Works of narrative non-fiction that have a strong sense of place have a particular attraction about them. Such writing that focuses entirely on place, especially forbidding or difficult places are even more compelling. Tales of people living in a landscape, trying to make “place” for themselves, or tales of people merely fighting to survive in hostile environments are at the core of the drama of human existence. Now, for most of us, our daily lives are quite distant from these struggles. We live ensconced in centrally heated and cooled homes and transport ourselves in vehicles that make exterior conditions irrelevant. We may no longer face regular reminder of how hostile nature can be to us, but literature born from the experience of that hostility beckons to us. It is that fundamental struggle that draws us to accounts of exploration and adventure. I have found that I have been often writing about people and the land or people in nature, and it is this classic tension between our reverence for and our struggle with the elements that keeps bringing me back.
I recently read Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land. It is entirely a story of place, and the place is the vast plains of eastern Montana. In part it is a work of history, chronicling the period of the second Homestead Act which opened eastern Montana to would-be farmers and ranchers from the east in the early 20th century. It is also a sort of travel writing, as Raban recounts his experience of the same place at the very end of the same century while he is researching there.
At the urging of the great railroad interests and of eastern banks, Congress passed the Enlarged Homestead Act in 1909. According to the Act, half-section (320 acre) grants of land in the area formerly known as The Great American Desert were made on easy terms. Claims were proved up by keeping the grant in cultivation for five years. Along its route to the west, the executives of the Milwaukee Road arbitrarily invented towns at regular intervals along the line. Raban writes,
“Trains need to be filled with freight and passengers, and it was part of the essential business of railroads to furnish its territory with customers, to create ready-made communities of people whose lives would be dependent on the umbilical of the line.”
At the same time a new pseudo-scientific method of agriculture was introduced that claimed to make it possible to raise cash crops and livestock in arid lands. Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual became a marketing device for the railroaders and the central source of optimism for recent immigrants and land hungry easterners alike. The Campbell Method proposed to instruct dry land farmers in methods of cultivation that would conserve the little moisture they had, and even suggested that new agricultural activity would attract increased precipitation through magnetism; somehow the act of working the land would improve the circumstances its geography.
The ranchers dispossessed of their former grazing lands by the Act regarded the notion of farming small sections of the dry prairies as destined for failure. They derisively referred to the homesteaders as “honyockers,” and thought of them as foolish, at best. Of course, the ranchers were correct. They knew that it required vast areas of the arid grassland to graze just a few head of cattle. But, as the homesteaders were fencing off the open prairie and bringing their first harvests to market, the Campbell Method seemed to be proving itself and the banks were eager to loan to the new farm owners.
Early optimism crumbled as the first few years of greater than normal precipitation passed, and typically dry conditions returned. Coupled with the brutality of winter on the northern plains, the conditions quickly brought failure for many of the homesteaders. Some hung on and scratched a living from parcels slightly better suited for agricultural production, but the scene recalls the iconic dustbowl imagery of the Joads, as most of the failed families struck out for point further west with what little they had left strapped to their Ford.
Raban structures his narrative around the stories and experiences of a few of the original homesteaders. He traces the thread of the these families to the current era, meeting the some of the descendents still on the land, and visiting the crumbling structures of former claim shacks and farm houses. Raban’s own experience of desolation and loneliness out in that vast and virtually featureless landscape is palpable, and it leads one to wonder at the resolve it must require to keep hanging on in a place so forbidding.
