What do you think?
Rate this book
Shawnee Books
Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland
Cultural historian Jeff Biggers takes us to the dark amphitheatre ruins of his family's nearly 200-year-old hillside homestead that has been strip-mined on the edge of the first federally recognized Wilderness Site in southern Illinois. In doing so, he not only comes to grips with his own denied backwoods heritage, but also chronicles a dark and missing chapter in the American the historical nightmare of coal outside of Appalachia, serving as an exposé of a secret legacy of shame and resiliency.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
7 people are currently reading
121 people want to read
About the author
Jeff Biggers
14 books49 followersJeff Biggers is a cultural historian, journalist, playwright and novelist. He is the coauthor of the novel DISTURBING THE BONES with filmmaker Andrew Davis, and author of numerous nonfiction works, including IN SARDINIA: An Unexpected Journey in Italy (Melville House), TRIALS OF A SCOLD (St. Martin's), longlisted for the PEN Bograd Weld Award. Recipient of the David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting, Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award, Biggers has worked as a freelance journalist, radio correspondent, playwright, historian and educator across the US, Europe, Mexico and India. His stories have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera America, Salon, The Nation and on National Public Radio and Public Radio International. He blogs regularly for the Huffington Post. Contributing editor at Bloomsbury Review.
His nonfiction works include State Out of the Union, selected by Publishers Weekly as a Top Ten Social Science Book in 2012; Reckoning at Eagle Creek, recipient of the Delta Award for Literature and the David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting; In the Sierra Madre, winner of the Foreword Magazine Travel Book of the Year Award; and The United States of Appalachia, praised by the Citizen Times as a "masterpiece of popular history." He also served as co-editor of No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems of Don West, which won the American Book Award, and wrote the foreword to the re-issue of Huey Perry's classic, They'll Cut Off Your Project.
Biggers founded the Climate Narrative Project, a media arts and advocacy project.
For more info: www.jeffbiggers.com
His nonfiction works include State Out of the Union, selected by Publishers Weekly as a Top Ten Social Science Book in 2012; Reckoning at Eagle Creek, recipient of the Delta Award for Literature and the David Brower Award for Environmental Reporting; In the Sierra Madre, winner of the Foreword Magazine Travel Book of the Year Award; and The United States of Appalachia, praised by the Citizen Times as a "masterpiece of popular history." He also served as co-editor of No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems of Don West, which won the American Book Award, and wrote the foreword to the re-issue of Huey Perry's classic, They'll Cut Off Your Project.
Biggers founded the Climate Narrative Project, a media arts and advocacy project.
For more info: www.jeffbiggers.com
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 15, 2010
Everyone from southern Illinois should buy and read this book.
Everyone from north of I-70 who likes to snort haughtily and feel superior to those from southern Illinois, dismissed as hillbillies, should buy and read this book. You might learn something.
Everyone who's heard of this FutureGen foolishness being crammed down our throats here in Illinois should buy and read this book.
Everyone who fails to understand why unions matter should buy and read this book.
Everyone who refuses to get out of the past and insist on better energy sources should buy and read this book.
Everyone who runs Peabody and Massey should buy and hit themselves in the head repeatedly with this book.
Everyone from north of I-70 who likes to snort haughtily and feel superior to those from southern Illinois, dismissed as hillbillies, should buy and read this book. You might learn something.
Everyone who's heard of this FutureGen foolishness being crammed down our throats here in Illinois should buy and read this book.
Everyone who fails to understand why unions matter should buy and read this book.
Everyone who refuses to get out of the past and insist on better energy sources should buy and read this book.
Everyone who runs Peabody and Massey should buy and hit themselves in the head repeatedly with this book.
May 2, 2010
This book is a good overview of the history of coal mining in Illinois, but its main focus is the region of southern Illinois around Eagle Creek. Just south of Eagle Creek, the Shawnee National Forest holds some of the most beautiful land in Illinois. I've hiked through a lot of that land over the last 20 years but I never knew the ravages of the coal industry were so close. This book was a real eye-opener for me.
A few minor complaints: a book which describes the importance of place should really have a map or two.* The author uses no foot- or end-notes and gives each chapter its own bibliography. Yet there are numerous occasions where he refers to various sources, which I would love to look at, but they are not cited in the bibliographies.
*Actually EVERY book should have a map or two.
A few minor complaints: a book which describes the importance of place should really have a map or two.* The author uses no foot- or end-notes and gives each chapter its own bibliography. Yet there are numerous occasions where he refers to various sources, which I would love to look at, but they are not cited in the bibliographies.
*Actually EVERY book should have a map or two.
May 7, 2019
This is an accounting of the coal industry in Southern Illinois, particularly the Eagle Creak region. This area has long been a target for Big Coal industry as the coal seams are rich and the people poor. The devestation caused by the coal industry in this region, as well as most other coal mining regions of the country, has changed the landscape forever, making farming and other land uses impossible, displacing the residents, their towns and their history. Page 197 "The abuse of the land has always gone hand in hand with the abuse of the miner or woodsman. It's easy to take and strip mine someone's land that we have convinced the world that it's inhabitants are disposable, poor white trash. Bunch on hillbillies."
Mining offers jobs, but with low wages, and health concerns lasting until death, which often times comes sooner rather than later. Once deep mining is too expensive, then strip mining, which employs less than a quarter of the labor of a deep mine, becomes the norm. Strip mining is just what it sounds like, stripping away all surface material and leaving the landscape looking like a moon scape of dirty ash, coal dust and mud slurry. Blasting makes living in the region untenable. Strip mining also takes the form of "mountain top removal", which is just what is sounds like. The mountain top is blown away, "dumped" into the valley and then the top is strip mined. Can you picture in your minds eye what this landscape would look like. Then think if this was your home, and had been your familes farming legacy for centuries. But, beccaue Big Coal has the money and the power and the political influence they can spread untruths, such as "clean coal" - akin to "safe cigarettes", that coal is cheap - it isn't when you add in the health cost and clean up cost which every American is paying in taxes - and that industry needs coal - which it doesn't as there are plenty of alternative, cheaper, greener sources which would employ more workers and benefit the economy and the environment.
Page 190 "We tend to forget that the freedom of religion and expression that so formed our early American experience was also wedded to the freedom of open spaces." While coal companies may claim that the land can be "reclaimed", once the forests are gone they cannot be replaced. The soil left from strip mining and mountain top removal will only support prairie grass and scrub pines. The environment, including the land and water and all who depend on it for life, is gone forever.
Coal is a dirty business and we should channel the subsidies that the government currently pays into the development and installation of green energy systems.
This book is reflective of a way of life destroyed and how it is destroyed. It provides much "food" for thought.
Mining offers jobs, but with low wages, and health concerns lasting until death, which often times comes sooner rather than later. Once deep mining is too expensive, then strip mining, which employs less than a quarter of the labor of a deep mine, becomes the norm. Strip mining is just what it sounds like, stripping away all surface material and leaving the landscape looking like a moon scape of dirty ash, coal dust and mud slurry. Blasting makes living in the region untenable. Strip mining also takes the form of "mountain top removal", which is just what is sounds like. The mountain top is blown away, "dumped" into the valley and then the top is strip mined. Can you picture in your minds eye what this landscape would look like. Then think if this was your home, and had been your familes farming legacy for centuries. But, beccaue Big Coal has the money and the power and the political influence they can spread untruths, such as "clean coal" - akin to "safe cigarettes", that coal is cheap - it isn't when you add in the health cost and clean up cost which every American is paying in taxes - and that industry needs coal - which it doesn't as there are plenty of alternative, cheaper, greener sources which would employ more workers and benefit the economy and the environment.
Page 190 "We tend to forget that the freedom of religion and expression that so formed our early American experience was also wedded to the freedom of open spaces." While coal companies may claim that the land can be "reclaimed", once the forests are gone they cannot be replaced. The soil left from strip mining and mountain top removal will only support prairie grass and scrub pines. The environment, including the land and water and all who depend on it for life, is gone forever.
Coal is a dirty business and we should channel the subsidies that the government currently pays into the development and installation of green energy systems.
This book is reflective of a way of life destroyed and how it is destroyed. It provides much "food" for thought.
September 1, 2025
An eye-opening account of the legacy of coal mining operations in Illinois and the environmental consequences. Clean Air legislation passed over the last few decades has been riddled with loopholes and exceptions that have perpetuated the destruction of the landscape and pollution of our atmosphere. While the book includes a few photos, it would have been helpful if it would have included maps and illustrations.
October 1, 2023
This book provides the history of part of Illinois along with stories from people there to show how industry can and will use people and the land for profit to the destruction of all else. It is a well-written and interesting work that provides a lot of history that most of us are lacking.
January 13, 2025
An interesting read on a neglected topic. occasionally repetitive, and chronologically challenging. Should have had footnotes so some of the more challenging assertions could have been more easily checked.
December 13, 2013
Excellent history of the battle between big coal and the people of Southern Illinois. Whites were first drawn to Southern Illinois by salt. Coal was readily available, and was useful in processing the salt. But with the industrial revolution, the extraction of coal became the priority.
Southern Illinois lead the radical organized resistance nationally by coal miners against coal company exploitation. Mother Jones started her long career as an organizer in Southern Illinois and insisted on being buried there (her grave is in Mt. Olive, in a union cemetery). While not included in the book this story continues today, with the fight overflow fracking--the latest scheme by big coal to ring the last drop of natural resources out of the ground for profits.
The book frames this history loosely around the fight to save the author's family home in Eagle Creek. Settled by some of the earliest arrivals to the salt mines, eagle Creek is finally destroyed by strip miners in current times.
As other reviewers have noted, the book provides an important antidote to anyone who writes off Southern Illinois as a hopeless backwater, and believes all things progressive come from Chicago.
My only criticism is that the frame really doesn't contain the narrative, and the book tends in the second half of the book to wonder off on tangents, focusing on mountaintop removal in Appalachia, which has nothing to do with Eagle Creek, other than bot are examples of depredation by big coal.
Southern Illinois lead the radical organized resistance nationally by coal miners against coal company exploitation. Mother Jones started her long career as an organizer in Southern Illinois and insisted on being buried there (her grave is in Mt. Olive, in a union cemetery). While not included in the book this story continues today, with the fight overflow fracking--the latest scheme by big coal to ring the last drop of natural resources out of the ground for profits.
The book frames this history loosely around the fight to save the author's family home in Eagle Creek. Settled by some of the earliest arrivals to the salt mines, eagle Creek is finally destroyed by strip miners in current times.
As other reviewers have noted, the book provides an important antidote to anyone who writes off Southern Illinois as a hopeless backwater, and believes all things progressive come from Chicago.
My only criticism is that the frame really doesn't contain the narrative, and the book tends in the second half of the book to wonder off on tangents, focusing on mountaintop removal in Appalachia, which has nothing to do with Eagle Creek, other than bot are examples of depredation by big coal.
January 10, 2017
Very interesting to me because of Eagle Creek's proximity to our hometown as well as the fact that a coal mine processing plant is now located a mile from our house. Very alarming because of the devastation wrought by strip mining at Eagle Creek as well as the State of Illinois' consistent turning a blind eye to this devastation. It pretty much confirms what I feel still going on today. Lots of ancient history and 20th century history here, detailing just how much has been lost in southern Illinois.
August 14, 2015
A ringing and poetic condemnation of two hundred years of environmental and human exploitation of the Illinois coal regions. I've been to the Eagle Creek area a number of times. Biggers' description is spot on.
April 17, 2010
Boring.
October 17, 2015
Lyrical, part family memoir and state memoir. I learned about the coal industry in Southern Illinois and Appalachia. The book is making me reconsider how I use my energy every day.
November 23, 2015
One of the more interesting books I have read in my History classes. I learned a lot that I didn't know about an area not too far from me and got a refresher course on the evils of global warming.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews