While the points of view taken are similar, there is a range of perspectives as to what would constitute justice.

REMEMBRANCE TO AVOID AN UNWANTED FATE

by Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley, Jr.

Sixty years ago, the United States turned to the tiny atom to unleash the most destructive force known to mankindand bring an end to World War II. Ironically, the uranium used to create the most technologically advanced weapon ever invented came from the land of the most traditional indigenous people of North America, and was dug from the earth with picks and shovels.

Nuclear weapons transformed the United States into the greatest military force the world has ever known, and the term "Super Power" was coined. Lost in the history of this era is the story of the people -- the Din -- who pulled uranium out of the ground by hand, who spoke and continue to speak an ancient tongue, and who pray with sacred corn pollen at dawn for good things for their families. By the thousands, these were, and remain, the forgotten victims of America's Cold War that uranium spawned.

"The Navajo People and Uranium Mining" is the documented history of how these Navajo people lived, how they worked and now, sadly, how they died waiting for compassionate federal compensation for laboring in the most hazardous conditions imaginable, and which were known at the time yet concealed from them. These Navajo miners and their families became, in essence, expendable people.

Today, the Navajo Nation, with the help of law firms, environmental groups, writers, photographers and historians, is doing all it can to correct this horrendous wrong done to Navajo uranium miners, their families and their descendents. This excellent book allows the people who lived this to tell their story in their own words.

Genocide. There is no other word for what happened to Navajo uranium miners. The era of uranium mining on Navajoland was genocidal because the hazards of cancer and respiratory disease were known to doctors and federalofficials, and yet they allowed Navajos to be exposed to deadly radiation to see what would happen to them. As a result, radiation exposure has cost the Navajo Nation the accumulated wisdom, knowledge, stories, songs and ceremonies -- to say nothing of the lives -- of hundreds of our people. Now, aged Navajo uranium miners and their families continue to fight the Cold War in their doctors' offices as they try to understand how the invisible killer of radiation exposure left them with many forms of cancer and other illnesses decades after leaving the uranium mines. No one ever told them that mining uranium would steal their health and cripple their lives when they became grandparents. But it did. They continue to leave us to this day only because they were the ones who answered the call.

Because of this painful history, in 2005 the Navajo Nation passed the Din Natural Resources Protection Act. This law prohibits uranium mining and processing in all its forms on Navajoland. It protects our land and our water from being contaminated as it was in the past. Despite our sovereignty and our will, there are those today who still seek to weaken our resolve in order to gain access to the uranium under our land just to enrich themselves. Only the telling of this story, as "The Navajo People and Uranium Mining" does so excellently, can protect us from this unwanted fate and a repeat of one of the more sorrowful periods of the Navajo Nation's history.

The global spread of transnational mining investment, which has been taking place since the 1990s, has led to often volatile conflicts with local communities. This book examines the regulation of these conflicts through national, transnational and local legal processes. In doing so, it examines how legal authority is being redistributed among public and private actors, as well as national and transnational actors, as a result of globalizing forces. The book presents a case study concerning the negotiation of land transfer and resettlement between a transnational mining enterprise and indigenous peasants in the Andes of Peru. The case study is used to explore the intensely local dynamics involved in negotiations between corporate and community representatives and the role played by legal ordering in these relations. In particular, the book examines the operation of a transnational legal regime managed by the World Bank to remedy the social and environmental impacts of projects which receive Bank assistance. The book explores the nature and character of the World Bank regime and the multiple consequences of this projection of transnational law into a local dispute.

Based on a PhD thesis, with a focus on Sierra Leone, this book explores the conflicts between pursuing mining activities to foster economic development and protecting the environment in which such activities take place. This study presents sustainable development as valuable recipe, by which mining ventures could be pursued as an economic imperative (to meet the needs of present and future generations), while protecting the environment and its components in the pursuit of such developments. The study shows that despite the definitional questions, sustainable development has direct and primary relevance for environmental protection in the economic exploitation of natural resources. It identifies a legal character in the concept beyond legislative processes, and a flexibility in its principles that allows for their interpretation within legal rules to enhance environmental protection at the national level. It also illustrates the link between effective implementation and ensuring sustainable mining.

Eight leading authorities from around the world have collaborated to produce this volume which provides a thorough treatment of mineral royalties. Intended as a reference for anyone interested in mineral sector taxation, it examines the many facets of royalties ranging from their justification, to the types of royalties used historically and presently. It analyzes royalty policy from the viewpoints of various stakeholders and indicates the strengths and weaknesses of different royalty types. Key practical issues such as tax administration, revenue distribution, transparency and reporting are covered. A CD-ROM, included with the book, contains an extensive appendix of actual royalty legislation from over forty nations.

Since prehistoric times, salt has been an important commodity for mankind, essential for the preservation of such foods as meat, fish and dairy products, and a necessary ingredient for breadmaking. It is also widely used in various industrial processes such as tanning and in the chemical industry. Salt can be obtained by evaporation from sea water or inland from brine springs, and following the discovery of rock salt deposits it has also been mined. This book explains the various processes by which salt is obtained and traces the history of the industry in Britain.

Introduction to Gold Prospecting and Fossicking

This volume gives a vital and unique insight into the effects of mining and other forms of resource extraction upon the indigenous peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea. Based on extensive fieldwork, it offers a comparative focus on indigenous cosmologies and their articulation or disjunction with the forces of 'development'. A central dimension of contrast is that Australia as a 'settled' continent has had wholesale dispossession of Aboriginal land, while in Papua New Guinea more than 95% of the land surface remains unalienated from customary ownership. Less obviously, there are also important similarities owing to: -a shared form of land title in which the state retains ownership of underground resources; -the manner in which Western law has been used in both countries to define and codify customary land tenure; -an emphasis on the reproductive imagery of minerals, petroleum and extraction processes employed by Aborigines and Papua New Guineans; -and some surprising parallels in the ways that social identities on either side of the Arafura Sea have traditionally been grounded in landscape These studies are essential reading for all scholars involved in assessing the effects of resource extraction in Third World and Fourth World settings. They contribute penetrating studies of the forms of indigenous socio-cultural response to multinational companies and Western forms of governance and law. ADVANCE PRAISE 'The writing is new and interesting. The essays mark out new ideas in seemingly effortless abundance. . . In sum - buy it, read it, I think you'll agree that its one of the really interesting books of the year.' Deborah Rose, Senior Fellow, Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, ANU. Alan Rumsey is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and James Weiner a Visiting Fellow in the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program, both in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.

Surface coal mining has had a dramatic impact on the Appalachian economy and ecology since World War II, exacerbating the region's chronic unemployment and destroying much of its natural environment. Here, Chad Montrie examines the twentieth-century movement to outlaw surface mining in Appalachia, tracing popular opposition to the industry from its inception through the growth of a militant movement that engaged in acts of civil disobedience and industrial sabotage. Both comprehensive and comparative, "To Save the Land and People" chronicles the story of surface mining opposition in the whole region, from Pennsylvania to Alabama.

Though many accounts of environmental activism focus on middle-class suburbanites and emphasize national events, the campaign to abolish strip mining was primarily a movement of farmers and working people, originating at the local and state levels. Its history underscores the significant role of common people and grassroots efforts in the American environmental movement. This book also contributes to a long-running debate about American values by revealing how veneration for small, private properties has shaped the political consciousness of strip mining opponents.

The men who worked British Columbia's mines have passed into history. Coal Dust In My Blood is a moving account of one coal miner's life, in plain, evocative language. But this book is much more than a personal memoir. Bill Johnstone's mining career spanned several decades and he worked in a wide variety of positions. His broad insights reveal important aspects of the history of coal mining in BC.

'Many British Columbians could take a chapter from this book and call it their own story. Immigration, the depression years, or most significantly, the life in the mines were experienced by many residents of this province.' - Robert D. Turner, from the Foreword

Until World War II, the Four Corners Region--where New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona meet--was a collection of isolated rural towns. In the postwar baby boom era, however, small communities like Farmington, New Mexico, became bustling municipalities with rapidly expanding economies. In "Quest for the Golden Circle," Arthur Gomez traces the development of the Four Corners' two industries, mining and tourism, to discover how each contributed to the economic and urban transformation of this region during the 1950s and 1960s.

Focusing on four cities--Durango, Colorado; Moab, Utah; Flagstaff, Arizona; and Farmington, New Mexico--Gomez chronicles how these towns played key roles in the West's dramatic postwar expansion. Cities such as Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tucson, El Paso, and Salt Lake City all grew through use of the abundant petroleum, uranium, natural gas, timber, and other natural resources extracted from the Four Corners region.

But the energy boom in these towns was not to last. With the arrival of foreign oil bringing economic growth to a halt in the early 1970s, town leaders turned again to the land to stimulate their economy. This time, the resource was a seemingly inexhaustible one-tourism. Gmez examines how business-minded citizens marketed the area's scenic wonders and established the entire region as a tourist destination. Their efforts were further assisted by the selection of stunning federal lands--Mesa Verde, Grand Canyon, and Arches National Parks--as treasures protected and promoted by the National Park Service.

Both mining and tourism, however, were beset by complex new problems and issues. Extensive highways, for instance, were planned to bisect a Navajo reservation. As Gmez illustrates, the growing cities in the Four Corners region felt tremendous competing pressures between outside business powers and local needs as their extractive economy boomed and busted and as they then struggled to attract tourism dollars. In addition, he highlights the prominent roles played by federal agencies like the Atomic Energy Commission and the National Park Service in shaping regional destiny.

An outstanding analysis of the complexities of postwar development, "Quest for the Golden Circle" successfully illuminates the history of one region within the larger story of the modern American West.

The boom era began with the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and extended over 150 years to include the rushes in the Pikes Peak region in Colorado, the Black Hills of South Dakota, Alder Gulch in Montana, and the Yukon. PRECIOUS DUST humanizes the mad rush to these remote places. 18 photos. 5 maps. Index.

Whether you're an experienced evaluator of mineral projects, a student, or a decision maker who is not a practitioner but must use evaluation results, this new book is an essential reference for your bookshelf. Designed to complement traditional engineering texts, this book emphasizes the concepts of mineral project evaluation rather than computational details. It describes various economic evaluation techniques typically employed (including conventional cost analysis, discounted cash flow, and option analysis), their uses, and their relationships with geological, technological, and financial evaluations. Also discussed are the strengths and weaknesses of commonly practiced evaluation methods.

This book explains the practical difficulties in conducting an analysis and correctly interpreting the results, as well as the use of alternative techniques. Because many existing texts do not adequately discuss the meanings and application of merit measures, such as net present value (NPV) or internal rate of return (IRR), this book represents an exciting departure from standard reference tools. Contents include: why NPV and IRR are both valid and useful merit measuresthe shortcomings of conventional NPV and IRR analysisthe dangers of scenario analysiswhy conventional incremental analysis is not needed to correctly calculate IRRwhy the desire to achieve NPV-consistent IRR is misleadinghow competitive cost analysis is conducted and usedwhy option pricing is an important addition to the evaluation process.

When used correctly, evaluation methods are powerful tools to help us understand the economics of investment projects. Don't miss out on this new source. Contains glossary and full index.

In 1897 the Berwind-White Coal Mining Company founded Windber as a company town for its miners in the bituminous coal country of Pennsylvania. The Miners of Windber chronicles the coming of unionization to Windber, from the 1890s, when thousands of new immigrants flooded Pennsylvania in search of work, through the New Deal era of the 1930s, when the miners' rights to organize, join the United Mine Workers of America, and bargain collectively were recognized after years of bitter struggle.

Mildred Allen Beik, a Windber native whose father entered the coal mines at age eleven in 1914, explores the struggle of miners and their families against the company, whose repressive policies encroached on every part of their lives. That Windber's population represented twenty-five different nationalities, including Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Italians, and Carpatho-Russians, was a potential obstacle to the solidarity of miners. Beik, however, shows how the immigrants overcame ethnic fragmentation by banding together as a class to unionize the mines. Work, family, church, fraternal societies, and civic institutions all proved critical as men and women alike adapted to new working conditions and to a new culture. Circumstance, if not principle, forced miners to embrace cultural pluralism in their fight for greater democracy, reforms of capitalism, and an inclusive, working-class, definition of what it meant to be an American.

Beik draws on a wide variety of sources, including oral histories gathered from thirty-five of the oldest living immigrants in Windber, foreign-language newspapers, fraternal society collections, church manuscripts, public documents, union records, and census materials. The struggles of Windber's diverse working class undeniably mirror the efforts of working people everywhere to democratize the undemocratic America they knew. Their history suggests some of the possibilities and limitations, strengths and weaknesses, of worker protest in the early twentieth century.

Few people in America today live with the dangers and deprivations that Appalachian coal mining families experience. But to the eighteen West Virginia women Carol Giesen interviewed for this book, hard times are just everyday life.

These coal miners' wives, ranging in age from late teens to eighty-five, tell of a way of life dominated by coal mining -- and shadowed by a constant fear of death or injury to a loved one. From birth to old age, they experience the social and economic pressures of the coal mining industry. Few families in these communities earn their living in any job outside a coal mine, and most young men and women find no advantage in completing their education.

Women whose stresses and strengths have seldom been disclosed reveal here their personal stories, their understanding of the dangers of coal mining, their domestic concerns, the place of friends and faith in their lives, and their expectations of the future. What emerges is a deeply moving story of determination in the face of adversity. Over and over, these women deal with the frustrations caused by strikes, layoffs, and mine closings, often taking any jobs they can find while their husbands are out of work Endlessly; their home concerns revolve around protecting their husbands from additional work or worry. Always there is fear for their husbands' lives and the pervasive anger they feel toward the mining companies. For some, there is also the pain of losing a loved one to the mines. Behind these women's acceptance of their circumstances lies a pragmatic understanding of the politics of mining and of the communities in which they live.

Giesen's insights into the experiences of miners' wives contribute much to our understanding of the impact of industry, economics, and politics on women's lives.

With a scholar's precision and a novelist's eye, Stefan Kanfer tells the inside story of De Beers Consolidated Mines - from the nineteenth century diamond rush that transformed Johannes De Beer's humble South African farm into an exotic klondike, to the Oppenheimers' shadow empire that has achieved umatched global reach.

On September 10, 1897, a group of 400 striking coal miners--workers of Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian descent or origin--marched on Lattimer, Pennsylvania. There, law enforcement officers fired without warning into the protesters, killing nineteen miners and wounding thirty-eight others. The bloody day quickly faded into history. Paul A. Shackel confronts the legacies and lessons of the Lattimer event. Beginning with a dramatic retelling of the incident, Shackel traces how the violence, and the acquittal of the deputies who perpetrated it, spurred membership in the United Mine Workers. By blending archival and archaeological research with interviews, he weighs how the people living in the region remember--and forget--what happened. Now in positions of power, the descendants of the slain miners have themselves become rabidly anti-union and anti-immigrant as Dominicans and other Latinos change the community. Shackel shows how the social, economic, and political circumstances surrounding historic Lattimer connect in profound ways to the riven communities of today. Compelling and timely, Remembering Lattimer restores an American tragedy to our public memory.

Der 2016 unterschriebene Friedensvertrag mit FARC in Kolumbien stellt das Land u.a. vor die Frage, welche Bedeutung der Ressourcenreichtum des Landes fur den Aufbau einer friedlichen Gesellschaft spielen soll. Abgeleitet von den Erkenntnissen aus Peru wird untersucht, welchen Einfluss der legale und nicht legale Abbau von Gold auf die jeweiligen bewaffneten Konflikte hatte, wie sich deren Nutzung in der Friedenszeit wandelte und welche neuen Konflikte entstanden sind. Zum Umgang mit der ehemaligen Konfliktressource Gold gibt es divergierende Vorstellungen, die extraktivistischen und postextraktivstischen Ideen zugeordnet werden koennen, die in lokalen Konflikten enden. Der Fokus liegt auf der subnationalen, nach Abbauart differenzierten Untersuchung von Ressourcenausbeutung und Burgerkrieg bzw. Postburgerkrieg. Die Ergebnisse zu illegalem Bergbau zeigen, dass es sich dabei nicht um ein Burgerkriegsphanomen handelt, sondern vielmehr um eine geduldete Praxis, die die Bewaffnung von Gewaltakteuren bedingt. Aber auch legale Ressourcenfoerderung, die nach Beendigung des Konflikts als Strategie der Friedensfinanzierung verstanden wird, fuhrt zu ahnlichen negativen Auswirkungen, sodass von einem Bergbaufluch gesprochen wird.

The coal mine represented much more than a way of making a living to the miners of Thurber, Texas, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--it represented a way of life. Coal mining dominated Thurber's work life, and miners dominated its social life. The large immigrant population that filled the mines in Thurber had arrived from more than a dozen nations, which lent a certain distinctiveness to this Texas town. In 1888 Robert D. Hunter and the Texas & Pacific Coal Company founded the town of Thurber on the site of Johnson Mines, a small coalmining village on the western edge of North Central Texas where Palo Pinto, Erath, and Eastland counties converged. William Whipple and Harvey E. Johnson first established a small community there in 1886 as the railroads' demand for coal enhanced the possibility of financial reward for entrepreneurs willing to risk the effort to tap the thin bituminous coal veins that lay beneath the ground. Where the first comers failed, Hunter and his stockholders prevailed. For almost forty years the company mined coal and owned and operated a town that by 1910 served as home to more than three thousand residents. In some respects, the town mirrored the work and culture of bituminous coal mining communities throughout the United States. Like most, it experienced labor upheaval that reached a dramatic climax in 1903 when the United Mine Workers, emboldened and strengthened by successes in other parts of the Southwest, organized Thurber's miners. Unlike elsewhere, however, the miners' success at Thurber was not fraught with violence and loss of life; furthermore, in the strike's aftermath good relations generally characterized employer/employeenegotiations. Marilyn Rhinehart examines the culture of the miners' work, the demographics and social life of the community, and the benefits and constraints of life in a company town. Above all she demonstrates the features both at work and after work of a culture shaped by the occupation of coal mining.