The new book by R. Craig Johnson is entitled AFTERDAMP: The Winter Quarters and Castle Gate Mine Disasters. It offers a fictionalized account of two of Utah’s worst mining disasters. Johnson’s research, his extensive mining knowledge of past to present mining, brings together an accurate, historical tale of the miners’ life, business of mining and mining practices for that time, and the tragedy of the two largest mining disasters in the US, just at the turn of the 20th century.
AFTERDAMP follows a young John Rossing as he forced to leave the family farm in Colorado and venture out to find work to support his mother, after his father was accidentally killed in a railway accident. His journey takes him to Glenwood Springs to the smelters serving Aspen and then into the mines of Winter Quarters and Castlegate during the late 19th and early 20th century. Rossing is introduced to a variety of people who have crossed the oceans to work in the Utah mines, including the Finns, Greeks, Swedes,Welsh, Italians and Chinese, finding friends, love, family and faith in the rudimentary, bleak, mining towns.
John Rossing is a fictional character and amalgamation of many of the miners documented lives and how they became miners. A few of the characters in the book, Teacum Pratt, John Parmley etc.,were actual people fulfilling their historical roles at those locations during the time period covered in Afterdamp.
The author, spent his 45 year career as a Corporate M/A Natural Resource Attorney representing some of the largest mining companies in the world. His expertise took him throughout the world to projects in South and North America, China, Africa, Europe, Mongolia, Australia and London.
As a child, raised in Carbon County, Utah, the author wandered Eastern Utah’s high desert, climbing the mountainsides and finding the remnants of the coal towns and long abandoned mine portals. He grew up, accompanying his father, a mining engineer, underground, observing the mining operations and listening to the stories of the miners, past and present. The author felt passionately that the early miners’ way of life, hardships, and mining conditions in the historical time period of the late 19th and early 20th century Utah needed to be told allowing the reader, to be guided daily, as they were, to the portals of the deep and dark. Johnson died in July, 2022 of glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer.
AFTERDAMP: THE WINTER QUARTERS AND CASTLE GATE MINE DISASTER is available in eBook, Paperback and Hardcoveris available at: https://www.amazon.com/Afterdamp-Winter-Quarters-Castle-Disasters/dp/195900901X
Media Contact
Company Name: Free Spirit Publishing
Contact Person: Nancy Johnson
Email: Send Email
Phone: 9735091324
City: Park City
State: Utah
Country: United States
Website: https://www.amazon.com/Afterdamp-Winter-Quarters-Castle-Disasters/dp/195900901X
