Published at the very beginning of a sudden upsurge in White Mountain tourism, Crawford's text presents numerous first- and second-hand accounts that are further embellished in later histories and guidebooks. The many texts published after Crawford's that attempt to meaningfully engage the interplay of tourism and mountain landscape often draw their illustrations from directly from Crawford's work. Crawford's accounts of local tragedies...all reappear in modified form throughout the body of White Mountain literature published in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This earliest local history of the White Mountains remains the most important source of information on the period before 1850. It is a curious document. Its author is Lucy Howe Crawford, Ethan Allen Crawford's wife. However, she tells the story from his point of view and even writes as if Ethan was the narrator (with some lapses into her own voice). She attributes the creation of their tourist business entirely to Ethan, but she must have played a considerable role herself. Ethan was illiterate, and Lucy could read and write only passably. Though telling the story in rough chronological order, Lucy often gets ahead of herself or leaves out parts of the events she is narrating so that she must return later and sketch them in. In short, the life story of Ethan and Lucy is somewhat fragmented and seems at first "primitive." Bit by bit, however, the reader comes to see the extraordinary cleverness and determination of this couple who, almost by themselves, invented White Mountain tourism.