BAD LAND An American Romance.by Jonathan Raban. 1996 324 pp.
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The author was born in Norfolk , England and wrote the book as he was amazed that people believed the railroad advertising pamphlets that east Montana was a paradise. This was distributed in the US and Europe where it was translated into German, Swedish , Norwegian , Danish, Russian and Italian Around here men wore guns as part of an everyday uniform. Nowadays the area breed cattle and a small portion is used for wheat if there is enough rain. Three generation of family members as well as each having family cattle brands. Houses surrounded by trees, but there are few farms. For every surviving ranch there are a dozen ruined houses. On hills many small unattended graveyards. Deserted houses had magazines and a Montgomery Ward mail order catalogue.1872 to 2001. More recently has revived on internet, also Sear coast to coast hardware. On the hill the schoolhouse, heated by a cast iron stove, and a teachers library with books published between 1910 and 1930s. These had adventures of small farm boys who became President of the land of the brave. You had an electric storm followed by heavy rain a "gulley washer". However this is part of the Great American desert. 1881 the Northern Pacific reached Montana. Some Bulgarian's worked had a town named Plevna 1908 was the year Bulgaria became independent from Turkey. There is the screen of an abandoned drive- in theater.
The Enlarged Homestead act of 1909 gave larger sections of 320 acres in the semi arid areas. To get it you did not have to be a US citizen but had to acquire that within 5 years. Small holding farmers in southern Sweden were bankrupted by cheap midwestern wheat. The US weather office in Miles City the regional capital showed that in 1906 13.61inches of rain,1907 - 14.75, 1908 -19.08, and 1909 - 13.31. With good rains the fertility to a large extent is washed to the lower strata or washed away entirely. Miles City had started as a army base in 1870s and now had a population of 5,000., a Carnegie library, 5 physicians a theater. People from cities and Europe saw 320 acres as an estate more than a farm.
Owen Wister's novel The Virginian 1903 a best seller was a requiem to the cowboy. The prairies full of buffalos and wild antelope. The book was dedicated to his friend Theodore Roosevelt. Call of the wild by Jack London of 1903 also portrayed the free spirit of the times. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is a 1908 western novel by John Fox The USA that seemed inexhaustible only a generation ago had run out of space. The ideal was to have a home with no landlord , no rent or mortgage and security your own land.
Homesteaders arrived with their equipment, and among them were ex soldiers from armies of Europe, used to long journeys. Many had already spent years in the US and had enough capital to set up a homestead and keep going in Montana through the first winter. Some came to get a claim and sell the land as soon as they got the title, after raising a loan at the bank. Men had come with sisters and girlfriends as single women could file claims. A British army veteran who had fought in the Boer was saw the area as the veld in South Africa. Frederick Remington 1861 to 1909 portrayed the prairies with the cowboys and Indians, Evelyn Cameron took photos of the areas, influenced by Huffman's pictures. The Cameron's had come to Montana to raise polo ponies as good pony could sell in England for £420 and bough in America for $5 However most ponies did not travel well by sea and it arrived with a brand was not a thing done in England. Cameron ponies were wild and uncontrollably. LA Huffman documented Montana on photos in 1878 when the herds of buffalo's and last Plaines Indians could bee seen.
1917only 5 inches of rain fell , giving a disappointing harvest at a time when the price of wheat was high. with drought came grasshopper followed by locusts. lightening bolts set fire to the buffalo grass and 1917 the Zimmerman telegram got the US into the war. With drought able bodied men were a liability and they signed up for this war. The army of occupation was 3 meals a day and money to send home. 1917 was good year for education boys went to France and girls taught school. The drought years also made people return to prayer. Bad weather is a force for religious conversion. Earlier with better rains loans were easy to get even without collateral. It was the spenders who were the ones forced leave. One person said his father was too poor to leave.
Barbed wire phones were free of charge. Farms could buy and electric telephone with a crank to charge the battery, connect one wire to an iron stake in the ground and the other to the nearest barbed wire fence. This way they were connected to all the neighbours but you had to shout loud. Each neighbour had a code ring of who they wanted to talk to but all could listen a long ring meant emergency. If a gate was not closed properly, this cut the connection.
Homesteaders nearly all said the Dirty 30s was the end when in 1934 the choking dust storm were so bad with stinging darkness that caused neighbors to quit. Much like the Joad family in the Grapes of Wrath. However more people quit between 1917 and 1928. Modern ranchers need 20 to 25 acres to pasture a cow. Many of the leavers returned to doing what they had done before coming out to Montana reclaiming old identities left behind back east or in Europe, like a barber. 10 years of homesteading had turned every one time clerk or school teacher into a competent handyman as janitor , repairman , truckdriver , train driver or railroad employee. On farms they did not admit they missed the human traffic of city life but felt at home again.
By 1922 for every working homestead there were deserted houses and sagebrush and grass started to recolonize the plowed fields. the deserted farms kept the name of the origin occupant when the were mentioned by neighbours ever after 60 years. Unpaid for tractors were driven away at night before the repo-man could get them. A deserted house or barn was slowly moved. For stayers this was a windfall. Even in 1990 there were still homes made up of several homesteads cobbled together, with different roof heights. The decline in population led to a rise in quality of subsistence. They could trail their cows from empty property to property, giving their own land a rest.
People had been brought to the poorest land in the whole US. The textbook Campbells book had been funded and promoted by the railways. The people were victims of a conspiracy and a con man's pitch. saw themselves as dupes of a government that was in the pocket of corporation fat cats.
Many wise homesteader filed their claims and as soon as they could raise a loan on their land left town on the next train west. Others were married to their plots for richer or poorer. It was much like the long depopulated hamlet in County Cork , Ireland or Europe from which people had set out for eastern Montana. Some lacked the imagination to leave and saw their own last chance in the neighbours failure. Land that had reverted to the government could be rented for peppercorn rent. Other land was got on a mortgage till a family had enough land to support itself. You needed 3,840 acres to make a living enough to support 150 cattle as a rancher.
By the 1920 many were motoring around as tourists , industrial wages were climbing fast as farm wages declined. The real west was over the Missouri river . Tourism thrives on picturesque poverty scenes. Since WW1 wage earner thrived while farmers sank into debt.
1926 rain obliterated memory of the bad years with the splendor of the harvest. However in 1930 people were harvesting Russian thistles for winter feed . This is tumble week and can only the fresh green shoots can be eaten.
Ranches now formed communities as the all came together and went from ranch to ranch, roping , and branding the young steers. These people worked together for the common good and were descendants from Bessarabia , Scots Swedes , English and Germans. By the 1990s ranchers farmed and farmers ranched, Montana had a relatively populous west with forest , mines mills farms, that could always out vote the sparse flat treeless east.
Missouri valley was a dinosaur graveyard and freehand paleontologist with shovels' and torches were trespassing on ranches. There was money to be made for dinosaurs bones.
Before the snowplow program on roads after a sudden blizzard followed by a cold snap one could be marooned out there for weeks,
People who managed to hold on until 1937 were rescued by the New Deal. The WPA Works Program Administration. operated dozens of schemes and an army of workers were damming rivers digging ditches and diverting water to arid soil. A program in Fairveiw. giving mortgage to farmers on irrigated land. Here there were fat trout from the mountain streams., game in the woods as well as wild strawberries , blackberries huckleberries and a lot to live off the land. Here a lot of other jobs came into being with the timber industry and looking after the forest, smoke chasers. Maintenance work on the Montana Power dam, as well as a fugitive centre of a distillery industry during the prohibition.
The author was born in Norfolk , England and wrote the book as he was amazed that people believed the railroad advertising pamphlets that east Montana was a paradise. Around here men wore guns as part of an everyday uniform. Nowadays the area breed cattle and a small portion is used for wheat if there is enough rain. Three generation of family members as well as each having family cattle brands. Houses surrounded by trees, but there are few farms. For every surviving ranch there are a dozen ruined houses. On hills many small unattended graveyards . More recently has revived on internet, also Sear coast to coast hardware. On the hill the schoolhouse, heated by a cast iron stove, and a teachers library with boos published between 1910 and 1930s. These had adventures of small farm boys who became President of the land of the brave.
You had an electric storm followed by heavy rain a gulley washer. However this is part of the Great American desert.
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