[In the review below, Marsh gives a mixed assessment of The Wild Earth's Nobility.]

Frank Waters has written one of those tales of the West which are competing with English, Scandinavian and other "sagas" for popularity with those who like long drawn out family histories. If it be true that every man's life has a novel in it, it is just as true that every family has the stuff out of which a saga (in the corrupted modern use of the word) may be fabricated. The American pioneer saga has its own virtues and its own defects. But all honest novels of pioneer families should be welcomed for theirs is the stuff out of which American society has been made.

Frank Waters's [The Wild Earth's Nobility] is a novel of the Colorado mining boom. It begins in the Seventies and runs through the early years of the 1900s. Here is the lore and legend and language of Colorado's great period.

Waters's novel interested the reviewer because it is the first modern, realistic novel, so far as he knows, to deal with one of the fantastic true stories of American expansion, one which is a legend in his family. But Waters has not made the best of his material. One doubts if he really meant what seems to be the main point of his novel. That point is that Joseph Rogier, originally from North Carolina, won his fortune through steadiness, control, discipline and will power; then lost it because of his loyalty to an ideal, his dependence on honor and his integrity, his inability to deal with schemers except physically.

The real reason for Rogier's fall, the true meaning of the story, was that in a gambling game, luck is no respecter of persons. The fortunes that grew up out of the great Colorado gold and silver booms did not favor the worthy any more than the scamps. And the plutocracy which emerged was an odd assortment of individuals with every known kind of background. When Rogier threw over building and contracting to take his luck with gold, even after years of thought and study, he had to stake what he had, to take pot-luck with the rest; and it just so happened that he lost.

This Rogier is a nebulous and, on the whole, unlikable person anyway. Nobody cares that he and his family lose everything, except possibly on general humanitarian grounds. That is the chief defect of the novel. The second defect is that Waters has not integrated his fascinating array of facts, old Colorado yarns, the mountains themselves and the society that grew up in Colorado Springs with his tale.

Only in the story of the married love of Tom and Molly has he made us feel. That story is the main part of the first third of the novel, covering the early pioneering days; and that first third is a sound and moving piece of story telling. Tom and Molly are the people we know best and come to feel with and for. But Molly dies early in the book; and although we look for Tom to reappear thereafter, he never does.

Tom is the romanticist, the dreamer of riches to be made just over the horizon, the lover of good company with liquor flowing free, the generous-hearted soul when in hope or in funds, the melancholy self-confessing failure when downcast. Always volatile, always dodging the implacable truth, Tom is doomed to failure—but not necessarily in Colorado. An occasional Tom came through with a strike and thereafter sat in the seats of the mighty. And in the end the strong, dependable and self-contained Rogier lost everything, too. Destiny was not in men but in the mountains. And Lady Luck was their goddess.

With the boy, Boné, and his natural passion for sounds culminating later in his absorption in music, Waters has tried a more delicate characterization. Boné's ultimate failure in creative work, that he becomes a ragtime player and composer in San Francisco, is a true realistic touch. For Boné had neither the facilities nor teachers nor understanding sympathy, nor, after the crash of his father's fortune, money to build up a musical career and interpret his love of his own country in music. That kind of thing must wait for a later generation.

The novel has a hundred episodes, including a number of horse races which left us cold. The style has stray tendencies to become perfervid. And Mr. Waters seems to have missed out by not giving his novel any meaning, direction, any theme. Its value is purely descriptive, explanatory and informative, livened with many fragments of fine storytelling. But those Golconda days in Colorado when Leadville boomed, Denver became a big town and Cripple Creek led the world in gold production, are worth reading about, and worth reading in these pages.

Mr. Waters knows the story and the legends and the facts. There is matter enough for another novel which need not be interrupted by the, on the whole, uninteresting Rogier family. There remains, though, in the book a quality which as a far-off echo reminds one of Henry Handel Richardson's great trilogy of Australia Felix. But the echo is slight and the comparison somewhat far-fetched.