Through Poverty's Vale: A Hardscrabble Boyhood in Upstate New York, 1832-1862Writing his full length reminiscence in a lonely Adirondack cabin during the winter of 1891 92, Henry Conklin recounts the first thirteen years of his life on a farm in Schoharie County, his young manhood in Herkimer County, and his service in the Civil War. The story is one of a hardscrabble life, of farming on marginal land and struggling each day for necessary food and clothing. And yet Conklin asserts that these years were the happiest he knew.