Doomsday Finally Comes to Wyoming's High-Flying Coal Country

For the past four decades, Wyoming’s coal miners have been the nation’s most fortunate. With little more than a high-school degree and a few weeks of training, they could make upward of $80,000 a year. They worked open-pit mines, meaning that unlike their counterparts in Appalachia, they were spared the dangers of collapsing tunnels or black lungs. Their product—subbituminous coal from the Powder River Basin, in the northeast part of the state—was coveted due to its low-sulfur content and eventually claimed a dominant 40 percent of the U.S. market.

Even as shale's recent boom cut into coal’s bottom line—gas and coal now each provide 33 percent of the nation’s electricity—Wyoming stayed the course. Most of the state's miners live in the gleaming prairie town of Gillette. The prevailing sentiment there has long been that other Americans are woefully uneducated about coal’s necessity and that far too much has been made of climate change. People held to the notion that the coal downturn was entirely the doing of President Obama’s administration and that the industry would soon rebound. Neither Wyoming Governor Matt Mead nor Gillette Mayor Louise Carter-King discusses the possibility of the state going the way of, say, West Virginia. The glass in coal country remained mostly full—right up until the layoffs started.