Bad Land: An American Romance

2. Fictions

FROM THE SPRING OF 1907 through the fall of 1908, the Milwaukee Road railroad lumbered through the Dakotas and into Montana. From the top of any butte, one would have seen its course through the Badlands: the lines of horse-drawn wagons, the heaps of broken rock for the roadbed, the gangs of laborers, engineers, surveyors. From a distance, the construction of the new line looked like a disaster of war.

The Milwaukee Road was a latecomer among western rail-roads. In 1881, the Northern Pacific reached Montana, where it hitched itself to the convenient valley of the Yellowstone River. In 1887, the Great Northern arrived; it clung to the Missouri River, winding westward to Great Falls. The Milwaukee Road, striking west-by-north through rough country, had to content itself with whatever creeks and coulees it could find. In Montana, it slipped from Waterhole Creek to Sandstone Creek to O’Fallon Creek, a muddy brook where catfish rootled in the shade of the crowding cottonwood trees. The new railroad followed the creek down to the Yellowstone, where it joined company with the Northern Pacific at Terry.

As the line advanced across the land, it flung infant cities into being at intervals of a dozen miles or so. Trairts needed to be loaded with freight and passengers, and it was part of the essential business of the railroad company to furnish its territory with customers, to create ready-made communities of people whose lives would be dependent on the umbilical of the line. So the company built these skeletal market centers on company-owned land. Its creations were as arbitrary as those described in Genesis. The company said, Let there be a city: and there was a city.

Each was a duplicate of the last. Main Street was a line of boxes, wood and brick, laid out on the prairie, transverse to the railroad line. The numbered streets, pegged out with stakes and string, ran north-to-south; projective avenues ran east-to-west. The boxes housed a post office, a hotel, a saloon, a general store, a saddlery, a barbershop, a church, a bank, a schoolhouse and a jail. Beside the line, sites were earmarked for the grain elevator and the stockyard. With the addition of a few shacks, dotted about between the pegs and the strings, the city was done. Photographed from the right angle, with railroad workers doubling as citizens, it could be promoted as the coming place in the New West.

This part of Montana had been named long ago — by the Indians, by the U.S. Army and by the ranchers, who had raised cattle, sheep and horses here for the last forty years. But the railroad was interested only in the brilliant future that it was bringing to the country, and it scorned the past. It ignored the existing names, preferring to adorn the landscape with bright new coinages of its own — the better to commemorate the historic achievement of the Milwaukee Road in bringing twentieth-century civilization to the naked prairie.

Searching for suitably beautiful names for its new cities, the company canvased its directors and senior managers for the names they had given their daughters. The President of the railroad, Albert J. Earling, had two daughters, Isabel and May. The girls were fused to produce Ismay, which sounded modern and tripping on the tongue. The recent offspring of other Milwaukee Road officials included a Lorraine, an Edina and a Mildred.

At Lorraine, the first of the Montana towns, the company dammed three springs to create a civic lake and a reliable source of water for the locomotives. Lorraine’s father must have suddenly fallen out of favor with the board, for Lorraine was Lorraine for only a few weeks before it was renamed Baker, in recognition of A. G. Baker, the chief construction engineer on the project. Edina, thirteen miles down the line, went the same way as Lorraine. There, a crew of Bulgarian workers lobbied to have the city renamed Plevna. Nineteen hundred and eight was the year of the declaration of Bulgarian independence from Turkey, and Plevna, liberated by Russian troops from its Turkish occupiers in 1877, was a name dear to Bulgarian nationalists. At Plevna, Montana, the Milwaukee Road did honor the past — but it was the obscure European past, not the American past, that received the tribute. The odd mouthful of consonants gave the place a touch of old-world class.

Ismay — of course — stuck firm, and so did Mildred. The capricious way in which the company attached names to the land, then withdrew and replaced them, is a nice illustration of how the West was still thought of as a great blank page on which almost anything might yet be inscribed. Its history could be erased, its future redrafted, on the strength of a bad breakfast or a passing fancy.

The half-built new towns, in which the typical business was a shed with a two-story trompe l’oeil façade tocked onto its front end, were architectural fictions, more appearance than reality; and their creators, the railroad magnates, speculatively doodling a society into existence, were like novelists. The only serious check to the imagination of the railroad-and-city builder on the Great Plains was the problem of gradient. If a town already on the map offended him, he could starve it to death by bending the line of his railroad away from it (as James J. Hill, president of the Great Northern, threatened to do to Spokane, Washington, in 1892; Spokane quickly carne round to Hill’s way of thinking). If it pleased him to turn a snake-infested bog into a swaggering market town, all he needed to do was to mark the spot with a junction.

Nothing in the geography prepares one for the arbitrary suddenness of these prairie railroad towns. For mile after mile, the sagebrush rolls and breaks. The bare outcrops of rock and gumbo clay monotonously repeat themselves. Then, out of the blue, you catch the glint of the sun on the sheet-metal cowl of a distant grain elevator. You pass the frayed ship’s rigging holding up the screen of an abandoned drive-in theater. There’s just time enough to savor the idea of the enormous, flickering image of Marilyn Monroe scaring the coyotes into the next county, and you’re in town.

You’re here: in a bar on Main, with Rexall’s next door, and, across the street, a used-furniture showroom squatting in the remains of what was once the opera house. The essential coordinates of place are here. This is a distinct local habitation with a name. Yet something’s wrong. Why is here here? Why is it not some where else altogether?

No special reason. One day in 1908, someone with a map on his desk thought it was about time to make another town, and so he sketched one in. Perhaps he was talking on the telephone, and the cross-hatched grid of the city-to-be simply drew itself on the paper where his spare hand happened to be resting. Perhaps the city’s name is that of the person he happened to be talking to. There is a town on the Milwaukee Road line named after a newspaper reporter who happened to be riding in the presidential car when Albert J. Earling was out on one of his naming sprees.

Nearly a hundred years after they were born, the accidental nature of their conception still haunts these towns. Their brick-work has grown old, the advertisements painted on the sides of their buildings have faded pleasantly into antiques, yet they seem insufficiently attached to the earth on which they stand. Leave one in the morning, and by afternoon it might easily have drifted off to someplace else on the prairie. Such lightness is unsettling. It makes one feel too keenly one’s own contingency in the order of things.

As the railroads pushed farther west, into open rangeland that grew steadily emptier and drier, the rival companies clubbed together to sponsor an extraordinary body of popular literature. For the land to be settled by the masses of people needed to sustain the advance of the railroads, it had first to be made real and palpable. In school atlases, the area was still called the Great American Desert — an imaginative vacancy, either without any flora and fauna, or with all the wrong flora and fauna. The railroad writers and illustrators were assigned to replace that vacancy with a picture of free, rich farmland; a picture so vivid, so fully furnished with attractive details, that readers would commit their families and their life savings, sight unseen, to a landscape in a book.

The pamphlets were distributed by railroad agents all over the United States and Europe. Every mass-circulation newspaper carried advertisements for them (Fill in the coupon for your free copy by return of post…). They were translated into German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Russian, Italian. They turned up in bars and barbershops, in doctors’ waiting rooms, in the carriages of the London tube and the New York El.

Some of these pamphlets were aimed at readers with firsthand experience of farming. But most were addressed to a wider audience. They dangled before the reader the prospect of fantastic self-improvement, of great riches going begging for want of claimants. They sought out the haggard schoolteacher, the bored machinist, the clerk, the telegrapher, the short-order cook, the printer, and promised to turn each of them into the prosperous squire of his or her own rolling acres.

“Unele Sam sends you an invitation …” The terms of the Enlarged Homestead Act, passed by Congress in 1909, after a great deal of lobbying by the railroad companies, were generous. The size of a government homestead on “semi-arid land,” like that of eastern Montana, was doubled, from a quarter-section to a half-section; from 160 acres to 320. One did not have to be a U.S. citizen to stake a claim — though it was necessary to become one within five years, when the homestead was “proved-up.” The proving-up was a formality that entailed the payment of a $16.00 fee and an inspection of the property to verify that it had been kept under cultivation. That done, the full title to the land was granted to the homesteader.

It was an astounding free offer by any reckoning. The only snag was the unfortunate name that early cartographers had written on the land. The name was mischievous. The northern Great Plains were not a desert — did not remotely resemble a desert. When James J. Hill, recently retired from the presidency of his railroad, wrote Highways of Progress in 1910, he was able to look back on what had already been accomplished in the region with benign pride:

The causes of [the Northwest’s] growth are to be found in the transfer of an immense population supplied by our own natural increase and by immigration, to enormous areas of fertile soil. It was like opening the vaults of a treasury and bidding each man help himself.

What the railroad pamphlets did was to point the way to the treasury and bid men help themselves.

The farther the pamphlets traveled, the more indefinitely suggestive they became. Minnesotan readers could measure the distance between themselves and Montana — they could imagine a dry and open country, and give a name and shape to shivering twigs of sagebrush. They had grown up with the language of American advertising and regional boosterism, and knew a sales pitch when they saw one. Faced with an astounding free offer, they looked, out of habit, for the small print.

But in London, Oslo, Kiev, where the text of the pamphlet was unpolluted by firsthand experience of the United States, the conjured world swelled before the reader’s eyes, free of the restraints of skeptical realism. In Europe, the cult of America made converts in every city slum and moldering agricultural village. People who had been ruined by the United States, like the smallholding farmers of southern Sweden, bankrupted by cheap Midwestern wheat, were among the most eager believers, their own misery itself a proof of the wonder-working providence of America. To readers like these, the pamphlets spoke as gospel.

In 1910, people had to furnish their American daydreams from a relatively scant supply of arousing details. There were letters home, articles in newspapers and illustrated magazines and a great deal of hearsay. The would-be emigrant was required to create an imaginary America that was palpable enough to become a real destination. By the time he bought his steamship ticket, he was bound for a land that existed in his head in rich, intricate and erroneous particularity.

Even now, when movies and television have flooded the globe with evocative American imagery, it’s a treacherous business, this bodying forth of one’s projected new life. The big, obvious pieces of the picture may all be convincingly American, but the old world sneaks into every unregarded gap that it can find. You conscientiously dream into being a lofty New York apartment — but it has an obstinately English smell and English light fixtures (the switches go down for On and up for Off). Your imagined American fields have English hedges. Born to a land where country roads loop circuitously around ancient, Domesday Book property lines, your rural America sprouts winding English lanes.

Long after the emigrant has become an immigrant, he or she retains a compulsively similitudinous cast of mind. Everything here is seen in terms of how things are done there. We’re always translating back and forth between the old and the new. I still can’t rid myself of the reflexive tic that converts all dollar transactions back into the “real money” of the English pound. In the supermarket, I carry the day’s exchange rate in my head. And so it goes for more important things, like one’s sense of space and distance. The shadow of one’s home country falls, unbidden, across almost every inch of American soil.

The pamphlet readers, innocent of the reality of America, brought to the text both a willing credulity and a readiness to fill in the spaces between the words with their own local, European experience. They had no more real idea of Montana than they had of the dark side of the moon. But they were devout believers and imaginers. The authors of the railroad pamphlets were able to reach out to an audience of ideal readers of the kind that novelists dream about, usually in vain.

When the packet arrived in the mail in the London tenement building, it was bigger and fatter than expected. The book that slid from the manila envelope had the glamorous, bang-up-to-date look of a bestseller. The dominant color on the cover was a warm golden yellow — the color of sunshine and ripe wheat. The designer had drawn the northwestern states as a single enormous field stretching from the Dakotas to the Pacific. Across the field ran the straight line of the Milwaukee Road. In the far distance lay its twin termini of Tacoma and Seattle; in the foreground were Ismay, Mildred, Terry, Miles City. The main body of the picture showed a fresh-faced young man steering a plow drawn by two horses. As the virgin earth peeled away from the blade of the plow, it turned into a breaking wave of gold coins. Sovereigns and pieces-of-eight were tumbling out over Ismay and Mildred.

The plowman looked strangely unplowmanlike. His exposed forearms were too pale, his hair too closely barbered. Beneath the brim of his new Stetson hat, he sported a pair of steel-rimmed specs. One might guess that just a few months, or even weeks, ago, this plowman had been sitting on a high stool in a dusty city office, keeping track of someone else’s money in laborious copperplate.

The cover raised a smile. It was an amusing flight of fancy, and one would have to be a great fool to take it seriously. Yet the more you looked at the sober text of the book, the wild claim made by the image on the cover grew to seem less and less fantastic.

It was there in black and white — the facts and figures, the testimony of learned professors, of experts from the United States Department of Agriculture, of new settlers, already coining money from their homesteads. There was a supporting photograph on nearly every page. A fleet of heavyweight pigs, grubbing in a meadow of sweet clover. A happy homesteader, standing neck-deep in a field of corn. Stocks of Turkey Red wheat, casting long shadows on the ground at the end of a hard day’s harvesting. Pictures of giant pumpkins, piles of new-laid eggs, smug cows and fleecy sheep. Pictures of the homesteaders themselves, on horseback, putting up fences, feeding chickens, brandishing sugar beets — all with the tranquil, engrossed air of people following their true vocation.

Here were the facts. At the Great New York Land Show, held in Madison Square Garden, Montana had carried off the prizes for the best wheat, best oats, best barley and best alfalfa in the United States. In print, these crops took on a solid, succulent weight. “Oats grow to perfection. There is something about the climate that favors them and produces a bright, plump, heavy berry that averages forty pounds to the bushel.” On alfalfa, the “noted alfalfa grower,” Mr. I. D. O’Donnell, turned in a lyrical prose-poem in praise of “this wonderful plant”:

Alfalfa is the best mortgage-lifter ever known. It is better than a bank-account, for it never fails or goes into the hands of a receiver. It is weather proof, for cold does not injure it and heat makes it grow all the better. A winter flood does not drown it and a fire does not kill it. As a borer, it is equal to an artesian well; it loves water and bores to reach it. When growing there is no stopping it. For filling a milk can it is equal to a handy pump. Cattle love it, hogs fatten upon it, and a hungry horse wants nothing else.

Or one might dwell with interest on the crisp figures issued by Mr. J. A. Brockway from his homestead near Miles City. “He produced last year $361 worth of onions from seven-eighths of an acre with $60 spent for labor. He made on potatoes as high as $100 per acre net profit and raised thirty barrels of pickling cucumbers from five-eighths of an acre.” That Mr. Brockway had to hire labor to harvest the produce of less than an acre was a nugget of information to which one’s imagination would return in the sleepless hours.

The book did not gloss over the fact that the land was dry — or at least dryish. There were figures from the U.S. Weather Office in Miles City: in 1906, 16.61 inches of rain fell; in 1907, 14.75 inches; in 1908, 19.08 inches; in 1909, 13.31 inches. It wasn’t much — about half the annual rainfall on London and East Anglia. But it was more than one might have feared.

According to the book, most of what rain there was fell during the growing season: it carne when it was most useful. And light rainfall means more sunshine. Here Professor Atkinson of the Montana State Agricultural College sounded a reassuring note: “All plant production is based on the presence of sunlight. An area, therefore, having a large number of bright days, is more fitted to bring rapid and satisfactory plant growth … This is one of the reasons why crop returns in Montana are greater than in areas of more rainfall.”

Too much rain (one learned) is a curse. It washes the goodness out of the soil. Mr. F. Walden, “the agricultural expert,” pointed out one unexpected advantage of farming in a dry climate:

In arid and semi-arid countries the soils are unleached, but where copious rains have been falling for ages, the fertility to a large extent has been washed into the lower strata or washed away entirely. It is well known that leached ashes are not nearly so fertile as unleached. The same is true of soils.

There was also the near-certainty of heavier rainfall in the future. For rain follows the plow.

It seems to be a matter of common observation that rainfall in a new country increases with settlement, cultivation and tree planting … Professor Agassiz, in 1867, predicted that this increase in moisture would come about by the disturbance of electrical currents caused by the building of the railroads and the settlement of the country.

Good for crops, Montana’s bracing climate was even kindlier to humans. “Its dry atmosphere will cure affections of the nose, throat and lungs.”

The book, taken to work and dipped into on the omnibus and in the lunch hour, grew into a dependable source of private excitement. The new science of dry farming (“which, of course, does not mean farming without moisture; it means a method of farming that conserves moisture”) was the key, and the man who mastered the basics of it could put himself on an equal footing with the rich farmers of Kent and Essex.

Some of the best land open to homestead entry may be found near the towns of Baker, Mildred, Terry and Ismay. Here are great stretches of level bench lands suitable for farming. The soil possesses extraordinary fertility.

The dictionary was needed for “bench lands.” Any conformation of earth, stone, etc. which has a raised and flat surface. One imagined something like the Kentish Weald, an hour south of London on the train from Waterloo.

The book explained exactly how to get a homestead. When you arrived at your chosen town, you would be well advised to go to a professional “locator.” For a $25 fee, the locator would find and stake for you a suitable half-section of unclaimed public land. You’d pay a filing fee ($22.00) to the U.S. Land Office, where your claim would be formally registered. Then you could set about building your farmhouse and fencing your 320-acre spread.

It was a dizzying thought.

This was not the Wild West. One wasn’t proposing to go out to some trackless frontier to wield a musket and wear a coonskin hat. This was twentieth-century farming country with regular train service and electric light.

The regional capital, Miles City, had a population of 5,000 and was said by the book to have “all modern conveniences.” “It is thoroughly up to date and wide awake.” Photographs of the town, which had started life as an army camp and then became a ranching center in the 1870s, showed wide boulevards lined with old trees and new telegraph poles. The grandest of the six hotels, the Leighton, looked as big as the Ritz. There were churches (Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, and a Greek-pillared Ursuline convent), handsome brick schools, a Carnegie library, an opera house, and a main street of shops under the shade of canvas awnings. Among the members of the Miles City Chamber of Commerce were listed nine attorneys, five physicians, three newspapers, two milliners, a music store and two osteopaths. In its austerely rectangular American fashion, its buildings set down like so many packing cases on a railway platform, Miles City looked as smart as paint.

Its private houses had an air of relaxed middle-class prosperity. Their room-sized balconies gave on to big leafy gardens. In one picture, a child in a sailor suit sat in a swing. In another, a group of ladies had put down a rug on the lawn and were taking a picnic tea. Looking at these photographs, hunting for clues in the shadows, made the distance to Montana abruptly shorten. The modern West, with its milliners and osteopaths, its garden swings and alfresco tea parties, was neither wild nor far. It was tantalizingly within reach, and success there was practically guaranteed.

Three hundred and twenty acres. The word “acre” was not in the everyday vocabulary of most readers, and from a rented flat or tenement room it was hard to get a handle on what 320 acres, half a square mile, actually meant. Some homework with a street map helped. In London, suppose one stood on the south side of Hyde Park by the Albert Memorial and looked north: all of the park that lay to one’s right would make a half-section. Rotten Row, with its parade of fashionables on horseback, would be in it. So would the entire length of the Serpentine and the Long Water. It would include Temple Lodge and the Peter Pan statue, the sloping woodlands round the tea house, and go all the way to Speaker’s Corner up in the far northeast of the park. The boundaries of the property would be marked by the hazy mansions of Park Lane and the wedding-cake stucco of Bayswater.

In such a space, one could imagine a dozen big fields, filled with rippling crops of wheat, oats, barley; ample pastureland for sheep and cattle to wander; a tree-shaded house, a red barn, a walled kitchen garden for vegetables. There would be poultry scratching in the yard … beehives in the clover … a winding gravel drive … It wouldn’t be a farm, it would be an estate.

The Milwaukee Road pamphlet recommended that serious home seekers who wanted to look carefully before they leaped should send off to Lincoln, Nebraska, for a book by Mr. Hardy W. Campbell, “the noted farming expert and inventor of the Campbell System of scientific farming for semi-arid lands.” Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual, price $2.50, cloth-bound in deep moss green, had a gilt camel stamped on its front cover. Across the camel’s legs trailed a banner that read: THE CAMEL FOR THE SAHARA DESERT — THE CAMPBELL METHOD FOR THE AMERICAN DESERT.

The book was famous. It carne out in several editions between 1902 and 1912, and in the houses of settlers already arrived rived in the West the Manual had a place in the narrow bookshelf alongside the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress. In the first issue of Ismay’s own local paper, the Ismay, which appeared on May 20, 1908, when the outlines of the town were still being pegged out by the railroad company, there was a poem in Campbell’s honor:

THE DRY LAND HOMESTEADER

I’ve started to dry farm

A piece of bench land sod,

And if I meet no harm

I’ll win or bust — by jinks.

Plow and harrow and disc—

Disc and harrow and plow:

Of course there is some risk

Until a chap knows how.

Campbell says they will grow

If seeds are put in right—

Depends on how you sow

With ground in proper plight.

And so I work all day:

At night I read his book—

I get no time to play

And hardly time to cook.

For despite its no-nonsense, lackluster title, Campbell’s Soil Culture Manual was an inspirational work. Hardy Campbell was an evangelist in the cause of Science, Progress and the American Way. His prose brimmed with excitement at the dawning of the new age. “The natural trend of things in the opening decade indicates that the twentieth century is to mark an advancement in all material things that go to give comfort to mankind far in advance of the splendid record of the nineteenth or any previous century.” Like all revolutionary discoveries, his own method of scientific soil culture had met “ignorance, prejudice and the inertia of error”; and, like all true prophets, Campbell had suffered for his beliefs, stuck to his guns and, at last, been proved triumphantly right.

He had seen the future of the West, and projected it before his readers like a magic-lantern slide. “The semi-arid region is destined to be in a few years the richest portion of the United States.”

Looking far into the future one may see this region dotted with fine farms, with countless herds of blooded animals grazing, with school houses in every township, with branch lines of railroads, with electric interurban trolly lines running in a thousand directions, with telephone systems innumerable, with rural mail routes reaching to every door. It is coming just as sure as the coming of another century. The key has been found and the door to the riches has been unlocked.

Yet Campbell was not appealing merely to his readers’ cupidity. The riches he promised were a force for virtue.

As a great moral influence we shall claim for scientific soil culture a place in the front rank … There is nothing that will go so far toward changing the life of a man or a family to the better things as prosperity. Poverty is a demoralizing influence. Idleness is next of kin to sin. And idleness is closely associated with poor farming. Whatever tends to give the people more of the material comforts of life helps to raise them up. It is easier to be good when one has had a fine dinner … Better farming means better farm homes, happier farm families, better citizenship, more nearly the ideal simple life.

Like every other means of spiritual self-improvement, the Campbell method demanded that its adherents dedicate their lives to its pursuit. To be a good Campbellite, “the principles of scientific soil culture must be grounded deep within him. He must be saturated with the subject. It must become part of his being.” So the dry-land homesteader would turn these pages by candlelight, moving his lips to the words of an inspired text.

One carne, dimly, to understand that the soil is a reservoir of moisture and that even in dry years the reservoir can be tapped by the farmer who is in on the scientific secret. The doctrinal heart of Campbell’s teaching lay in his near-mystical faith in the power of capillary attraction. If a very slender glass pipe is placed upright in a bowl of water, the water in the tube will defy gravity by rising noticeably above the level of the water in the bowl. So the Montana farmer had to coax the water on his land to defy gravity and rise to nourish the roots of his winter wheat.

Campbell diverted his urban readers with kitchen-table experiments that could be performed miles from the nearest farm. One was invited to suspend two plant cuttings in neighboring glass tumblers of water, and to float a thin film of olive oil on the water of the second tumbler, to deny air to the severed stalk. Cutting No. 1 would sprout healthy roots, while Cutting No. 2 would become a rotting stump. There were more experiments in tumblers with different sizes of buckshot (not so easily obtainable by the average apartment dweller), to demonstrate that small soil particles attract more water than large ones. In the novitiate period, at least, dry farming with Campbell was enjoyably like 101 Things To Make & Do. Here was science made plain for Everyman, and even as you sat at home in the smoke and din of the city, you knew that you were stealing a march on the mass of farmers, toiling in their fog of ignorant tradition.

When you eventually graduated from the kitchen to the land, 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 disc 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. Campbell quoted a ripe testimonial given to him by Mr. J. B. Beal, Chief Land Examiner of the Union Pacific Railroad: “We find by the Campbell System that we can as well keep moisture in the ground as to put it in a jug and put in the cork.”

Anyone would be excited by Campbell’s figures. On his own farm, he had reaped 54 bushels of wheat to the acre. Using the Campbell method, Mr. L. L. Mulligan had gotten 75 bushels of barley; Colonel W. S. Pershing, 300 bushels of turnips; Joseph Emmal, 120 bushels of potatoes; and on the grounds of the State Soldiers’ Home at Lisbon, North Dakota, had been raised 23 tons of sugar beets per acre. With crops like these, grown on land once named a desert, Campbell’s drumrolling on behalf of his own system did not seem immodest.

The soil culture empire has no limits. The system is useful on every farm. It reaches over oceans and mountains. Over vast areas the principles are triumphing over the perverseness of nature. And some day this soil culture empire will be the garden spot of the earth.

In its rousing generalities, the Manual sounded like a political manifesto — as, in a sense, it was. Campbell was a disciple of both Thomas Jefferson and the current president, Theodore Roosevelt, and his book was shot through and through with Jeffersonian and Rooseveltian ideas. In the nineteenth century, American agriculture had been notoriously wasteful, its crop yields per acre far lower than those of Britain and Germany. Campbell’s system was intensive and — in one of Roosevelt’s favorite words — conservationist. It cherished the available natural resources of soil and water, and accepted the finitude of those resources in a way that Americans, with their careless habit of striking camp and moving on, had never really done before. It brought to farming a strict, Presbyterian ethic of saving, husbanding and staying home on your own plot.

Intensive farming meant small farms, Campbell had strong words for the big landowners: they squandered their acres and made little contribution to rural society.

Land greed has been the curse of farming. The farmer can no more do his best while trying to cultivate a thousand acres than by confining himself to a two-acre plot. He must have enough, but not too much.

So the 320-acre homestead was a farm of exactly the right size, and the homesteader exactly the right kind of citizen.

The small farmer is the one who makes his farm his home. He seeks comfort for himself and his children. He does not build a shed to shelter him during the crop season with his family miles away. He becomes a permanent fixture in his county. He wants the school house to be located not far away and he willingly taxes himself for the support of the school. He contributes to the erection of a church in the village and he is careful that the rural route and the cooperative telephone do not pass him by.

“The small landholders are the most precious part of a state,” wrote Jefferson in a letter to James Madison in 1785. And again (in a letter of the same year to John Jay):

We have now lands enough to employ an infinite number of people in their cultivation. Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests, by the most lasting bonds.

Jefferson’s vision of democratic America as a giant quilt of small farms was closely, perhaps slavishly, echoed in Campbell’s Manual. The tabletop physics, the patent Sub-Surface Packer and all the rest of the impedimenta of scientific soil culture were there to bring about a revitalized agrarian democracy.

The idea of turning the West into a garden and a cradle of superior civilization wasn’t new, but Campbell’s book made it seem so. It was up to date in its romance with the new century and its guileless optimism about science and technology. Campbell, born in Vermont in 1850, had come to adolescence during the Civil War. By the early 1900s he was able to look out on the America which his grandchildren were set to inherit, and see it as a land of spotless promise once again. It was fitting that the war veterans of Lisbon, North Dakota, were now producing phenomenal crops of sugar beets using the Campbell System; one sign among many of the wonderful new times ahead.

Mold and damp have had their way with my copy of the Manual, which gives off a thin, sour stink from its place on the desk beside the typewriter. Its spine was broken between pages 240 and 241, when someone trod on it with a muddy boot. The imprint of the boot (a size 12, I’d guess) looks like a deliberate verdict.

When Campbell wrote of how his system could enable readers to live “the ideal simple life,” I think he was making a direct allusion to another inspirational work. Charles Wagner’s The Simple Life was published in 1901 (in translation from the original French) and was an immediate and spectacular bestseller. The success of Wagner’s book (it sold more than a million copies in its Doubleday hardbound edition) is a gauge of the powerful tide of rural nostalgia that was washing through the industrial cities of Europe and America at the turn of the century. There was a deep and troubled hankering for a life more neighborly, more elemental, more “organic”; and the railroad pamphlets, Campbell’s Manual (along with several other books on farming for beginners) and the Enlarged Homestead Act found a receptive audience of people who were recklessly eager to believe in the idea of escaping the city to a new life in the country.

On the bestseller lists between 1901 and 1910, two sorts of generic fiction stand out — and they represent the masculine and feminine sides of rural nostalgia. The masculine ones romanticize life in the wild, on the frontier or the open range. The feminine ones, set east of the Mississippi, romanticize life on the farm and in the village. But, as in life, the genders get interestingly mixed up.

In 1902 the top spot on the list was held by Owen Wister’s The Virginian (which would go on to sell 1,623,000 copies in hardback), a requiem for the Noble Cowboy and the open range of Wyoming. Wister called his novel “an expression of American faith” and dedicated it to his friend Theodore Roosevelt (“the greatest benefactor we people have known since Lincoln”). Wister’s preface to the reader goes straight to the emotional center of the book:

Had you left New York or San Francisco at ten o’clock this morning, by noon the day after tomorrow you could step out at Cheyenne. There you would stand at the heart of the world that is the subject of my picture, yet you would look around you in vain for the reality. It is a vanished world. No journeys, save those which memory can take, will bring you to it now. The mountains are there, far and shining, and the sunlight, and the infinite earth, and the air that seems forever the true fountain of youth — but where is the buffalo, and the wild antelope, and where the horseman with his pasturing thousands? So like its old self does the sage-brush seem when revisited, that you wait for the horseman to appear.

But he will never come again. He rides in his historic yesterday. You will no more see him gallop out of the unchanging silence than you will see Columbus on the unchanging sea come sailing from Palos on his caravels.

… What is become of the horseman, the cow-puncher, the last romantic figure on our soil? … Well, he will be here among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play as he would like. His wild kind has been among us always, since the beginning …

How could twentieth-century America still be worthy of — and still find room for — the quintessential American, the free spirit, the horseman? A sort-of answer was provided by Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, published in 1903 (1,752,000 copies sold). London’s story of a dog who, on the death of his master in San Francisco, made his way back to the wilds and became the leader of a wolf pack, was a sermon about the ungainsayable power of atavism. The true American will not be long content with a life of rubber bones in the doghouse. The unfettered prairie and our wolf ancestors beckon.

Another answer was suggested by the 1908 bestseller The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, by John Fox, Jr. (1,285,000 copies), a riot of purple nature writing set in the Cumberland Mountains’ on the Virginia — Kentucky border. The search for coal to fuel the railroads and factories brings “the smoke and steam and bustle and greed of the twentieth century” to the idyllic green world around the lonesome pine, and the plot centers on a love affair between a mountain man’s daughter and a mining engineer. The beautiful girl gets to him, and so does the beautiful landscape; by the end of the book, the engineer has become an ardent conservationist.

All the time they talked of what they would do with Lonesome Cove.

“Even if we do go away, we’ll come back once a year,” said Hale.

“Yes,” nodded June, “once a year.”

“I’ll tear down those mining shacks, float them down the river and sell them as lumber.”

“Yes.”

“And I’ll stock the river with bass again.”

“Yes.”

“And I’ll plant young poplars to cover the signs of every bit of uptorn earth along the mountain there. I’ll bury every bottle and tin can in the Cove. I’ll take away every sign of civilization, every sign of the outside world.”

“And leave old Mother Nature to cover up the scars,” said June.

“So that Lonesome Cove will be just as it was.”

“Just as it was in the beginning,” echoed June.

“And shall be to the end,” said Hale.

Hale and June are about to conceive an Appalachian version of Roosevelt’s darling, the Yellowstone National Park.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin (1903, and it sold 1,357,714 copies) found the ideal simple life in rural Maine. Rebecca, after many modest adventures and vicissitudes, unexpectedly inherits the beloved farm of the title. Her farm will reunite her scattered and dysfunctional family, and on the last page of the book Rebecca is found thanking God for this gift of healing real estate:

She sat in the quiet doorway, shaded from the little Riverboro world by the overhanging elms. A wide sense of thankfulness and peace possessed her, as she looked at the autumn landscape, listened to the rumble of a wagon on the bridge, and heard the call of the river as it dashed to the sea. She put up her hand softly and touched first the shining brass knocker and then the red bricks, glowing in the October sun.

It was home; her roof, her garden, her green acres, her dear trees; it was shelter for the little family at Sunnybrook; her mother would have once more the companionship of her sister and the friends of her girlhood; the children would have teachers and playmates …

… garden … acres … trees. Many of the book’s readers had none of these, and the words had a talismanic vibrance. To inherit a farm was as happy a fate as could be imagined. It was to inherit the earth.

Gene Stratton-Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost came out in 1909 and sold 2,053,892 copies. The novel is set in small-town Indiana and Michigan — an area that must have seemed pretty wild and remote to most readers. But in Stratton-Porter’s book, suburbanity is encroaching fast. There are trolley lines in Onabasha, the hometown of Elnora Comstock, who lives with her embittered mother on the edge of town, by the remains of the Limberlost swamp. For the wetlands are being drained, the forest has largely gone, and even distant Mackinac Island, in the straits between Lakes Michigan and Huron, has become a vacation resort.

The Limberlost is the last surviving patch of primeval wilderness in a world already in the hands of the property developers. The owl, the grosbeak, the whippoorwill, the Luna moth still live there, but even in 1909 their survival is threatened. For Elnora, the swamp is the beautiful, moist, dangerous (her father was swallowed alive in the Limberlost) and vital source of authentic American values. She pays for her school textbooks and, later, her college education by collecting rare moths in the swamp and selling them to a naturalist in town known as the Bird Woman.

Near the end of the book, now grown up and on the edge of marriage, Elnora stays on Mackinac Island with her childhood friend Freckles (a boy of the Limberlost), his wife, the Angel, and their brood of young children. Freckles asks Elnora what she thinks of Mackinac:

“Oh, it is a perfect picture, all of it! I should like to hang it on the wall, so I could see it whenever I wanted to; but it isn’t real, of course; it’s nothing but a picture.”

“These people won’t agree with you,” smiled Freckles.

“That isn’t necessary,” retorted Elnora. “They know this, and they love it; but you and I are acquainted with something different. The Limberlost is life. Here it is a carefully kept park. You motor, sail, and golf, all so secure and fine. But what I like is the excitement of choosing a path carefully, in the fear that the quagmire may reach out and suck me down; to go into the swamp naked-handed and wrest from it treasures that bring me books and clothing, and I like enough of a fight for things that I always remember how I got them. I even enjoy seeing a canny old vulture eyeing me as if it were saying: ‘Ware the sting of the rattler, lest I pick your bones as I did old Limber’s.’ I like sufficient danger to put an edge on life. This is so tame. I should have loved it when all the homes were cabins, and watchers for the stealthy Indian canoes patrolled the shores …”

Stung by Elnora’s dismissal of his lovely island, Freckles sheepishly justifies it as a merely temporary move: “This is secure while the children are so small, but when they grow larger, we are going farther north, into real forest, where they can learn self-reliance and develop backbone.”

If you go farther north from Mackinac, you hit the Canadian border in less than fifty miles. To find a classic American environment for his children to learn the Emersonian virtues, Freckles was going to have to become an immigrant and head off through Ontario in the direction of Hudson Bay. The United States, which had seemed inexhaustible only a generation ago, had run out of space.

The prospect of a homestead in Montana must have struck the readers of all these books as a miraculous conjunction between the real world and the world of private daydreams. I imagine a family — husband, wife, daughter, son — each lost in an age- and gender-appropriate bestseller. It’s hard to see the reader of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm swapping it for The Call of the Wild, but, however dissimilar their books, the family members would each find something of their separate fantasies reflected in that other book, published by the Milwaukee Road railroad. The extraordinarily fertile benchlands around Ismay and Mildred promised adventure, space, nature, escape at the same time as they offered the comforts of village life with its intimate gossip and its twin guardians of church and school. To have a home with no landlord, no rent, no mortgage … To be the lone plowman of one’s own acres … A homestead would combine the call of the wild with the warmth and security of Sunnybrook Farm.

The day before yesterday I was lunching with a friend who is the grandson of homesteaders. I recited the titles of the books I had been reading lately, dredged up from the basement of the Seattle public library. I thought them quaint oddities, but my friend claimed that he had read them all.

“The Simple Life? A Girl of the Limberlost?”

“Sure. Limberlost was a family word. When one of my sisters went all moony, we’d say she was away in the limberlost.”

“The Trail of the Lonesome Pine?”

“Wasn’t that written by a guy named Fox?”

“Where did you run across these books?”

They were all in his grandmother’s house, in Ismay.

In 1909 the roadbed was still soft, and when the emigrant train pulled out of Marmarth, North Dakota, its speed didn’t rise above that of a reasonably agile man on foot. As usual, it was already running more than five hours late; the published timetable was another railroad fiction. With the sun sinking fast toward the horizon, the train crept through a sudden irruption of badlands terrain, past mushrooms of sandstone on stalks of pale gray clay.

At the back of the train were the emigrant cars, each with a family, its livestock, furniture and farm implements snugly boxed in a single wagon. Whenever the train stopped at a station, these families could be seen living the life of Reilly: they slept on brassbound feather beds, tipped luxuriously back in rockers, played cards around their dining tables, while their cattle grieved and snorted at the bars of their compartments. To rent an emigrant car was relatively expensive. From Chicago to Miles City it cost 49¢ per hundred pounds of movables, with a minimum charge of $98 a car. The people aboard were nearly all farmers from the Midwest and as the land inched past they watched it closely, furtively, pretending to be engrossed by their newspapers or their hands of cards.

The polyglot crowd in the coaches that made up the forward end of the train had to stow their belongings as best they could. Their stuff, parceled in blankets, cardboard boxes, old flour sacks and flimsy suitcases lashed shut with rope, spilled out into the gangways of the carriages, where it served as seating for children and beds for household cats. The toilets (one at each end of every coach), the poorly trimmed oil lamps, the improvised cooking arrangements and the scanty opportunities on the trip for washing, gave the coaches a powerful and complicated smell that many of the settlers’ children would be able to recall in their nonage.

The journey had to be survived on a bare wood-slatted seat. With the temperature outside close to 90° and the train barely moving, the oppressive breadth of America was brought painfully home to every passenger. The stations — Selby … McLaughlin … Haynes … Reeder … Bowman … Rhame — slowly came and slowly went, their names empty of any meaningful association. At close to noon, the Missouri River had been crossed at Mobridge, South Dakota; since then there had been nothing in the geography to engage the eye. The badlands formations arrived as a welcome break; they gave one something to look at, provided a talking point in their queer resemblance to animals, human faces, architecture.

A number of the home seekers were old hands at long journeys. Aboard the train were ex-soldiers from the armies of Europe. In one coach a gentle and self-possessed German played tunes on a clarinet to an audience of children. He had served as a bandsman in the Russian army of Tsar Nicholas II and had played his clarinet during the Russian retreat from the Yalu River on the Korean — Chinese border in the recent Russo-Japanese war. There were other veterans of that war from Moldavia, Bessarabia, Romania, the Ukraine, along with Prussians from the army of Kaiser Bill and men from half a dozen languages and countries who had lately been patrolling the trouble-ridden borders of the Austria — Hungary empire. There were separate knots of Swedish, Norwegian and Irish people, all of whom had escaped to America from blighted rural economies back home.

Few of these Europeans were fresh off the boat. Most had spent several months, and some had spent years, working in the United States and saving enough from their wages to set up a homestead and keep it going through the first Montana winter. They’d taken jobs on construction sites; in railway gangs and logging camps; in garment factories. Their English tended to be still broken, but getting faster and more idiomatic. They were dressed in the American uniform of smart off-the-peg department-store clothes. Had it not been for their littered baggage, the women in shirtwaists and the men in snappy summer suits might have been taken for tourists on a sightseeing excursion.

The best accommodation in the coaches was the curtained overhead sleeping berths, where, for a premium, one might sprawl and read in tolerable privacy. On one of these bunks lay Elam McDowell, a newspaper reporter from Minneapolis, who had given up his job at the Minneapolis Tribune in order to stake out a homestead and edit the Terry Tribune, whose owner, Alfred Wright, had written to the Minneapolis paper to inquire if they could recommend a suitable journalist for the Terry job. McDowell had left his wife, Irene, and their three daughters back in the city. They’d join him later in the year when the homestead was under the plow and the house built.

In another sleeping berth, Ralph Norris, six feet four, was cramped for space. Norris, a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago, had been a famous college athlete. He had broken the world record for the pole vault, though his record was disappointingly short-lived; it was broken again exactly eight minutes after being set. Norris’s fiancée, Virginia Wilson, had just been diagnosed as having tuberculosis. Her doctor believed that a change of air might bring about a cure, and the high, dry climate of the Plains was thought to be as good for the disease, if not better, as that of Switzerland. Norris, who had made a careful study of the pamphlets and could practically recite Campbell’s book by heart, had nailed Mildred as the place to make a fortune and restore Virginia’s health. As soon as the house was up, they’d marry — and Ralph Norris spent much of his time constructing in his head an airy yet snug sanatorium where his bride, liberated from the miasma of the city, would at last shake off her illness for good.

Despite all the reassurances in the pamphlets, Norris had certain fixed ideas about the West. Stories of claim jumpers, fence wars and Indian raids had made him decide to take no chances. In Chicago, guided by a helpful salesman who knew all about the hazards of Montana, Norris selected the.43 Caliber “Egyptian” rifle as the ideal homesteader’s weapon. He bought seven of them, together with two cases of ammunition, and this arsenal occupied most of the bunk, leaving Norris a shelf just wide enough for him to lie on his side, his bent knees poking through the curtains.

The passengers with the least luggage were single men, Americans, for whom a bedroll and a spare checkered shirt were sufficient equipment for what they had in mind. The provisions of the new government homestead act were interestingly elastic. It should not take too much effort to turn free land into free money. The legal requirement of cultivation could be easily met: as the saying went, all you had to do was drag a turkey’s foot across the place. You could prove up your claim and sell the land as soon as you got title; but the smart dodge would be to use the land as surety at the bank, raise a loan for farm equipment, and light out with the cash.

Several of the men had come with sisters and girlfriends, for single women could file claims. Some had come in a consortium, got together at the local bar. They viewed the bona fide homesteaders as comic rubes. They would not dream of living in the godforsaken holes that were framed by the windows of the train. Once they’d gotten through the paperwork on their claims, they’d be back in the city within the week. For now, they smoked, joked, sucked at beers and mimicked the accents of the settlers.

The train ground to a halt at Baker, and to many of the passengers it seemed that it might never move again. Occasionally there would be a mild jolt as an emigrant car was uncoupled from the train’s rear end. Twice, a sweaty official in the braided livery of the railroad company walked the length of the train calling “Baker for Cabin Creek! Baker for Cabin Creek!” The new lake, which came to within a block’s length of the line, had been intensively homesteaded by mosquitoes, who laid into the emigrants as into a free church supper. The arrival of the train had drawn a jostle of horse-drawn wagons and a few dusty automobiles, but this traffic faded from the streets while the train remained at a standstill.

In one of the coaches, sitting alone above a spreading pool of tobacco juice on the floor, was Worsell. In the informal society of the prairie, where everyone was on first-name terms with everyone one else, Worsell would always be remembered only as Worsell, or Mr. Worsell, or That Englishman. He was not a man who inspired much affection in others.

Worsell was a Londoner and, at thirty-four, an old soldier. He’d been invalided out of the South African War because of his leg, and had blued his discharge pay on a ticket to America, the land of big helpings and easy pickings. He’d had no luck in New York, and, following the talk in the hostel where he’d put up, had made his way northwest to Minneapolis. He’d tried his hand at a number of things — had worked in a hardware store, taken a job in the housepainting business and hauled logs with a timber outfit in northern Minnesota.

In Minneapolis he met a Swedish girl who had recently arrived with her family in America; in the company of Kirsten Torup, Worsell had never felt so positively talented. His fluent English made him the custodian of all things American. In restaurants and on streetcars, he was almost dashing. He became a welcome guest in the tenement building where the Torups had an apartment. He corrected everyone’s pronunciation. He grew a mustache and bought a phonograph.

Worsell and Kirsten married when Kirsten found she was pregnant, and their son, Arthur, was born late in the year in 1902. Worsell was tickled pink with his boy, though much of the time he was away at the logging camp, mailing money back to Kirsten in Minneapolis.

When Arthur was four, Kirsten died of the flu, and Worsell’s world, never robust, went to pieces. Utterly unequipped for single parenthood, he farmed the child out with his wife’s relations. Up at the camp he moped and drank alone. He paid irregular visits to Arthur; strained occasions on which he was usually slightly drunk.

In 1909, he was following the drift of the talk in the bars in Minneapolis, just as earlier he had followed the drift of the talk in the New York hostel. He had no time for reading. Free land was free land, and Worsell wanted a piece of it for himself.

After a long while, the locomotive began to sigh and throw off gouts of bitter steam. Its whistle sounded — a flat complaining oboe note — and the train crawled out of Baker into the last of the sunset. The dying light gave the miles of new barbed wire fencing a surreal brilliance. The prairie here was dotted about with small, imperfect rectangles of plowed ground, and even this late in the evening, people and horses were still abroad, cutting new fields out of the yellow grassland. There were tents, some glowing faintly from the light of kerosene lanterns, a few makeshift cabins, the skeletal frames of partially constructed barns. By the time the call came for Plevna, it was pitch dark. All one could see was the occasional grotesque shadow show on the screen of a tent roof.

Across the gangway from Worsell, a woman was feeding her family catsup sandwiches — thin slices of bread smeared with tomato ketchup. She offered one to Worsell. He wasn’t hungry, but nor was he in the habit of passing up a free offer. The scrape of ketchup was so faint as barely to color the bread without moistening it or adding any perceptible flavor, but Worsell ate it anyway. Food was food, and you eat what you can get was Worsell’s motto.

He wasn’t someone to whom mental associations came easily — and when they did, they were almost invariably unwelcome. So he was surprised to find himself dwelling on the landscape of the past hour or two and being rather pleased by the echoes it aroused in his mind. It had been a long time since he’d seen so much barbed wire, so many tents, such a boundless sweep of dry grass. It was like the veldt. It was across a terrain exactly like this that the British army had driven the Boers into funnel-shaped traps of barbed wire that the young Worsell had helped to unroll from the drums. Jacobsdal … Petrusburg … De Brug … Tins of bully beef and field canteens of strong, sweet tea … Musing amiably on the tricky ways of the wire and its twisted four-point barbs, Worsell watched his reflection in the dark window glass.

Nearly forty hours after leaving Chicago, the train arrived in Ismay, where a crowd of husbands had been waiting for it since early afternoon, a good number of them in Nigger Bob’s saloon. (Bob Levitt was not black; he was a white ex-cowboy from the XIT ranch in Texas.) The dazed and travel-stained emigrants lifted their bags and boxes down on to the track. They had been expecting a city, with street lamps, signs, illuminated storefronts. They stood under a clear night sky, looking in perplexity at a bare scatter of buildings, their blocky shapes silvered by storlight. Ismay might as well have been Haynes, or Reeder, or McLaughlin.

Many spent their first night in Montana at the Milwaukee Hotel, a honeycomb of bare closet-sized rooms, each just large enough to hold a bed, an upright chair and a nightstand with a water pitcher atop and a chamber pot below. The curtains of the rooms were thin enough to see the stars through them and they stirred and shivered in the drafts that wormed their way through the poorly carpentered frames. Some of the emigrants heard for the first time the intense contralto sobbing of the coyotes, and wondered apprehensively if they were wolves. Some, too tired, expectant and keyed-up to face their cell-like sleeping quarters, sat up in the lobby, smoking and turning the pages of back numbers of the local newspaper. On the front page of one issue of the Ismay was a poem:

HERE’S TO ISMAY

At summer’s eve when Heaven’s ethereal bow

Spans with bright arch the glittering hills below,

Why to Ismay turns the prophetic eye.

Where grand possibilities so plent lie

Slumbering, but aphynx like, raises her infant head.

Telling how homeseekers daily tread

Her unfinished streets now rank with life

Where all is genial — no sign of strife!

Long may she thrive while countless homes do stand

On such abundant and fertile land.

While natives listen at eve’s alluring strains,

Blest little Ismay, youngest city of the plains!

A schoolteacher from Red Wing, Minnesota, out of long habit correcting the poem’s faulty spelling and grammar, picked up the echo of Oliver Goldsmith and his Deserted Village.

Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain,

Where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain …

But Goldsmith was writing an elegy on a rural community destroyed by the big landowners. In Ismay, history was being miraculously rewritten. The cattle ranchers, who had lorded it over the plains, like the wealthy foxhunters with their parks and fake castles in Goldsmith’s poem, were being fenced out by the laboring swains. The ideal village was being reborn, the land restored to the virtuous cultivators of the earth. Blest little Ismay!