Roughnecking it
(Book)

"More than a century ago the Gold Rush opened the American West. Now, with the same explosive effects, oil is changing the face of the frontier, populating it with a new generation of settlers as tough and as violent as the cowboys and miners of the past....Williamson takes us to Kemmerer, Wyoming, a small town at the heart of this new migration...where the Gold Rush is occurring in its twentieth-centry form, with "roughnecks" -- the oil-field workers -- as the modern equivalent of the "Forty-niners." Williamson's striking imagery and character sketches reveal how the roughnecks' dreams of fortune and adventure mirror those of the original gold diggers, and how the life they've chosen demands the same grit and energy. But these blue-collar pioneers face dilemmas unique to the 1980s, a struggle with issues that concern the entire nation: the search for energy vs. the preservation of the American wilderness; the small-town thirst for growth vs. the sudden tide of progress that brings not only overwhelming prosperity but also such problems as drugs, prostitution and Old west-style shoot-outs; the attempt to maintain law and order vs. the tradition of lawlessness and freedom that is at the heart of Western life." -- from the jacket flap