Roughnecking It
Williamson, Chilton Jr.
none of his business, or our business, or the Supreme Court's business, because when' it proposed the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, the 39th Congress did not intend to make it the business of anyone...
...In sum, here was the proverbial story waiting to be written...
...it brought indignation to the hearts of the Sierra Club...
...That is, he went out and worked, drank, shot, and hunted-he became a roughneck even while writing this book...
...Like Mark Twain in Roughing It over a century ago, Chilton Williamson, Jr...
...Roughnecking It is a perfectly rumbustious book...
...Nevertheless, by the Fourteenth Amendment every state is forbidden to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," and, Raoul Berger notwithstanding, that requirement is not met by any state that executes its black murderers, for example, and imprisons its white murderers or (as happened recently in Virginia) imposes a fine of a thousand dollars on its white killers...
...Like the mountain man and Indian scout of old, Williamson Js something of an environmentalist, for all his hellraising...
...Men like Ed Cantrell, the focus of the almost eerily controlled "Ballad of Ed Cantrell," about a sheriff's killing of one of his own officers...
...Eighth Amendment applicable to the states...
...it brought massive public drunkenness, shootings, car wrecks, prostitutes, drug, pushers, and, some people said, mobsters...
...There was no particular native set...
...At the other end of the spectrum are, the Commissary Commandos, who stage a spectacularly boozy rampage each summer...
...It could and probably has been done in a few visits by teams of magazine reporters and photographers, their slick words accompanied by even slicker fullcolor spreads...
...Also in the cast are the Mormons...
...technology, made a huge find in the Pineville Field near Coalville, Utah, an event that "was the sort of success story the oil people had been waiting for...
...And 'he doesn't, although he keeps his environmentalist streak pretty well buried here...
...He recognizes the necessity of the oil wells, and the vigor of boom times-but he doesn't have to like' it...
...And women like Nancy Peternal, a local politician of the "activist" stripe, bent on preserving something of the west...
...One can agree that the Constitution does not regard death to be a cruel and unusual punishment, and that, the Supreme Court notwithstanding, the Eighth Amendment does not require the punishments imposed to be proportioned to the crimes committed, and, anyway, that the Fourteenth Amendment was not intended to make the Roughnecks work on rigs in the oil patch...
...Within a few years, Wyoming had become a synonym for everything that was going on in the American West to transmute, by a wild and sinister chemistry, the Old West into the New...
...in Kemmerer, Wyoming, Chilton Williamson was just another transient pioneer...
...Judge for yourself: in the course of this book, the author drinks approximately 384 cans of beer, kills perhaps two fifths of Walker's, picks off a number of innocent animals whose only mistake was having merrily bounded into his range, and helps wreck four trucksthings all men love to do...
...This is a "larger" story, all right, but it was probably easier to set down...
...Williamson explains: "So the Energy Boom came to Wyoming, which still called itself the Cowboy State...
...What happened next...
...How easy this was is anyone's guess, but it should be noted that the author now lives in Wyoming, a happily married man...
...he listens to them sympathetically, but eschews conversion because of their strictures concerning the consumption of spirits...
...That is probably not true and is surely not sufficient...
...Wyoming is to me America-or rather, what was America," the author confides about halfway through Roughnecking It...
...0 ROUGHNECKING IT Chilton Williamson, Jr...
...Bloomington, Indiana 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1983...
...Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...none of his business, or our business, or the Supreme Court's business, because when' it proposed the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, the 39th Congress did not intend to make it the business of anyone other than the authorities of a particular state...
...In Roughnecking It he sharpens the technique he first employed in Saltbound, a book about a winter on Block Island...
...They pique Williamson's curiosity about religion...
...went out west to see4hat was going-on, which turns out-to-have been: nothing less than the creation of the new wild west, a-return to the frontier of gold-rush days by way of the oil boom...
...In Roughnecking It, he had no such problem...
...Like any pioneer, all he had to prove was that he was made of sturdy stuff...
...In Saltbound, Williamson had to insinuate himself into a very closed, insular group of townie islanders...
...Chilton Williamson knows how to catch a character and tell a story...
...it brought air pollution where formerly there had been only pure Rocky Mountain air, bright and thin as Coors beer...
...Roughnecking It is a deft journalistic performance...
...In 1975, writes Williamson, American Quasar, using the most advanced in seismic data and drilling and computer...
...This participant-observer journalism is something Williafmson does very well...
...They make about $14 an hour, and drive large four-wheel-drive vehicles such as GMC Jimmys, Ford Broncos, High Sierras, and Jeep Renegades...
...When they are not drilling, driving, or drinking, they go shooting with various pieces of the highpowered arsenals they usually carry Joe Mysak is a reporter for the Daily Bond Buyer...
...With G.P...
...What interests Williamson most is the cast of characters settling the new west, men like Sam Slade, the New York-born roughneck and driller, a hard-working rowdy of the instantly recognizable good-guy type...
...The boom brought population explosions that caused settled small towns like Rock Springs to be buried under a sea of tent cities and tract houses as it soared in three years from ten thousand to nineteen thousand people...
...Morris, who wrote in the mid-1800s, he knows that "the land of the heart is the land of the West...
...But this author chose the more difficult method of writing the story, and has thus turned out a truer, more intimate study...
...In the course of his revels, however, Williamson had to perform the difficult task of writing about his friends...
...D around with them in their vehicles...
...Simon and Schuster / $15.50 Joe Mysak There is opportunity in America...
...Even the advocates of capital punishment (and I am one of them) must agree that this sort of discriminatory sentencing is forbidden by the Constitution...
...When they are not drilling or driving back from the rig, they drink beer and Walker's whiskey...
Vol. 16 • February 1983 • No. 2
