" In the hour of their disspiritedness, the haggard face and form that drooped and fainted were authentic enough They had worked hard and hoped hard, and their disappointment was as great as their expectations had been. But the money movtie demeans the. They were in no race for wealth - that was precisely what disgusted Grandfather with the mining business. They were makers and doers, they wanted to take a piece of wilderness and turn it into a home for a civilization. I suppose they were wrong - their whole civilization was wrong - but they were the antithesis of mean or greedy. Given the choice, any one of them would have chosen poverty, with the success of their project, over wealth and its failure. "

― Wallace Stegner , Angle of Repose