Frank's Ranche; Or, My Holiday in the Rockies: Being a Contribution to the Inquiry into What We Are to Do with Our Boys

A father travels west to find his son. That's the heart of it. In the summer of 1886, E. Marston leaves England for the American Rockies, drawn by worry and hope in equal measure. His son Frank has been chasing frontier dreams across the continent, trying farming in Minnesota, always failing, always pushing onward. Now Frank has landed at a remote ranch in the Rockies, and his father is coming to see him. What follows is part travelogue, part anxious parent's eye-view of the American West. Marston records the bone-deep cold, the spectacular emptiness, the strange wildlife, and the rough men who call this landscape home. But mostly he watches his son, that "adventurous spirit," trying to carve out a life in a place that doesn't care about his ambitions. The frontier that Americans mythologized becomes, in Marston's careful prose, something more complicated: a proving ground where dreams go to be tested against rock and weather and silence. This is a book for anyone who has ever watched someone they love chase a dream that terrifies them. It captures something eternal about the distance between what we imagine our lives will be and what they become.