MUCH attention has been devoted by novelists to California in the days of the Gold Rush, but little has been written of the agricultural and industrial development which followed on the heels of the forty-niners, and gave the Golden State and its people their peculiarly distinctive character. Francine Findley has in "Treeless Eden" limned an admirable picture of this development; the foundation of the book is the influence on the character of the Californians of the fertile soil, of the newness of the country, of the splendid untouched natural resources, of the new forces stirring in America as she began after 1870 to take a foremost place in the family of nations.

The story begins in 1869, and carries through three generations of the Jacox family, down to the days of Roosevelt, the bank holiday, and the NRA. California changes, and the Jacox family with it. The valley of the Sacramento River, in 1869 a region of deserted mines and straggling, undeveloped farms, and now one of the most prosperous and productive spots in the country, is the background; in the foreground are the farmers, the business men, the politicians, the farm laborers and factory workers, who made and were made by the development of the state. Beneath it all there is this theme: "Progress" results from the efforts of self-reliant, ambitious, ruthless men and women, those who keep an eye on the main chance and let nothing stand in their way; more kindly, less certain souls, who wish only to live and let live, are trampled beneath the feet of the climbers. But a day of reckoning comes: there is no Eden without the tree of the knowledge of right and wrong. Selina Jacox, stern, avaricious, grasping all she could hold, becomes the millionaire apricot Queen, known all over the country, and lived out her lonely days in a cheerless mansion, bejeweled and embittered, fabulously wealthy in money, but poor in everything else. Jim, the illegitimate son of her kindly, easy going husband, Captain Jacox of the "River Belle", is trained in the ways of Selina, and sacrificing love, honor, friendship, everything to the lust for power, dies unsatisfied. His son, Howard becomes a Communist agitator, married a half-breed Indian for love, finds happiness, as the old Captain, his grandfather has found it, in helping others