In Below Grass Roots, the second book in Frank Waters’s Pikes Peak saga, turn-of-the-century Colorado Springs is prospering with the mining boom and a growing tourist industry. Patriarch Joseph Rogier becomes ever more obsessed with the treasures of the towering mountain and tries to enlist his son-in-law Jonathan Cable in his mining schemes. Cable instead leaves for Navajo country with his young son. Rogier, convinced that new wealth lies deep within the mountain, below grass roots, sinks his mines and what remains of his fortune ever deeper into the mountain’s granite.

As in the other two novels in this semiautobiographical saga, Waters’s masterful narrative draws on his own keen perception of the human condition to bring us this compelling tale of struggle and hope in the American West.

Pike’s Peak is composed of three condensed novels: The Wild Earth’s Nobility, Below Grass Roots, and The Dust within the Rock.

Frank Waters (1902–1995), one of the finest chroniclers of the American Southwest, wrote twenty-eight works of fiction and nonfiction.