Description, Mining the Past In the late summer of 1977 the author headed for the Wyoming prairie to try to find Big Muddy, the seemingly magical coal mining camp where her grandmother and her family had lived in the early 1900's. Her first obstacle had been finding out that her grandmother wasn't well enough to travel with her. Susan decided to go anyway, armed only with her grandmother's vague directions and the name of a coal mine no one except her family seemed to think existed. Road maps drew a blank, and there was no GPS or Google in those days for information. Mining the Past tells the...