Of all the memoirs of the wild West, Frank Crampton's autobiography of his youth in the mining camps ranks with the very best.
Scion of a wealthy New York family, Crampton ran away from home in 1904 at the age of sixteen. Two bindle stiffs picked him up in a Chicago railroad depot and led him west as they taught him to survive first as a hobo and then as a hard-rock miner. In the first two decades of this century Crampton lived and worked in almost all of the important mining camps in the Westin California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado as a miner, assayer, surveyor, and finally one of...
Of all the memoirs of the wild West, Frank Crampton's autobiography of his youth in the mining camps ranks with the very best.
