Brantley Baird never misses a chance to talk history, from how his great-grandmother helped settle the town of Snowflake long before Arizona was granted statehood to tales of riding to school bareback and tethering his horse outside the one-room schoolhouse.
His family worked the land and raised livestock, watching the railroad come and go and cattle empires rise and fall. Then came the coal-fired power plants, built throughout northern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to power progress in distant Western cities.
