SOURCE: "Character and Landscape: Frank Waters' Colorado Trilogy," in Western American Literature, Vol. II, No. 2, August, 1967, pp. 183-93.

[Pilkington, an American professor of English, is the author of several books on the literature of the West and Southwest. In the essay that follows, he examines the interrelationship between place and character in The Wild Earth's Nobility, Below Grass Roots, and The Dust within the Rock, a trilogy he considers "a work of great lyrical and emotional power."]

The drama of people's "conflicting relationships to their earth," Frank Waters once wrote, "has provided something of a thematic continuity in all my books" ["The Western Novel: A Symposium—Frank Waters," South Dakota Review (Autumn 1964)]. Like most Western writers, Waters strives to capture, in D. H. Lawrence's phrase, "the spirit of place." But as anyone who has submitted himself to the power and beauty of his books will testify, he is interested not simply in natural settings existing in isolated grandeur, but rather in the subtle influence of landscape on character and in the interaction of the two. Waters was born in Colorado, and he has lived and traveled throughout the West—particularly in New Mexico, Arizona, Mexico, and southern California. In the writing of his books, each of these places was cast into the fiery smelter of his imagination and was refined to a quintessential purity; in his works, each is the scene of memorable episodes in man's continuing struggle to live in harmony with his natural surroundings.

Waters' best-known books are his novels of northern New Mexico, People of the Valley (1941) and The Man Who Killed the Deer (1942) and more recently The Woman of Otowi Crossing (1966). They have earned for him, in Lawrence Clark Powell's estimation, the title of "laureate of the Sangre de Cristos," and without question they deserve their high ranking among novels about the West. It is a pity, however—indeed, I would call it shameful—that his Colorado mining trilogy, which is by all odds one of the most remarkable and moving fictional chronicles in American literature, is today out of print (it has never been reprinted) and virtually forgotten. The three volumes which make up the trilogy—The Wild Earth's Nobility (1935), Below Grass Roots (1937), and The Dust Within the Rock (1940)—taken together run to more than 1,600 pages. They are laid against the background of Colorado history and in the commanding shadow of Pike's Peak, and are brilliantly evocative of the author's native region (the area around Colorado Springs). By following the shifting fortunes of Joseph Rogier and his family during a span of some fifty years, they provide a dramatic panorama of Colorado's rowdiest period—the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Leadville was the scene of a silver boom and gold was discovered at Cripple Creek. Like Thomas Wolfe's North Carolina novels, to which it has been compared, the trilogy is to some extent autobiographical; also like Wolfe's fiction, it is a work of great lyrical and emotional power.

The first part of the trilogy, The Wild Earth's Nobility, begins in the 1870's, when Joseph Rogier, the son of a wealthy Carolina planter who had lost his fortune and had died a broken man, migrates with his wife and family to the town of Little London in Colorado. When he had left home, Rogier had gone first to Baltimore, where he had learned the trade of carpentry; later, he moved to Missouri, married there, and began rearing a family. His last move is to Colorado, where he soon prospers, first as a builder, then as an independent contractor. Quite early during his residence in Little London there occurs a tragedy which foreshadows his own downfall many years later. Tom Hines, his brother-in-law, is bitten by the get-rich-quick bug; against everyone's advice, he goes to Leadville, which is in the midst of a silver boom, and promptly loses his and his wife's last penny. Humiliated, Hines drops out of sight, leaving his wife dependent for her livelihood on the Rogier family.

For two decades, Rogier leads a steady, prosperous life. Noting his growing wealth, his wife asks him to build her a house in the town's fashionable North End. Rogier promises her that he will, but he never does; instead, he constructs, on a creek called Shook's Run, a great rambling, barnlike structure which, in good times and bad, remains the family's home. The cumulative effect of this episode, and many others like it, is to stress "that inconceivable obstinacy of purpose … which was both Rogier's virtue and folly" (Below Grass Roots). By the 1890's, Rogier is a truly wealthy man, and when Little London is inundated by the madness of the Cripple Creek gold strike, he is at first content to dabble in relatively safe enterprises. Gradually, though, he begins supporting more risky ventures, and by the end of the first volume he has sunk everything, all of his money and vast holdings in land, in a mine called the Sylvanite, which even from the beginning seems to be a complete washout.

Below Grass Roots is mainly an account of Rogier's growing preoccupation with mining, with the Sylvanite, with getting below the surface and into the core of the earth itself. It begins in the late 1890's with Rogier virtually bankrupt. Disgusted with himself, he vows never again to have anything to do with mining and sets out to re-establish himself as a builder and contractor—a task he accomplishes with the help of his business contacts in Little London. But like a fatal magnet, Cripple Creek inevitably draws him back. At first he returns to do construction work for some mines in the district, and soon under the spell again, he decides to re-open the Sylvanite.

Rogier's financial recovery and his decision once again to invest his time and money in the Sylvanite are a subtle and insidious process which takes years to unfold, and during this time great changes are occurring within the Rogier family. The daughters all get married and leave home; the only son, Big Joe, who Rogier had hoped would follow him into building and mining, gets a job on an Eastern newspaper. Only Ona remains in Little London. She marries Jonathan Cable, a boarder in the Rogier household who is part Indian and whose origins always remain something of a mystery. After their marriage, Jonathan tries selling real estate and insurance, but he is dissatisfied and is finally persuaded by Rogier to try his luck on the Sylvanite. But Ona is bitterly opposed to his risking his life and money in her father's mine, and she and Cable quarrel continuously. There follows an interlude in which Cable takes their son March to the Navajo reservation in New Mexico, where for several months he works at a trading post. Content with the life of the reservation, he thinks of staying there for good, but he is terribly frightened when March is almost lost in a flood. So he returns to Ona and to the Sylvanite, where, working in winter cold and high altitude, he contracts pneumonia and dies. Ona, with very little choice in the matter, takes her children, March and Leona, and moves back to the family house on Shook's Run.

Rogier, now in his seventies, is again pouring everything, every penny he can beg or make from his building projects, into the Sylvanite. The theory at the time was that all of the wealth of the Cripple Creek district was in the earth's crust. Rogier, however, believes that the greatest deposits of gold are deep beneath the earth's surface. His belief is partially vindicated when a mine on a neighboring hill discovers, deep within the earth, a rich vein of treasure. But by this time, Rogier has become too old and too addled even to run his construction business, and he is able to work the Sylvanite only when he can scrape together a few dollars. Eventually, the mine has to be closed and the equipment sold for salvage. This turn of events leaves Rogier broken financially and physically, an old man barely capable of remembering the names of his grandchildren. Fittingly, his deterioration parallels the decline of the Cripple Creek district itself. Following a period of strikes and labor trouble, the district begins to lose its appeal to investors, and at novel's end, the mining of gold has been virtually abandoned for that of more useful metals needed in the war effort.

By 1920, the approximate date when The Dust Within the Rock begins, Rogier is a semi-invalid. The family is now destitute, financially ruined by the old man's obsession. Ona's son March, to keep himself and his sister in school, has to work at the railroad station in Little London, while at the house on Shook's Run his grandfather still dreams of finding gold beneath Pike's Peak. In one last, ill-starred effort to get down "below grass roots," Rogier begins digging a tunnel under his greenhouse. The tunnel and greenhouse collapse—and with them the last vestige of the old man's health. Not long thereafter he dies of a stroke, his body finally debilitated by the weight of the years; in spirit, however, he remains contentious and unyielding to the end.

After finishing high school, March enters the small college in Little London. He wants to follow his grandfather's lead, to become a mining engineer, not realizing that "engineering is the strictest and biggest business of all, the most tedious and unromantic." Eventually, though, he comes to doubt the validity of his chosen profession. He begins to see mining in a different light than his grandfather had seen it: "A mine gutted, a hill truncated, a mountain peak uprooted for a gold brick! It seemed to him a monstrous symbol of that America laid waste for a wealth no one knew how to use." His family, in even more straitened circumstances, lose their home on Shook's Run. March, in order to make money, drops out of school to look for a job. But his resultant wanderings, while prompted by financial necessity, are primarily a means of self-discovery, an attempt to find some meaning for his existence.

He goes first to Casper, Wyoming, where a different kind of gold (oil) has just been discovered. Though he works for a time as a laborer in the oil fields, he soon tires of such drudgery, and not knowing quite what to do, he heads south for the border country of the Southwest. He gets a job as a "junior engineer" at a copper mine in Arizona, and later he is hired by a large corporation to manage one of its silver mines in central Mexico. March finds the tropics a kind of paradise where everything comes easy, and since his position as manager requires little of him, he soon slips into the relaxed tempo of the natives. But there is something alien and malevolent about this way of life, and March comes to realize that it is mired in the "black sediment that lies at the bottom of Mexico's soul, like a quick-sand. And from the earth itself a down-dragging affluence like that coming from the heavy resistant Indian bodies. He could feel his own blood sink down to meet it. In the blue depths of time, he thought, I am scraping bottom."

Believing that he is beginning to rot, like some jungle plant being consumed by decay, March leaves Mexico and makes his way back to Little London, where he arrives in time to hear news of a revival of interest in Cripple Creek; mines are being worked again, and a new drainage tunnel is about to be built in the district. As a result of valuable experience gained in Arizona and Mexico, he is offered a position as engineer of the drainage tunnel project. At peace with himself at last—"quiet, resolute, and integrated"—March accepts. He rejoices in the realization that, after a long and tortuous journey, he has come home—home to stay. "Men are free," he had once thought to himself in Mexico, "only when rooted in a living homeland; vibrant and alive when they are continuously renewed by the sap running through their veins; at peace only when they acknowledge the mystery of which they are a part."

With March physically and spiritually restored and eager to get on with the task before him, the trilogy comes to an end. It is a vast, sprawling, almost overwhelming work, and one scarcely knows where to begin in assessing it. Perhaps a good place to start is where Waters no doubt started—with the land itself. Though much of the action of the trilogy occurs in Little London (which is, of course, the author's native Colorado Springs), town life is always shown to be superficial and corrupting. Waters is mercilessly sarcastic in his comments on Little London society and on the summer tourists who infest the place. The town, he writes, "was the most unforgivable of prostitutes pampering to rich visitors, a woman who had not even the brazen honesty of her calling" (Below Grass Roots).

Contrasted with the hypocritical greed of Little London are the freedom and beauty of the surrounding plains and mountains. There are numerous references to Pike's Peak, which hovers symbolically over the town; to Rogier, the encircling mountains are "majestic and immense … mute and imponderable manifestations of a strength inviolate and enduring" (The Wild Earth's Nobility), and occasionally they awe him to the point that his own dreams and follies seem insignificant by comparison. From the standpoint of use of language, the brilliant set pieces of description in which Waters evokes the land as it appears at different seasons of the year are perhaps the most spectacular aspect of the trilogy. For example, consider his lyrical description of autumn as it comes to the Navajo reservation in New Mexico:

It is the time when the cottonwoods and willows along the acequias burst into a last flaming yellow, and horses' hoofs ring louder on the hard earth. The crows grow blacker, bleaker, and shine like polished knobs along the fence posts. The wind rustles through the corn milpas and the brittle tawny fields spotted with sunflowers. It is the time of harvest; when the double-bladed axes swing in the forests and the teams strain under jags of sweet-smelling cedar; when the old women trudge down the trails with bags of pinones; when the ripened squash glisten by moonlight under a coat of silver rime. Up the Rio Arriba, there, and the Rio Grande, the adobes are hung with chile, a thousand necklaces of scarlet…. October is the corn-ripe moon. Of all months of the year, it is America's month, and the corn comes in by wagonloads: Indian corn, the crop of America's soil: blue ears and black, blood red, bronze, pink, yellow and speckled. The colors spout out of shucking hands, they gleam drying against the dull adobe walls, they hang braided from every doorpost. At night the little water drums, the peyote drums, throb across the pasture. White-sheeted figures sing softly in deep male voices down by the little stream. The first frost has come, "the thunder sleeps." (The Dust Within the Rock)

The land as it is used in Waters' novels, however, is more than just the match which sets off a string of descriptive fireworks. Indeed, its unyielding quality and the necessity of man's accommodating himself to it constitute one of the recurring themes of the trilogy. As Waters puts it, all men are confronted with an enigma: "how to ally themselves with the earth of their adoption" (The Wild Earth's Nobility). It is his belief that the American—the Anglo—has not yet solved this enigma and that his failure to do so explains his traditional restlessness. Time and again in these novels Waters returns to the idea that the Anglo was too suddenly transplanted to "a mighty, new continent" and that he has not yet attuned himself to "the deep rhythm of its wide and bitter earth, its immense and lonely skies, the thunder of its mountains, the tide-suck of its pelagic plains. Not yet rooted in a living homeland—not yet at peace with its breathing spirit of place—strangers all, alone and lonely! And so forever restless, hurtling back and forth from horizon to horizon, moving at every and any excuse" (The Dust Within the Rock).

As Waters sees it, it is the Indian, and only the Indian, who has acquired a mystical affinity for the American land, who has solved the puzzle of what it requires of a people. The Indian's rain dance, for example, symbolizes his perception of "the secret of the great Western landscape, its malevolent aridity, that must always, unceasingly, be propitiated" (The Wild Earth's Nobility). Because "he is not in tune with the land, not yet rooted in a homeland, conforming to its spiritual laws," the white man is confronted with a dilemma, the only resolution of which, says Waters, is "the white's eventual fusion with the Indian" (The Dust Within the Rock). In the trilogy this concept is embodied in the character of March, who finally comes to accept the mixture of blood within him: "I am all that ever has been and will be. I am the false pride and greed and envy, the crumbled magnolia leaves and the moth-rotted Confederate flag of my grandfather's people. And I am my father's dark hawk face and the smoke of a thousand strange campfires in his blood." March, then, is the human symbol of that merging of blood which, in Waters' view, is the only solution to the white man's uneasiness amid the wonders of the American landscape. As a result, he is the only one of the people in the novels to achieve peace with himself and his surroundings, the only one to reach his "living homeland."

Each of the other characters fails, in some important respect, even to be aware of the potency of the land and of its influence on the lives of men. Mrs. Rogier fails because she is too concerned with superficial things, with maintaining her pompous aristocratic pride and her sense of superiority. Ona, March's mother, fails because, of necessity, she is wrapped up in the minutiae of life, in the numbing routine labor of taking care of her parents and making a home for her children. Even Rogier himself fails, and his failure is not only more subtle, but it is also more complete. Seemingly, his only concerns are the land and the secrets that lie deep within it. But his desire to get down "below grass roots" becomes an obsession. He is reminiscent of Melville's Ahab, who also sacrificed everything, including his life, in pursuit of an almost insane objective. Many things about him, such as the tone and terminology he uses in talking about his mine, the Sylvanite, suggest a comparison with Ahab. "Business!" he exclaims at one point. "Who told you this was a business? This is a mine, and more too. It's a shaft to Hell if I can get her there" (Below Grass Roots). In a sense, Rogier is a greater character than Ahab, because Rogier remains human and believable, while Ahab does not. But Rogier's fatal weakness, like Ahab's, is his monomaniacal insistence on conquering nature, on dominating it—instead of yielding to it, as the Indian would have done.

The character of Rogier, however—though he is, in the last analysis, a failure—is magnificent. Indeed, all of the characters in the trilogy are well-drawn, and several of them are as convincing and fully realized as any in Western fiction. The family itself and the web of human relationships of which it is composed are brilliantly drawn. The family functions organically; it is a unit greater than the sum of the individuals who comprise it, and despite Rogier's appalling folly and his wife's foolish pride, it is vibrant with life—with the joys, sorrows, and tragedies that every family knows.

The emotional resonance with which these characters and their family unit are portrayed no doubt derives from the circumstance that they are based on real people and a real family. Specifically, Rogier is the fictional counterpart of Waters' grandfather, Joseph Dozier, who was a pioneer resident of Colorado Springs, a builder and contractor, and a mine-owner in Cripple Creek. Also, March's experiences closely parallel those of the author's early life, and undoubtedly the family situation Waters describes was drawn from his own childhood.

Waters' mining trilogy, then, is to a great extent autobiographical. This fact lends the work an emotional quality it would not otherwise possess, and though it is sometimes overwrought, even melodramatic, it never crosses the bounds of what seems artistically right and factually true. For example, March asks himself, "Who am I? Am I the rock, the sturdy mountain granite shattered by frost and disintegrated by time, or the timeless dust within the rock, carried to the sea to rise against a lofty peak with sea-shells on its summit?" (The Dust Within the Rock). Not every young man would pose such a question, but it certainly seems plausible that a sensitive, romantically-inclined youth like March (or the author) would ask it. Nor does it seem out of line that he receives no immediate answer to the question but is left "quivering with a nameless ache," which ebbs and flows with the "ancient winds that prowled around his grandfather's house on a cold October's night."

As is true of most autobiographical fiction, Waters' Colorado novels are pervaded by a curious ambivalence. But it is not an ambivalence which detracts from their effect or artistic validity; instead, like the continuing conflict between characters and landscape, it adds a dramatic tension that heightens the already emotional tone of the work. This ambivalence is implicit in a passage such as the one in which March yearns to "know again within his grandfather's gaunt old house the mingled pride and warm humanity, the lingering dream-stuff of nearly forty years." Yet, because he feels too keenly the strictures of parental supervision (among other reasons), he later abandons that house and its melancholy inhabitants. March, like all of us at one time or another, finds himself trapped in the crosscurrents of elegy and exorcism. He must come to terms with his past, but he has difficulty deciding which has priority: nostalgic remembrance or the necessity of ridding himself of childhood ghosts. It is a universal human situation, and because Waters handles it in a subtle and believable fashion, it enhances his work considerably.

People and their relationships to the land—these are, as Waters says, the foundation on which all of his fiction rests. Certainly, they are the main concerns of his Colorado mining trilogy. It is the people that one remembers first and most vividly from the trilogy, but then, too, one remembers them against the awe-inspiring backdrop of mountains and plains. One also remembers how genuine and deeply felt the family situations are, for they were, after all, dredged up from the half-forgotten images and emotions of the author's childhood. Viewed as a whole, Waters' trilogy is an engrossing, almost breathtaking, panorama of people, places, and historical events. It is inter-woven of many elements—the intricate pattern of a remarkable family structure, the grandeur of the Western landscape, the tragic magnetism of mining once it enters the blood—and all are treated with grace and sympathy, are described with a lyrical quality that invests the story with poetry. Technically, though it was written over a period of about ten years, it maintains an evenness of tone throughout and, for a work of such great length, the level of performance is consistently high. If there exists somewhere a publisher who wishes to promote Western literature, I suggest that he start by re-issuing these magnificent, but neglected, novels. And critics could do their part by assigning them to their rightful place in our literary record. Recent American literature, I submit, is not so rich in talent and accomplishment that literary historians can afford to ignore one of its most important fictional chronicles.