Duane Ankney liked to heat his home with coal in Colstrip, Montana. Lots of folks do. They drive down to the local Rosebud Mine and a front loader drops scoops of the stuff into pickup beds and trailers.

But during the many cold months he spent in Helena, representing Colstrip and other Montana coal communities in the Montana Legislature, Ankney wasn’t around to keep his personal coal-fired home heating system fed and burning.

When Ankney passed away in August from apparent heart failure at 79, tributes on social media and in newspapers across Montana hailed him as the state’s “Coal King.”

Often donning a hat and blessed with an impressively bushy mustache, Ankney looked like an extra playing one of the townspeople in a Hollywood western. He remembered little things about his neighbors

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