Drought To Revolt In Montana
“Bad Land: An American Romance” by Jonathan Raban (Pantheon Books, 324 pp. $25)
In the present-day West he explores so engagingly in his new book, “Bad Land: An American Romance,” Jonathan Raban meets many people hostile to the federal government. These dissenters are not only extremists like the members of the Militia of Montana who refuse even to look at him as he eats breakfast in the Landmark Cafe, “evidently the regimental mess,” in Noxon, Mont.
They are also mild-mannered ranchers disdainful of Washington bureaucrats who, they say, think of the West as an empty space in which to practice their naive environmental experiments.
Raban seems in general to disapprove of such outlooks, remarking at one point that “ranchers and farmers, with their wheat subsidies and grazing rights, had more tax-dollars in their pockets than any other single group of Americans, not excluding, say, single teenage black mothers on welfare.”
Yet, he writes, if one were looking for evidence to support the idea that the federal government was capable of dishonesty, one had only to remember the Enlarged Homestead Act, passed by Congress in 1909, which guaranteed 320 free acres in the Plains of Montana and Dakota to anyone willing to farm them.
Through the promotional efforts of railroad and mining interests, Americans and Europeans were persuaded that it was possible to farm what Raban refers to as “the Great American Desert,” an expanse of land “which looked suspiciously like the surface of the moon.” In one of his blunter passages, Raban calls the dryland homestead scheme “this cruel hoax, this shoddy, obvious piece of scam artistry.”
To make his history palpable to the reader, Raban steps into the Montana moonscape, creates a feeling of its intimidating immensity and then walks through a ruined homestead, picking up and examining its abandoned contents.
One item is the famous pamphlet that inspired so many settlers, “Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual,” in which Hardy W. Campbell, an evangelical farming expert, described what he saw as a revolutionary new system for farming semi-arid land.
As Raban sums up the system: “You’d need to buy a Campbell Sub-Surface Packer to compact the soil at the root-level of your crops. You’d also need a disk harrow to break up the topmost layer into a fine, loose mulch. The pulverized surface soil would collect the rain; the packed soil would store the moisture for future use.”
If there was rain.
There was, at least for the first three summers after the settlers arrived, 1911, 1912 and 1913. Raban recreates the spirit of the time by introducing actual families and showing how their hopes soared, their bankers rejoiced, interest rates sank, credit expanded and debt mounted. And then, as Raban writes: “The weather broke. It had not been cured, as the optimists claimed. It had only been in remission.”
Most ruinously, drought hit in 1917. Wheat production fell, and along with it wheat prices. One of Raban’s witnesses recalls his father’s telling him that “his haunting memory of this time was the sight of his mother, on her knees every day, crying and praying for rain.”
The war in Europe and the drought in Montana “collapsed into a single catastrophe.”
What is the point of this vivid reconstruction of the past, besides making readers feel firsthand the awful futility of fighting nature at its most malevolent? In the last third of “Bad Land,” Raban travels back and forth between eastern Montana and his home in Seattle, trying to see what became of the homesteaders and their descendants and trying to understand the legacy of their experience.
His conclusions are complex, reflecting the contradictory nature of a community made up of individualistic people who wanted to succeed on their own terms. The failure of the homesteaders was reflected for him in a pathetic effort by Ismay, a Montana town in the heart of the Plains, to rename itself Joe and thereby share the glory of the pro football hero of the same name.