Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1943. Hardcover first edition - The first book by this prolific chronicler of the American West - a memoir which describes his "early years when the West was still a place of ranchers, miners, cowboys, prospectors, and mountaineers - for most men, a world of backbreaking, lonely, and dangerous work. However instead of focus on 'the cold and the cruel fatigue', he wrote about the tiny things which together create the 'poetry of rock and ice and snow.' He documented his experiences in rugged southwest Colorado - especially his days working in the Camp Bird Mine near Ouray - to preserve what he saw as a rapidly disappearing way of life. Illustrated with line drawings by William Arthur Smith. vi, 298 pp.