Books
The Price of Copper
Labor, Race and Suicide in a New Mexico
The Price of Copper is a veteran journalist’s unflinching investigation of a family tragedy and long-standing mystery—the sensational 1938 suicide of powerful New Mexico copper mine boss Rone B. Tempest Sr. on the eve of his scheduled testimony before a federal labor board. From this dramatic opening, the book paints a vivid portrait of open-pit copper mining, labor conflicts, and corporate-sponsored racism in company mining towns across the Mountain West from the early years of the twentieth century to the first successes of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.
The author’s paternal grandfather, Rone Tempest Sr., was the general manager of the Chino Copper Mine in Santa Rita, New Mexico, which was owned by the Kennecott Copper Corporation and under investigation over labor practices. His boss was Salt Lake City copper baron and ruthless anti-union strikebreaker Daniel C. Jackling—the “Prophet of Porphyry,” who pioneered the industrial mining of low-grade copper ores by introducing the use of dynamite, steam shovels, rail, and giant mill works. After detailing the saga around Tempest Sr.’s death, the story follows the trajectory of the Chino mine over time, including the rise of predominantly Hispanic labor unions and the advancement of Hispanic workers to senior management roles—gains in civil rights that would have made the labor environment entirely unrecognizable to those fighting for reform in 1938.
A compelling and dramatic history of the great early twentieth-century advances in western copper mining that provided the essential metal needed to electrify the continent and the world, The Price of Copper is a unique personal story that connects to the broader history of copper mining in the West, as well as a valuable social history offering a new narrative about the dynamics of corporate management and giving additional insight into the formation of the “Copper Age” in the United States.
The Last Western
The Unjustified Killing of Michael Rosa by Ed Cantrell
ROCK SPRINGS, WYOMING, 1978. A Puerto Rican undercover cop out of West Harlem. An Indiana preacher's son turned frontier lawman. A midnight shooting death outside a boomtown saloon. A mountain town murder trial turned Wild West show.
In his powerful and compelling reconstruction of an infamous 1978 killing in boomtown Rock Springs, Wyoming, journalist Rone Tempest tracks the parallel lives of Ed Cantrell, an Indiana schoolboy who styled himself a 19th-century gunfighter lawman, and Michael Rosa, a decorated U.S. Marine who worked under Cantrell as an undercover narc until Cantrell drew his gun an shot him dead in the back seat of an unmarked police car.
The Two Elk Saga
Originally published in seven installments between May 20 and June 10, 2014 on the nonprofit news site WyoFile.com.
"The Two Elk saga is made up of intertwined stories: one man’s outsized dream; Wyoming’s desire to believe in energy castles in the air, kept aloft by taxpayer dollars; and the federal government’s failure to bring anyone down to earth, until millions of dollars in public money had been squandered. It is, in short, a case study of territorial ambition, personal greed, political nepotism, government malfeasance, and a highly creative interpretation of federal tax laws."