Tooele native’s latest book based on Tooele County’s past

A fictionalized Tooele County has taken center stage in a Tooele native's newest book.

Jana Richman, who grew up in Tooele, but now lives in Salt Lake City, said most people will recognize Ganoa County -- a primary geographic location in her most recent book "The Last Cowgirl" -- as Tooele County.

"It's been fictionalized enough that I didn't feel comfortable calling it Tooele County," she said.

Images of Dugway Proving Ground, with its chain-link fences, and of the majestic Oquirrh and Onaqui mountains fill the pages of the book. Even the beginnings of Tooele County are brought into the mix.

"Like most of its residents, Ganoa was born into farming, grew up in mining, milling, and smelting, then handed itself over to God and country," Richman writes.

The book tells the story of a woman's journey as she deals with her past. It is told in a first-person point of view and seamlessly weaves the past and the present together.

The book is centered around Dickie Sinfield. After her father moves her family to a ranch in Utah's west desert, Dickie can't wait until the day she can get away and move to the city. The story follows Dickie as she becomes a journalist in Salt Lake City, and then returns to her childhood home after her brother is killed. She becomes strangely pulled toward the ranch and desert she fled from. Memories come rushing back as she visits places and people from her past. The book also touches on religion and the role it plays in the desert community of Clayton, Utah.

Richman said one of the reasons she fictionalized the county is the hard facts of Tooele County didn't serve the story.

"Ganoa is set further away from Salt Lake City and it's got a much smaller population than Tooele County has, so it's just got kind of a different makeup. But," she added, "as far as the demographics of it, it's probably quite similar, with the mining and military background."

Because the story goes back and forth between present time and the '60s, another element of Tooele County that didn't serve the story was the change and growth the county has gone through in that time.

Richman said she isn't sure how people familiar with Tooele County will react to the book, but that it will depend on the person's history with the county and how long they've been there.

"For a long while, Tooele County was just a really small rural community, and everybody knew each other," she said. "It wasn't what it is now, which is a bedroom community."

While the book does have seeds of autobiography, Richman said it moves rather quickly away from that.

Richman graduated from Tooele High School in 1974, and her parents still live in Tooele.

"I always spent a lot of time in the Oquirrh Mountains and the west desert," she said. "I love the west desert and I think it's one of the most serene and beautiful spots on the face of the earth. I wish more people thought so instead of thinking it was a wasteland."

Richman received an accounting degree from the University of Utah and worked on Wall Street in New York for a few years before moving to Tucson, Ariz.

"While I was there [New York] I decided I really wanted to write so I moved back to the West."

She received a master's degree in journalism and a creative writing degree from the University of Arizona and then returned to Utah in 2004.

Richman was inspired to write this book after remembering an event in 1968, when the U.S. government was conducting open-air nerve-gas testing in the west desert, which ended up killing more than 6,000 sheep.

"I just remembered that incident in 1968 and I remember mostly that it didn't cause as big of a reaction as it seems like it should have, so that kind of always stuck with me," Richman said.

The historical elements in the novel are based on fact, but Richman didn't stick with the facts. For example, the nerve gas testing referred to in the book did kill 6,000 sheep, but not the cattle that are also written about. The killing of the cattle was added so that it had an impact on that particular ranching family, she said.

Richman said she writes about the West and issues affecting the West because it's who she is.

"I'm a Westerner through and through, so the conflicts of the West always intrigue me and stir me," she said. "The places where the old West merges with the new West and the places where our romantic visions of the West are in conflict with the reality of the West run through my writing. I'm a Westerner and I always will be."

Sarah Miley: swest@tooeletranscript.com