Book Notices

Protecting Wyoming’s Share: Frank Emerson and the Colorado River Compact

BY MIKE MACKEY

Sheridan, WY: Western History Publications, 2013. x + 227 pp. Paper, $24.95

Mike Mackey introduces his book as one about a peace treaty, implying a feat of extraordinary diplomacy and compromise. The “treaty” is the 1922 Colorado River Compact, an effort to fairly regulate the use of the Colorado River, increasingly vital to seven states including Utah. Protecting Wyoming’s Share takes the perspective of Frank Emerson, a Wyoming commissioner who participated in the negotiations. Through his acts and words, the book traces the problems of water usage and appropriation that made the compact necessary through the interstate politics of the project to ratification and its consequences.

St. Thomas, Nevada: A History Uncovered

BY AARON MCARTHUR

Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2013. xiv + 156 pp. Paper, $24.95

St. Thomas, Nevada, existed for six years as a Utah Mormon settlement and then, after a boundary change, sixty-seven years as a Nevada desert town until the construction of the Hoover Dam drowned it under Lake Mead. The town’s history can be seen as a microcosm of the West, a story of the life of Native inhabitants disrupted by the coming of miners and farmers and the speculation and administrative development that accompanied them. However, the town’s placement also endowed it with an additional, unique set of issues: boundary disputes between states, western water issues, and the social aspects of dam construction.

Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament

BY EVELYN I. FUNDA

Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2013. 336 pp. Paper, $21.95

In this literary memoir and cultural history, Funda writes of the experiences of her Czech immigrant ancestors and her parents, who farmed land in Emmett, Idaho. Mostly she writes of her own experiences and how her identity as a farmer’s daughter and her relationship to the land and farming shaped her. With family as the framework, she writes of farming practices, rural life, changes on the land and in communities, stories, connections, love, strife, and loss.