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.

Based on one of the most significant periods in Frank Waters’s own life, Pike’s Peak is perhaps the most complete expression of all the archetypal themes he explored in both fiction and nonfiction.

In The Dust within the Rock, the third book in the Pike’s Peak saga, an aging Joseph Rogier clings to his vision of finding gold in the great mountain and his grandson Marsh comes of age in the Rogier household. It is the early part of the twentieth century, in Colorado Springs, and the schoolhouse, the newsstand, the railroad, the mines, all become part of the younger man’s emergence into adulthood and self-discovery.

Waters’s powerful and intuitive style transforms the tale into a mythic journey, a search for meaning played out in the drama of everyday living on the vast American frontier.

Pike’s Peak (1971) is composed of three condensed novels: The Wild Earth’s Nobility, Below Grass Roots, and The Dust within the Rock. Some years after its publication, an interviewer asked Frank Waters whether it was autobiographical. “Yes,” he replied, “and no.”

The Wild Earth’s Nobility is the first of Frank Waters’s semiautobiographical novels in the Pikes Peak saga. Here, in a frontier town in the shadow of the commanding mountain, the Rogier family settles near an age-old route of migrating Native Americans. In an era of prospecting, silver strikes, and frenzied mining, Joseph Rogier becomes a successful building contractor, rears a large family, and is gradually overwhelmed by the power of the great peak.

In Waters’s visionary prose, the story becomes a mythic journey to reconcile instinct and reason, consciousness and intuition, and the powerful emotions of a family struggling with its own dreams and human limitations.

Frank Waters (1902-1995), one of the finest chroniclers of the American Southwest, wrote twenty-eight works of fiction and nonfiction. Of Pike’s Peak (1971), the Chicago Daily News wrote, “It is a product of maturity, written with a sustained strength and beauty of style rarely found in fiction today.”

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