The family travelled from Illinois to California by automobile, and Crampton credits this trip with inculcating in him an interest in the American West.

[2] His thesis concerned the history of mining in Mariposa, CA, with an emphasis on the land grant of John Charles Fremont.

[3] In the early 1950s, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley obtained an original manuscript of a member of the Mariposa Battalion expedition.

Largely on the basis of the fact that Crampton's PhD thesis covered some of that history, he was requested to edit this work, which was published in 1957.

In 1956 Crampton was awarded a grant to study the cultures and retrieve artifacts from the area which was to be flooded by the Glen Canyon Dam.