| OCR Text |
Show UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY series of negotiations. Governor George Dern nominated Snow to be chair of the new commission, but he declined in order to return to his southern Utah responsibilities. Snow had only a year to live. Edward Hunter Snow provides all historians with a model in the use of documents. Alexander had hundreds of documents at his disposal, including Snow’s journals, letters, and talks; the extensive collections of the Harold B. Lee Library and Archive at Brigham Young University; the collections of the LDS Church History Library, the Utah State Historical Society; Dixie State College; and the Washington County News. Alexander has been over this ground before and has mastered it again. For instance, his chapter on the tax question provides a clear, complete description of all the issues and negotiations involved, even as it details Utah’s transition into modernity. On the issue of documentation, the book is outstanding. Alexander masterfully describes the life of a man hardly known by Utahns and causes one to consider seriously the demands and meanings of a life spent in civic service. DOUGLAS D. ALDER Dixie State College Coal in Our Veins: A Personal Journey. By Erin Ann Thomas. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2012. 274 pp. Cloth, $29.95.) MANY ACCOUNTS of the development of the Utah coal industry tend to focus on the important role of industrial immigrants from southern Europe. But before the Italians and Greeks and South Slavs came, there were the Welsh and other immigrants from the coal districts of Britain, who composed the greater part of the mining workforce in the nineteenth century. One of those Welsh miners was Evan Thomas, who immigrated to Utah from Merthyr Tydfil in 1874 with his wife, Margaret Davis, and their five children. They settled initially in Logan but within a few years relocated to Scofield, where their two eldest sons, Frederick and Evan, Jr., were among the two hundred or more men and boys killed in the May 1, 1900, Winter Quarters mine explosion. Evan, Sr., and a third son, Zephaniah, would normally have been with them in Mine Number One, but Evan, “feeling he had been given an inferior room, ‘rose to his full five foot three inches and roundly denounced the foreman, the superintendent, and the Pleasant Valley Coal Company generally before taking his youngest working son and heading home’”(60). Zephaniah later made his way into management and served as mine foreman at Castle Gate dur ing a tumultuous period that included the 1922 strike; the mine explosion on March 8, 1924, that killed 172 men; and the subsequent surge in Ku Klux Klan activity that culminated in the lynching of Robert Marshall on 196 |
