Painted Bricks: Jackrabbit, Gillette Wyoming.

Painted Bricks: Jackrabbit, Gillette Wyoming.:  

Jackrabbit, Gillette Wyoming.

Towns and Nature: Gillette, WY: 1907 CB&Q Roundhouse and Water Tower

Towns and Nature: Gillette, WY: 1907 CB&Q Roundhouse and Water Tower: ( Satellite , the roundhouse was removed by 1970. There are no obvious remnants.) Note the water tower on the left. The building with the de...

Today is Christmas on the Julian Calendar.

So, as a result, it's the day which the Orthodox who follow the Julian calendar, which is not all of them, celebrate Christmas.

Emblem of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church

In Ukraine, where the majority of Christians are in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which obtained autocephalous status on December 15, 2018, Metropolitan Epiphany, its head will lead a service in the Assumption Cathedral of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery for the first time since 1685.  In that following year, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church fell under Moscow's authority. The Metropolitanate of Kyiv actually became an ordinary diocese of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1722 

This year, however, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church gave its members the option of celebrating Christmas on December 25, which became a widely discussed topic in Ukraine itself, where celebration of a civil Christmas on December 25 had already become widespread. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, an Easter Rite Catholic Church which is the largest Eastern Rite church in the world, apparently already did.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church's having obtained autocephalous status has been an odd backdrop to the war.  The Russian Orthodox Church is the largest Eastern Orthodox Church in the world, and it has been one of the primary opponents to reunion with Rome.  The relationship between the various Orthodox Churches is complicated on a legal basis, but generally the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is regarded as being the  primus inter pares between the various autocephalous church's heads, although sometimes the Pope is also referred to in that fashion.  He is regarded, generally, as having the power to accord autocephalous status, which at least from the outside is problematic as it would seem to suggest that he has a sort of superior authority which the Eastern Orthodox otherwise reject as to the Pope, even though they recognized early in their history.  Anyhow, the granting of autocephalous status by the Ecumenical Patriarch was fiercely resisted by Moscow, and it has lead to a round of schisms.  Moscow continues to deny that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is autocephalous, and one of the claims of Russians in the war is that they are defending Orthodoxy.

As for the United States, about 1,200,000 Americans are reported as being in an Eastern Orthodox Church.  At least in Wyoming, most of the Eastern Orthodox Churches are Greek Orthodox, although they often have Russian Orthodox members and may be served by Priests who are from another branch of Orthodoxy.  Gillette has an Antiochean Orthodox Church, which represents a congregation which converted from Protestant fundamentalism following an intense study of the early church.

Thursday, November 24, 1921. Thanksgiving Day.

 

Today was Thanksgiving Day across the nation, the day falling on the same point in the calendar in 1921 which it now does.  As readers here know, during the Great Depression the day was moved, much to the consternation of some.

The news on the day included news of war and peace, with fears that negotiations to end the Anglo-Irish War, and grant Ireland independence, were about to collapse.

The day saw an inspection of Troop 2 of the Boy Scouts in Casper, with that troop having just received honors as noted.  This is of interest in that the newspaper didn't really bother to take much note that the troop was associated with St. Mark's Episcopal Church.  The association of the Boy Scouts with churches was so strong, it being part of the Muscular Christianity movement, that this was simply assumed.

I'm surprised, frankly, that this troop wasn't Troop 1, given that the Episcopal Church was very much a major American protestant denomination in an era in which protestant denominations were culturally dominant.

Interesting that gasoline prices were an issue.  As of January 2020, the price would be roughly equivalent to the current one, but with the current inflationary cycle the country is now in, that would be difficult to really determine now.

Disaster struck in Gillette:

Today In Wyoming's History: November 24: 1921

1921  A serious fire in Gillette, WY destroyed several of the towns landmark buildings.

Mid Week At Work. 700 out of work in Gillette

Last Saturday I went to a funeral.

I'll not give the details on it, but one of the things was that before it, there was, as there often is now, a slideshow with photographs of the departed's life, which in this case was certainly highly poignant.  That was done to background music, as is also seemingly the norm now.

One of those songs was James McMurtry's Lights of Cheyenne.

I'm not sure how McMurtry is categorized musically.  I wouldn't classify him as "Country" music, now that I'm slightly familiar with him, as he seems to me to be more of a sort of folk balladeer.  Not a cheesy neo folk balladeer,  like Bob Dylan (sorry Dylan fans, but that's how he strikes me), but more of the genuine article like John Prine.

McMurtry is the son of novelist Larry McMurtry whose novels are concentrated on rural, and often historical, Texas.  Larry McMurtry wrote what I'd regard as by far the most accurate novel on the atmosphere of modern ranching, Horseman, Pass By, which was made into the very good, but not as good as the book, movie Hud.  Some of those descriptive abilities clearly passed on to his son, as they're in Lights of Cheyenne.

Okay, what's this have to do with Gillette and the coal layoffs?  Quite a lot.

Lights of Cheyenne does a really good job of describing the lives of dozens, maybe hundreds, of people from this region I've met in lawsuits and in the law in general, both plaintiff's and defendants.  I can't quite describe it, but he does in the song.



I should note that when people post such things, the first question is "are you referring to yourself?".

Nope.

Not at all in fact.  But rather the people I've met on both sides of litigation.

And frankly a lot of those same people are now out of work in Gillette.

The Houston Chronicle published an article sometime ago trying to describe the reason that Donald Trump won the presidency, and did it by saying that those people were described in the music of James McMurtry.  If you wanted to understand them, it maintained, listen to McMurtry.

That's too simplistic and definitely not fully accurate, but there's something to it.

I haven't written about coal for awhile, although there are quite a few items up on this blog about coal and trends applying to it.  What surprised me over the last year or so is that coal seemed to stabilize.  Then it became clear that it had not.  It was still in trouble, but it did look for awhile as if the coal companies might be able to hold on and work their way out of their immediate financial difficulties.  Then this came, so apparently not.  At least it doesn't look that way.  Seven hundred benign laid off at once is a pretty big message.

Where from here?  Well nobody knows.  But even on a day in which the Tribune leads its headlines with the disaster, in the help wanted a coal mine in Sweetwater County is hiring.  So some will make it back into coal jobs.  Chances are that these mines won't be closed forever either.

But the trend line is pretty hard to ignore.  People who were counting on a change in administration to reverse coal's fortunes must be disappointed and there's no way to realistically related this back to any prior era.  It's the era itself.  Half of Wyoming's coal production has disappeared over the past decade and a lot of jobs with that.  Now more are gone and a lot of them won't be coming back.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Is Beer the Most Distributist Product Ever? Hey, what about whiskey (and other distilled beverages)?. Wait a minute, In Vino locorum subsidiarietatis Veritas?

There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee,
and the mother of Jesus was there.
Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.
When the wine ran short,
the mother of Jesus said to him,
"They have no wine."
And Jesus said to her,
"Woman, how does your concern affect me?
My hour has not yet come."
His mother said to the servers,
"Do whatever he tells you."
Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings,
each holding twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus told them,
"Fill the jars with water."
So they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them,
"Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter."
So they took it.
And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine,
without knowing where it came from
— although the servers who had drawn the water knew —,
the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him,
"Everyone serves good wine first,
and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one;
but you have kept the good wine until now."
Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee
and so revealed his glory,
and his disciples began to believe in him.

John, Chapter 2.*

Okay, we've done beer, and we've done whiskey, what about wine.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: Is Beer the Most Distributist Pr...: A bottle of "double cask" Wyoming Whiskey, which is Wyoming Whiskey that's also been partially aged in a sherry cask. ...

 

And no, we're not grasping for those lyrics from the famous John Lee Hooker song.

Frankly, I know nothing about wine.

I've always known that, but it really occurred to me after I decided to add this post, following my one on beer and whiskey.

Indeed, I pondered why that might be.  

My parents rarely drank wine, but for that matter my father only bought beer during the summer and while we often had a bottle of Canadian Whiskey on hand, it usually lasted an eternity.  Indeed, when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, it was considered to be a social obligation to have whiskey on hand for social occasions.  My folks weren't huge entertainers (they were definitely better than we are here however), and that's about the only time the whiskey was ever brought out.  We didn't stock more than one kind and for whatever reason, the only kind of whiskey my father ever bought was Canadian Lord Calvert.  I supposed that this might be because my mother was Canadian, but as she never ever drank it, that supposition might be way, way, off the mark.

One of my aunts and uncles liked Scotch, and liked Cutty Sark for that matter.  Asking my father about it, he told me that it tasted like paint thinner, and I have to agree.  And not just about Cutty Sark, but all Scotch Whiskey.

About the only wine my parents ever bought was Mogan David, which based upon their website must have been Mogan David Concord.  I feel bad, quite frankly, for the Mogan David company, because back at that time it was simply a fairly cheap and rather obviously Kosher table wine.  The purple wine came with a Star of David emblazoned upon it.  This was all prior to the introduction of tehir horrifying fortified "pop" wines which came out under the MD 20/20 name, and which acquired the nickname "Mad Dog 20/20".  I frankly think that their introduction of that brand, while it may have been a marketing mistake, was a mistake.  I'm surprised to learn that it still exists, actually.

Anyhow, when I was a kid, on very rare occasion, my father would buy Mogan David.  I'm not sure why.  It always came in big gallon sized bottles, and it lasted forever.  I haven't had it for years and years, and indeed not since I was young, probably ten years old or younger, and I'd get a small glass when they bought it.  As it isn't the kind of drink you serve to guests, and as they so rarely bought it, and quit buying it at some point, I don't know what the thought was.

Anyhow, when growing up and still young, "wine" to me meant Mogan David.

When I was in my very early teens my mother, for some still unknown reason, took a wine making class at the local community college and she accordingly started making wine as a hobby.  Simply taking up wine making was really odd for a person who basically didn't drink and who was living in a family that nearly didn't, so I don't know what she was thinking.  It was a mistake all the way around for a variety of reasons.

For one reason, she was a horrible cook and at least based upon her wine making experiment, being a bad cook equates with being a bad vintner.  Her wine was awful.  She made  most of it from berries that she harvested from where our garden was located and for years and years I assumed thereafter that the berries must have been basically unpalatable.  Later on, I found they weren't, when other people made other things out of them. Go figure.

Fortunately, after stinking up the house with the fermentation process for awhile, she gave it up.  Pretty bad stuff.

I don't know if that early experience left me tainted on wine in general.  I'd had beer obviously so apparently that didn't carry over.  As an adult I've been exposed to wine a lot more, but I've picked up a very limited taste for it.  Basically, I like Chianti and buy it on odd occasion.  I don't like any other wine much unless they are very close to Chianti.  Some of the wines that people really like I absolutely detest.   Most of them actually.  Dry Champagne I like, but it's not like you are going to drink gallons of that unless you are Winston Churchill.

So my knowledge on wine is super limited and will stay that way.

Anyhow, as I did beers and whiskey, and as I'm looking at this from a Distributist and local agricultural level, and as I know there are a couple of wineries in the state, I decided to complete the Tour d'alcohol with that.

Now, going into that I'll note that I'm very skeptical about the ability of Wyoming to produce any wine in the first place, unless it's made out of the wild stuff that my mom used, and I'd discourage that.  While my mother, in her brief vintner stage decided to plant a couple of Concorde grape vines over my objection (she never had a grasp on agricultural yield and she couldn't accept that a couple of vines weren't going to yield adequate grapes for fermenting, and she didn't accept that the harsh weather here wasn't conducive to grapes), Wyoming doesn't really have the climate for growing grapes.

Indeed, grapes are sufficiently susceptible to climate that you can actually tell what the climate of a past era was like based on them.  The line basically north of the Rhine in Europe and west the English Channel are the beer lines, basically (with some blending of the two) as you can grow grains north and west of there, but not grapes, usually.  When you can grow grapes in those regions, something odd is going on.  We know, for example, that there was a period when England produced a lot of wine.  It was during the Medieval Climatic Optimum.  You can't grow them there now.  Likewise, during the same era Newfoundland had abundant wild grapes.  It doesn't now.  There's never been a time when you couldn't grow grapes in France, Spain, Italy, Greece and North Africa, which is why all those areas have been wine regions (the modern exception being North Africa but only because of Islam).

So you can't do much with that here.

Apparently you can do a little,  however.

Before I go on, there's one additional thing I should mention that I recently learned.  I've always known that there are wines that are attributed to regions that surprise me, but I didn't realize that simply labeling wine is a big deal.  I had no idea.  Apparently in California, for example, a lot of wine labels are basically that.  Some big mega winery produces all kinds of wine and ships it out under lots of labels under contract.  People buying the label tend to think that a winery by that name is produced there, but nope, it may be just a label.

Indeed, a Benedictine Monk I know told me that the wine sold under the label of his home abbey was not produced there, but in another state and sold under the abbey's name via contract.  He was careful to note that as the abbey did in fact produce other things, but not wine.  The abbey was located in the far north so I would have really wondered about how the accomplished producing wine but, nope, they didn't do it.

That's a bit of a shame really as both wine and beer were once widely produced by monastic holy orders and for practical reasons.  Somehow, as we've progressed through the 20th Century and became more and more hedonistic and amoral we none the less found more in more in the way of societal puritanism to apply to people otherwise living moral lives.  Odd.  And its further misguided in that the Puritans themselves were not teetotalers at all.

Well, anyhow, I've come to know something about beer and whiskey but I remain really ignorant on wine.

So, anyhow, back to wine and Wyoming.

There are, surprisingly, a few Wyoming wineries.

The claimed first winery in Wyoming was Table Mountain Winery.  It interestingly was the brainchild of a UW student from a southeastern Wyoming farming family who researched the topic while a student and went on to apply what he learned, receiving a grant in the process.

And its a true winery.  A ten acre vineyard supplies the grapes for seven different wines which, after looking at their website, I realized that I have in fact seen in the stores.  I haven't tried it, but once again, this is a Distributist or Agrarian triumph, as its amazingly all local and they've been at it for nearly twenty years now.

I should note, before I move on, that the "claimed" item above is because well prior to this time, when I was a student in Laramie in the 1980s, there was some sort of winery in one of the small towns up in the mountains west of Laramie.  This was the Hiney Winery.  I know nothing about it other than that it advertised on radio a lot, back in the days when people, including me, listed to their car radios.  I recall it as their kitschy advertisements always closed out with the line "buy a little Hiney" or something like that, featuring that obvious double entendre.  I never tried it, and have no idea how it was produced.  Laramie is already 7,000 feet in elevation and the towns in the mountains were even higher than that, so I'd be amazed if the grapes were produced locally.

Moving on, Cody Wyoming has a Buffalo Jump Winery.  Knowing what a buffalo jump is, I wonder about the name, but the tourist town has a winery so called.  The last time I was in Cody I noticed it or at least an outlet selling the wines, but I didn't stop in (I'm obviously a very poor candidate for wine tourism).  Their website indicates that the grapes are from California, Oregon and Washington, and they have a second outlet in Arizona.  So they're producing wine, but they're acquiring the grapes. The owners also indicate that they're in buffalo ranching, and indeed they were in that prior to being vintners.

There's also a Jackson Hole Winery, making Jackson Hole the location of at least two breweries and one distillery, or perhaps two distilleries if we include nearby Driggs Idaho in the mix.  Their website indicates that they produce 2,500 cases of wine per year and a large percentage of the grapes are from a farm owned by the vintner, which is a family operation.  However, the vineyards are in the Sonoma region and other grapes are acquired via partnerships and business arrangements. As Jackson Hole is over 6,000 feet high, the lack of local grapes isn't surprising. They do produce the wine themselves.

Weston Wineries, which apparently also produces liqueurs, is another Wyoming winery that relies upon importing the constituents from other states, in this case grape juices.  Indeed, their website specifically notes that they do that and that its common in the industry, which it truly is.  In looking it up, I realized that it too is something I've seen in the stores but never tried.

A really unique winery is found in Gillette Wyoming and was mentioned here the other day in the context of distilleries, that being Big Lost Meadery.  As it name indicates, it specializes in mead.

I'll be frank.  I can't stand mead so I'm not going to try this product.

Most people have never tried mead and are only familiar with it, if they are at all, from stories about Vikings quaffing down buckets of mead. Given that, we imagine it in our minds being something like Russian Imperial Stout or something.  It's not like that at all.

Mead is made from honey.

That's right, it's made from honey.

Now, I'll confess that my experiences with mead are quite limited.  When I was 19 years old, and hence old enough to first drink in Wyoming (the drinking age was then 19), I bought a bottle of mead due to the Viking legends.  It was awful.   I likely didn't make it past the first glass before I tossed the bottle out.

Recently I've had mead again, but for an odd reason.

Up at the start of this entry I noted that my mother tried her hand at wine making after taking a class at the local community college.  About a year or so ago my son, in college, decided to try it too.  His efforts were less reliant on products of the wild, indeed they weren't at all reliant on it, and he gave it up after an initial effort.  Nonetheless, a friend of his wanted to try mead and so they recently made a batch.

Their mead wasn't nearly as bad as the mead that I had when I was young, and I note that there's "dry" mead that's less sweet.  His friend and his family were really impressed with it.  While I was much less unimpressed with it than with the stuff I had years ago, I'm not going to take it up.

Which means that I'm not going to try Big Lost Meadery's product.  It may be great, if you like mead, but as I don't, I'm not going to bother.

Based on their website, Big Lost (which also brews beer) plays a bit with the manly  man image of mead. But the fact that the Norse and other northern Europeans drank it at one time actually tells me something else.

Grapes don't grow in the far north but there are plenty of bees up there, and bees make honey.  The fact that the early Scandinavians made mead (and they weren't the only ones by any means) tells me that if people figure out how to make ferment something, they'll ferment anything available.  Honey was available.  As soon as beer became available, it's worth noting, the Norsemen switched to that.**

And that about covers it for Wyoming's wine. 

Except for the homemade stuff, of course.

________________________________________________________________________________

*St. John covers here, of course, Jesus' first public miracle, the changing of water into wine at the Wedding Feast at Cana.

The entire story is an interesting one, and not simply (but of course principally) because it was Jesus' first public miracle.  Like most of the Bible, the story is multi dimensional in all sorts of ways.  One thing we can take from here, from a historical prospective, is the practices that pertained to wine at the time.

Very clearly, then as now, there were various grades of wine.  We learn from this story that the wine that Christ created from the water was of superb quality.  The steward was amazed that the hosts had saved the best wine for last, a practice that woudl be the reverse of what we'd expect then and now. 

Also, based upon the common size of water vessels at the time, this involved a very large quantity of wine. 

That's interesting not only because it tells us of the commonality of wine at the time. . .nobody was shocked that there was a lot of wine, but running out of wine would have been a disaster for the hosts, but also because it touches on a theological point, that being that the drink that was brought into the room at the Last Supper was wine, not "grape juice", as some take great straining strides to maintain.

**I've referenced before, but the novel Krisin Lavransdottir, while a novel, gives a really good account of daily life in Medieval Norway including the drinking habits of Norwegians at that time.  Citing a novel for factual information is always hazardous, but its so well researched I feel it can be relied upon for those details, and it makes it plain that a vast amount of beer and ale were consumed.  Mead is mentioned exactly once in the book.

The calm before the storm?

In today's Tribune it's reported that the anticipated oil development in Converse County will require approximately 8,000 laborers.  According to a rule of thumb, which is just that (i.e., maybe not real, but probably something to it) this means that about 16,000 people will be coming in to serve them.  So, the speculation is, the area is going to see an increase in people to the tune of 24,000.

For a region like Denver, that doesn't mean much, but for Wyoming in certainly does and long time Wyomingites, particularly those who have lived here most of their lives, let alone those who have been here from childhood, and more particularly those who were born here, that is at least to some degree worrisome.  While a lot of the political pundits in Wyoming, particularly those on the political right, always view such things as good in a chamber of commerce sort of way, average Wyomingites view such things as mixed blessings as they are.

Of course, a lot depends on what really occurs, and right now, we don't really know what will occur. A big oil development seems set to launch, but then we've seen some interesting ups and downs in the market over the past couple of decades.  Indeed, at a recent conference I attended in that giant oil town, Houston, it was noted that the 21st Century has experienced two oil crashes, the first one being part of the big crash that came at turn of the Bush-Obama Administrations, and being caused by it, and the second coming due to the price sets of the Saudi's a few years ago.  Such a thing could occur at any time, really, or for that matter the opposite could.  The constant stress in the Middle East, as we all know, could have some big impact at any time.  Or not.

Indeed, something interesting about the last crash is that it didn't really cause a drop in oil production.  It did see a drop in oil development.  The two are not the same.  That suggests that something has changed about the oil economy, but what it is, is not fully clear.  What seems to be the case is that consumption has entered a new domain as the world's dependence upon petroleum is declining. 

Not declining so much, of course, that the development will not occur now that petroleum is at about $70/bbl.

One thing that this will mean, should it get rolling, is that Gillette, Douglas, Lusk, and Casper are going to see some sort of stress and boom.  Each town likely sees itself in the crosshairs that way, but my guess is that Douglas will feel the impact more than the others, but they'll all see it.  Casper, being the big regional city that it is (although more on that in a post coming soon) will be uniquely affected, but then Douglas certainly will be as well.

Probably.

We'll all soon know, one way or another.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church, former location of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Gillette Wyoming.

Churches of the West: Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church, former location of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Gillette Wyoming

When I took this photograph, it was the location of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Gillette, Wyoming. As noted at the time, I had no idea how old the structure of the church was. An addition, not visible here, to the back side looked to be a rectory.

Since I took this photo, the Church structure sold to the Antiochian Orthodox parish in Gillette, and this Church is now Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church.  I don't know where the Episcopal parish formerly located here is now located.  The pastor of this church informs me that it has been redone inside, in keeping with Orthodox traditions, and he would graciously allow me to photograph the interior in the future.

Coal layoffs and Northeast Wyoming

Peabody Coal Company, the world's largest coal producer, and Arch Coal have announced layoffs in the Gillette area which amount to a combined 450 jobs lost.  And the losses won't stop there.  With that many jobs lost the local economy in Campbell County will be undoubtedly impacted.  Additionally, a loss of that many jobs clearly indicates big changes in operations at the mines themselves, and the energy infrastructure in Campbell County, which is what the economy of the county is based on, will be hit.  It's unlikely, therefore that the job losses will stop there.

This is a rim news for the area economy.  And for the state.  School funding is principally based on the coal severance tax.  Without ongoing major coal production, the schools are in big trouble.

Moreover, this may reflect such a major shift in the economics of coal that there may never be a return to its former position in the economy, either nationally or locally.  Wyomingites have been quick, in some quarters, to blame regulation and the current Administration for coal's demise.  One of the interviewed miners blamed the event on regulation and expressed the thought that things wold turn around under a new Presidential administration.  Our Superintendent of Public Instruction mentioned budget problems, in a recent op-ed, as being due to "the war on coal".  But people shouldn't fool themselves.  This likely represents a shift so deep in the economics and culture of coal that current events show an existential change much deeper than merely a current White House discontent with it.  

Indeed, even twenty years ago I was told by an energy company executive that "coal is dead".  I was surprised by his view at the time, but he was quite definite in his views.  But he was expressing an energy sector long term view, at that time, that coal wouldn't survive a switch to other forms of power generation.  Ironically natural gas, of which North America has a vast abundance, has really eaten into the coal market and that's not going to change.  Power plants take years to build and years to permit.  Coal fired plants are being built, they're being retired.  This not only won't change overnight, it won't change at all.  The coal industry itself pinned its hopes on the Chinese market, which uses a lot of coal, but China also has a lot of coal.  The Chinese economy is in the doldrums right now, and that will likely change, but when it does the question is whether China will enter an economic period mirroring Japan's long endured slow economy, or change to a more growth oriented but volatile economy like North America's and Europe's.  And a bigger question is whether China, which is under pressure from much of the rest of the world on emissions, will itself move away from coal.  It hasn't so far, but there's no guaranty that it will not.  Coal, to the extent it retains any popularity (and that's little outside of the coal producing states), is popular only in the US and China.  Indeed, in some areas of the US it is now so unpopular that efforts to ship coal by sea to China were opposed in Pacific maritime states, something that had not been worked out at the time the local coal producers went into this slump.

So chances are high that this is a sea change, not a downturn.  And if it is, it's one that has huge implications for the state.  The state didn't deal with them in the last Legislature, or even really discuss dealing with them. By the next one it will have no choice.

"Then the coal company came with the world's largest shovel". Musical references and economic trouble.

When I ran this yesterday: 

Lex Anteinternet: Coal in the ICU:    Mine haul truck on display in Wright Wyoming. Wyoming has had a long association with coal. The first coal mines in the state date...

I resisted the temptation to quote from John Prine's "New Grass" song "Paradise".

I'll note that the Tribune, while it didn't actually name the song, couldn't, and the reporter today started off his article about the Peabody Coal Company noting the sad song, and then turned to it again a second time.  Interesting.

For those who haven't heard it, the really sad song involves the demise of an actual Kentucky town named Paradise, and features the chorus:

And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away

Well, the Peabody Coal Company won't be hauling Gillette away, although coal mining, as the article details, is really in huge long term trouble.   That doesn't help Gillette much either, rather obviously, but that's not Peabody's fault.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Matthews Church, Gillette Wyoming

Churches of the West: St. Matthews Church, Gillette Wyoming:

Monday at the Bar: Courthouses of the West: Campbell County Courthouse, Gillette Wyoming

Courthouses of the West: Campbell County Courthouse, Gillette Wyoming:

This is the Campbell County Courthouse in Gillette Wyoming. The courthouse has been recently added on to, but the additions match so well that it is not really possible to tell. The court houses the district and circuit courts for Wyoming's Eighth Judicial District.

Campbell County's war memorial is located on the same block as the courthouse.