THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 26, 1997 TAG: 9701190711
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY PAT LACKEY
LENGTH: 82 lines
BAD LAND
An American Romance
JOHNATHAN RABAN
Pantheon. 324 pp. $25.
Even today, Westerners tend to be different from other Americans: They're more distrustful, if not hateful, of the federal government. The first county extension agents to travel west to teach farming were despised.
A poll published in The Washington Post on the 25th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing revealed that 20 million Americans appear to believe that the moon landing was a hoax perpetrated in the Arizona desert by the federal government to benefit corporations with NASA contracts. Significantly, Westerners were twice as likely as Easterners to believe the moon landing never occurred.
Reading Jonathan Raban's beautifully written book, Bad Land: An American Romance, will help you to understand how Westerners got that way.
Bad Land is about homesteaders in a large section of western Montana and the eastern Dakotas, early in this century. They were lured from across Europe and much of the United States by railroad company pamphlets that might charitably be described as ``romantic fiction,'' and by the government offer of free land. Pay a $16 fee, cultivate 320 acres, and the land was yours.
``At a time when there was real fear that America might soon be unable to feed itself,'' Raban writes, ``homesteading dry-farmers would vastly widen the wheat belt, and raise cattle on a tiny fraction of the land required by the old-style ranchers. And the homesteaders would finance the completion of the transcontinental railroad network.''
The railroads created towns at roughly 12-mile intervals in the middle of an area that Raban describes as having ``more space than place.'' The farmers' bees came by mail-order from Sears, Roebuck. As Raban drives past a dozen ruined houses for every surviving ranch, he thinks, ``I'd rather settle for a more sociable berth, like being a lighthouse keeper.''
Most of the farms and towns never had a chance - not against the intense cold, hail, tornadoes, prairie fires, grasshoppers, fluctuating crop prices, shallow topsoil, remoteness, bankers' eagerness to lend money for expensive equipment, and most of all, aridity. Crops needed 15 inches of rain a year to grow and frequently didn't get it.
Raban writes that one railroad magnate ``created as many ruins by accident as Tamburlaine the Great had done on purpose.''
``The misleading language and pictures of the pamphlets,'' he says, ``would eventually entitle the homesteaders to see themselves as innocent dupes of a government that was in the pocket of the corporation fat cats - and their sense of betrayal would fester through the generations.''
In one respect, Jonathan Raban is the perfect author for this book. He is a Brit in his late 40s who grew up in lush farmland. The openness and emptiness of the West strike him hard, reminding him of nothing so much as the sea.
In a feat he calls ``imaginative reconstruction,'' Raban visited the homestead ruins, talked to descendants of homesteaders and read homesteaders' accounts of their hard lives, then his imagination brought the whole story to emotional life. The reader feels what the homesteaders surely felt.
The writing occasionally brings the reader to an admiring stop. On one page, an establishment is described as ``the kind of crepuscular beer joint in which one might expect scuffles to erupt as extensions of normal conversation''; young waiters are ``hovering like skinny angelfish,'' and farmers are ``exchanging rainfall figures in one-hundreths of an inch.''
An early photographer is described as a ``robust, broad-shouldered woman with a commanding nose, shaggy eyebrows and a mouth like a mailbox.''
The book, though it includes a chapter on early photographs of the West, has but one photograph - on the cover. And that photograph is entirely wrong for the book, because it is dominated by a ruined cabin. In the West, the book makes clear, the endless land dominates people and their puny constructions - never the other way around. More and better photos would have greatly improved Bad Land.
But it's never boring. It abounds with Raban's insights and theories.
``My God,'' he writes, ``was as much a product of the landscape and weather in which I lived as he was of the scriptures in which I read about him - and it seems to me entirely unsurprising that the Protestant gods of the United States would be so much fiercer and more temperamental than the one in whom I once believed. . . . There is no Anglican mildness in the climate of eastern Montana.'' MEMO: Pat Lackey is an editorial writer and columnist for The
Virginian-Pilot.