Bad Land: An American Romance

4. Fences

“NO — HE TOOK IT FROM WAY BACK THERE, where I just was.” “The headland on the horizon there has to be in line with the end of this rocky ridge—”

“That’s a different ridge—”

“It’s the same ridge. It’s got the same three outcrops on it — look. And the curve of the swale is right from here … the way it bends toward us like it does in the picture.”

“This vee-shaped nick in the skyline here? That’s that. We’re too far over this way.”

“If he was using a box Brownie, he’d have been holding it down at waist level, like this. We need to be lower to get the same angle.”

“Higher. You got the wrong ridge, partner.”

We had been wrangling all morning. Earlier, we’d spent an hour in the wrong township, on the wrong half-section, where the U.S. Geological Survey map appeared to have been drawn by a doodling fantasist. We were now in agreement with the map, at least, though not with each other. This was Township 9, north of Range 53 East, southern half of Section 2, eleven miles northwest of Ismay. The land had been proved-up by Mike’s grandfather Ned Wollaston on April 27, 1917, and granted to him and to his heirs and assigns for ever, under the Presidential seal of Woodrow Wilson. We were definitely on the Wollaston place, but the homestead had gone AWOL.

The photograph had been taken by Mike’s father, Percy Wollaston, sometime in the late 1930S, when the family had quit the homestead but the buildings were still intact. In the chemical gloaming of underexposure stood a trim, two-story farmhouse with its attendant barns and cow barns. Laid out on an apron of low ground between a sheltering escarpment and a seasonal creek, the homestead was as snugly substantial as a village, though even in the snapshot its desertion was palpable. A window at the front of the house gaped wide and black. The rectangular outlines of the fruit and vegetable gardens were blurring into grass.

We’d expected to find the place in ruins, but there wasn’t so much as the ruin of a ruin in sight. The open range, green in May and splashed with yellow and purple wildflowers, was empty except for a herd of cattle two or three miles off. I didn’t like the look of these drifting smuts on the horizon: there was a lone cottonwood tree half a mile to the west of us; the Jeep was twice that distance. Meanwhile, as we tried to match photograph and topography bump for bump, the missing homestead slid about over the prairie like an egg on hot oil.

“You want an El Ropo?” Mike dug from his back pocket a packet of somewhat flattened Swisher Sweets. He was much stronger than me but nearly twice my weight. If it came to a prairie corrida, we’d make a fine pair of clowns.

Our cigar smoke brought a whiff of pool-hall degeneracy to the clear Montana air. We were upwind of the cattle. How keen is the olfactory sense of a Hereford bull? “How far is it between the house and the swale, in the picture?”

“Seventy, eighty yards?”

“Well, look—”

We settled back into dispute. Maybe the swale had changed its course … Maybe grass had grown over the exposed rock of the ridge … Maybe too many years had stacked up between us and the snapshot. As a child, I used to tramp along the edges of plowed fields in Hampshire, trying, usually in vain, to identify Neolithic tumuli that were marked on the Ordnance Survey map. The Wollaston homestead had vanished off the face of the earth, leaving as little trace as those stone-age graves. Mike and I, both fifty-something, had cause to shiver at the discovery that a mere half century had been sufficient to consign his grandfather’s farm to the realm of prehistoric archaeology.

Killdeer wheeled overhead, the most miserable-sounding of all Peterson’s Western Birds. The wind keened in the long grass. Cigars clenched between our teeth, we followed the zigzag line of the swale, searching for landmarks.

“Ned had a compass rose tattooed on the back of his left hand. It used to fascinate me when I was a kid. I don’t know how he got it. He never went to sea.”

“He was captain of a prairie schooner—”

“He probably had a hydraulic lunch in Minneapolis and fell into a tattoo parlor by accident. It could happen to anyone.”

“Look—”

And suddenly we had a perfect fit. The ridge, the notch, the swale, the low hill like a headland in the far distance were aligned exactly as they were in the photograph. A barbed wire fence ran out ahead from close beside where Mike’s father had stood with his Brownie — and here, at our feet, was the rotted stub of a juniper post. A coil of rusty wire lay on a shoulder of rock behind us. The irregular patch of emerald, over to the right, must have been the hog pen. The shit from Ned’s pigs — years older than either of us — was still doing a useful job. There, where the original topsoil had lain undisturbed beneath the floor of the house, and where the grass now grew tighter and curlier than elsewhere, was the Wollaston homestead.

Crossing the swale, Mike dislodged with his foot a ragged metal hoop. “Top of a milking bucket,” he said. A little farther on, he eased away from the earth a cobweb of rust and pronounced it to be some vital component of a threshing machine.

“If you say so—”

I watched him wade through the cricket orchestra in the grass: burly, stooping, hatless in the high sun. He had squashed out his cigar before entering his grandfather’s front yard, and I followed suit. We trod with the self-conscious gravity of men in church.

“Fender from a Model T … There’s the front of their cook-stove … That’s a wagon-tongue.”

Once upon a time, long ago, Mike had been a college instructor in anatomy; he’d been able to put a name to every bone in the human hand. His tender feelings for machinery proved him to be still an anatomist at heart. At his Seattle boatyard he kept a derelict industrial trailer stacked end to end and floor to ceiling with “parts.” Even he can have had only a foggy idea as to what these parts were parts of. It was their lame-duck, orphaned isolation from their parent bodies that touched his soft spot. His trailer was an asylum for lost flywheels, sprockets, gauges, camshafts, manifolds, grommets, thermostats, ball joints, thrust rings, rocker arms, injectors, valves, shims, circlips, thingummies and whatsamajiggers.

He parted the grass with his fingers to expose a protruding black-metal spike. “Their lightning conductor. That was a good business to be in. Better than snake oil. The salesmen used to travel all over the dirt roads, selling these things out of the backs of their cars. They’d get the wife when the husband was away in the fields and tell her a few good lightning stories … I bet a lot of kids on the prairie came out with a look of the lightning-conductor salesman about them.”

Nowadays, Mike bought and sold things — land, houses, boats and ships. He liked damaged goods, insurance write-offs, hopeless wrecks. For a vessel really to engage his affection, it had to have been to the bottom or been raked by fire from stem to stern. He was currently restoring to seaworthiness a fish-processing ship, a 500-ton oceangoing tug and a motor yacht, all gotten from their insurers for a song. Each project began with talk of thievish windfall profits, but the truth was that Mike couldn’t pass by a wounded hulk without wanting to be its Good Samaritan.

Here, picking over the scant wreckage of the family farm, he was daydreaming these fragments back to life again; the parlor rising from the grass, new cedar rafters making a grid of the blue sky.

He stood in a dip, like the crater from a small bomb. “This was a fine root cellar they had …” Near the collapsed cellar a blistered pipe stuck out of the earth. “Well-casing,” Mike said. He flipped a quarter into the pipe. The coin didn’t fall far before it made a hollow, liquid plop. “They must have had a little windmill here to pump the water to the house.” He was building the windmill in his head as he spoke.

When he was a small child, shortly after Pearl Harbor, Mike, along with his eider brother and two sisters, had been evacuated to Ismay, where the children lived with their maternal grand-mother for the duration of the war. His father worked on the hydroelectric plant at Great Falls, Montana, and the family lived in the small clapboard company town below the dam. When the United States entered the war, there were fears that German or Japanese sympathizers might blow up the dam, enabling the Missouri to sweep the town away. So the Wollaston kids were sent 350 miles back east to Ismay. Though the homestead was only a short ride away, they were never taken to see it, nor was it spoken of.

“Look—” Mike had found a small rusted metal frame with a single plank of Wood dangling loosely from a bolt. “Percy’s sled.”

“Rosebud,” I said, and wished I hadn’t.

For a full minute he stood, too, cradling his father’s toboggan. Then he laid it back in the grass as carefully as one might move a sleeping child.

“You wouldn’t like to take it home with you?”

“It’s better where it is.” He affected his lopsided, hardboiled grin. “I’ve got more than enough junk already.”

We lunched on the brow of the rocky ridge, a children’s picnic of sardines, crackers and bananas. A morning in the ovenlike interior of the Jeep had turned the 7UP into an explosive hot drink.

“The only time Percy ever said anything to me about the homestead, it was just a single sentence. We were sitting up late one night over a glass of whiskey. There was a silence. Then he said he hoped he’d never again have to see anything like his mother, down on her knees, day after day, praying for rain. That was it. That was all he ever said.”

Maybe Percy Wollaston’s taciturnity was meant to keep his memory of the homestead fresh and vacuum-sealed; for in 1972, when he was in his seventieth year, he wrote a book-length memoir of his prairie childhood. He wanted his grandchildren — born in the 1960s — to understand how very close they were to the kind of pioneer, frontier life that, by the time of Watergate, had come to seem merely part of the quaint costume drama of the remote American past. He was then living in a handsome log house near Eureka, Montana, on the wet green western slope of the Rockies. Elk and deer trampled his lawn and raided the fruit trees; a trout stream chuckled over granite boulders thirty yards from his living-room window. In this forest clearing, listening to the water, he sat at a manual Smith-Corona and re-created on the page the dry and treeless country around Ismay between 1910 and 1925.

He wrote fluently, in well-carpentered sentences. He was a practical man whose life had been spent attending to details, and the habit of patient craftsmanship showed in his writing. As the story took hold, he found himself able to look out at the world through the promiscuous, relentlessly observant eyes of his seven-year-old self. He noticed everything — the appearance of the soil as the first sod peeled in a breaking wave from the blade of the plow; the grain and texture of fresh-cut juniper; the dismal creak of wagon tires on snow. He illustrated his work with neat pen-and-ink drawings that showed exactly how to build a claim shack, make a “stone boat” to clear the land of rocks, or set a trap for coyotes.

He sketched the homestead as it had been in 1919 (and the precision of the date was typical of him). A photocopy of this drawing was pegged out with stones on the ground between us. Mike and I were sitting on the back wall of the dugout barn, built in a hurry to shelter the horses in the fall of 1909. Its flat roof was shaggily thatched with hay bought from a neighbor. Its pine-log posts and beams were cut from a stand of timber in hills ten miles away to the southwest.

Below us, the farm buildings rose into being, four-square and short-shadowed in the early afternoon. The granary and blacksmith shop. The cow barn. The henhouse. The machine sheds. The new horse barn was a steepling frame structure with a vaulted roof over the hayloft. From the lean-to kitchen of the farmhouse, a path of marbled-yellow flagstones led past the root cellar to the henhouse — Mrs. Wollaston’s daily route. The galvanized-iron blades of the windmill barely turned in the listless breeze.

The air was thick with heat. In sweat-sodden shirts, we walked down the broad curve of the driveway to the front door of the house — and from here the random bumps and breaks of the prairie took on a sudden shapeliness. A shallow winding valley enfolded the farm on all sides. The fenced lawn extended almost as far as the creek. Close to the house, the flowerbeds, watered each evening with kitchen slops, were tight-packed with clematis, chrysanthemum, aster and larkspur.

It was a view to be proud of, and “homestead” seemed too cramped a word for a spread so grandly, spaciously conceived as this. The long trim lawn, the sweeping drive, the natural ha-ha of the creek bank were all dreaming of an elsewhere; the only things missing from the picture were the immemorial elms. The Wollaston place was a manageable family empire, built to last, built to be handed down to grandchildren to grow upon and farm in their turn.

Now Ned’s grandson made a sharp right turn round the corner of the farmhouse kitchen, as if the walls still stood, and found the flagstone path to the henhouse.

“Watch out for eggs—”

Past the henhouse was the site of a bonfire. Sagebrush grew over the ashes, but we dug out the remains of a leather-upholstered car seat, some bits of charred timber, a lawn-mower wheel, the broken starboard half of an alloy cap pistol — Percy’s six-shooter. A tarnished coin at my feet turned out to be a paper-thin stamped medallion of a woman’s head, hair flying, art-nouveau style, with a projecting metal tab. I handed it to Mike.

“What I think? It’s the clasp to an old-timey photograph album.”

We searched for its other half. No luck.

“They must have burned the family photos when they left.”

The thought was no sooner phrased than it was interrupted by a low snuffle at our backs. On the brow of the ridge, a troop of twenty or so cattle stood shoulder to shoulder. I saw the snuffler: pendants of drool dangled from the corners of its rubbery lips. The animals all wore the same expression, of mild unfocused hostility.

“Cows,” Mike said. “But out here cows can get a little frisky if you’re not in a truck or on a horse.”

Moving slowly, trying to look nonchalant and big, we sidled off the cows’ property to the Jeep.

The car jounced and slopped over the rough ground. Mike still held the little medallion (Mnemosyne, mother to the nine muses) between a forefinger and thumb blackened by the day’s archaeology. We reached the dirt road and turned south for Ismay and Baker. Mike sucked morosely on an El Ropo. We didn’t talk.

They burned the family photos.

One mile southeast of the Wollaston place, on the southern half of Section 12, Worsell was holding down his claim.

His land (he’d saved himself a few precious dollars by doing without the services of a locator) was rough: 320 acres of lumps and bald patches, with a southerly tilt that would expose it to the full broiling heat of the summer sun. It had no creek bed to give it shape or suggest a good site for a house. It had one great advantage in Worsell’s eyes: on its northern and eastern sides it was already fenced, and the lines of raw posts and new wire looked a treat. So did the view. From the high benchland slope, one could see clear to Wyoming.

As the music-hall song went, “You could see Australia — if it wasn’t for the ’ouses in between …” Worsell had grown up in a tenement block off the Bethnal Green Road, where the view had been of a brick wall and of the windows of rooms that were bleak mirrors to the Worsells’ own. On the South African veldt, he had experienced an entirely unlooked-for sense of liberation. It was a land on which a man could stretch himself and feel comfortable in its bare distances. But Montana beat the veldt hands down. Worsell, a small man with a pinched and beaky face, like a dusky house sparrow, could grow big here. Strolling along the mile of new fence, chewing on a quid of Red Man tobacco, his pride in his place, its every knoll and tussock, came to him as sharply as a stab of pain in an abscessed tooth.

His army days had set him up with at least one useful skill: Worsell was expert at wangling things out of people. He used to wangle leave, rations, and any cushy numbers that were going. On the prairie he wangled tools, rides into town, wagon space for lumber from the store in Ismay, and “advice” that he parlayed into hours of free labor.

The neighbors to the north were the Docken brothers, Art and Will, who had taken up adjoining claims. They were strapping fellows in their thirties and full of useful know-how. Will Docken’s homestead had a floor of poured concrete, and the Dockens’ fences were a cut above everyone else’s — their posts more closely spaced, and in such perfect lines that they might have been drawn on the land with ruler and pencil.

Worsell was in luck. It was a happy coincidence that his own boy was named Arthur; talking to Art Docken, he let drop the fact that his Art, poor motherless son, was boarding with the wife’s people back in Minneapolis, and that he’d be bringing the seven-year-old out to Montana as soon as things were shipshape here. People softened toward Worsell when he told them about Art.

He frequently sought ‘advice’ at mealtimes, turning up at his neighbors’ half-built houses at around noon or six o’clock and casting a hopeful eye at the pan of soup on the stove, or wrinkling his nose appreciatively at the smell of baking bread. “Don’t mind me” and “if you’re sure it wouldn’t be a trouble” were his catchphrases, and, in his first days on the claim, Worsell ate as well as any homesteader in the county.

It took Worsell a week to build his house. The frame was made of two-by-fours; a flimsy contraption that kept on getting the better of Worsell as he tried to subdue it with hammer and nails. It bulged and twisted. A nail driven in at one corner caused the opposite corner to spring apart. It groaned and swayed in the lightest breeze. Wrestling with it, Worsell looked as if he were trying to emulate the Wright Brothers and take to the sky in a stick-and-string box kite. He stiffened it, somewhat, with planks, ten feet long and one inch thick, fastened at odd diagonal angles to the frame. For the roof, he laid a two-by-six on its edge to make a raised central peak, then nailed down his remaining planks, bending them over the crosspiece. The resulting camber was just sufficient to deflect the rain.

Worsell wrapped his creation in jade-green tar paper. Tar paper was a wonderfully forgiving material. It could hide almost any lapse in craftsmanship. Impregnated with asphalt, pliable and easily cut, it kept out the worst, at least, of the weather and was the salvation of every hasty, lazy, cheeseparing or ham-fisted person who came to homestead on the prairie. Tar paper was as important in its way as barbed wire, and Worsell’s shack was a classic piece of Great Plains vernacular architecture.

Many claim shacks, constructed on the same principles, were far better built than Worsell’s. A few had lasted into the 1990s, as toolsheds and kitchen extensions. One could immediately recognize them. With their shallow crescent roofs and tight, caulked planking, these weathered relies of 1909 were like old wooden boats. But I warmed more to Worsell’s shack (which was long gone by the time I reached the Worsell place). Worsell’s carpentry was hearteningly like my own. It was actually worse than mine. I’d use screws. I’d batten down the tar paper with laths. If Worsell could build himself a little house on the prairie, there was hope for anyone — and many of the people who showed up on the emigrant trains were as slapdash and unhandy as Worsell and me.

The better sort of claim shack had a raised floor with pine boards — sometimes varnished pine boards. Worsell, short of cash and time and patience, wasn’t interested in genteel refinements.

His floor was bare earth. But it was his own earth, and Worsell, man of property, found comfort in the dusty soil under his feet, its tufts of grass, flattened and dying, its spicy, clovelike smell.

His one big investment was the stove. Claw-footed, squat, broad-bottomed, the stove, which was the smallest and cheapest model on offer at the store, was built much like its owner. Its undersized tin firebox was perpetually hungry for fuel. It guzzled the leftovers from Worsell’s construction work, cottonwood sticks, dried cowpats. Buffalo turds were the best fuel, but they were rare finds. Sunbaked over thirty years or more to the consistency of building bricks, these ancient, weirdly sculpted stools needed to be sawn or chopped up with an axe to fit the firebox, where they burned as slowly and warmingly as seasoned oak. Worsell found half a dozen on his land, and when he beat the bounds of his place he always kept an eye peeled on his neighbors’ property for an overlooked prize.

Worsell slept under his old army greatcoat on a cot lent by the Yeargen neighbors with young Art in mind. Late in the evening, as the earth cooled and the wind got up, the stovepipe clanged against the roughly cut hole in the roof through which Worsell could see stars, the frame creaked, and loose tar paper slapped against the planking. Waking to these noises, Worsell would, for a moment, be fooled into thinking that he was back aboard the troopship, pitching and rolling through a South Atlantic night.

For kitchen equipment, he had a skillet and a kettle. When he was forced to cook for himself, he did a fry-up of bread and salt bacon. Water came from Whitney Creek, a mile down the hill, where Worsell competed with the rattlesnakes for access to the muddy shallows. He lugged the water back to the shack in a pair of army-surplus canvas buckets and let it stand overnight while the mud settled. It was poor, alkali stuff. His tea tasted soapy and saline, however many leaves he shook into the pot.

In front of the stove there was a dark stain in the earth. The stain grew steadily bigger and matured into a small pond of brown tobacco juice. Worsell, a man of soldierly habits, spat accurately and always at the same target. His rare visitors left the house with a single image of his domestic arrangements: the gleaming pool of Red Man juice, topped up by Worsell in the course of conversation whenever he wanted to add emphasis to a point.

Worsell’s shack was a blot on the neighborhood. The Dockens and the Wollastons were shocked by its squalor. The Londoner had brought into their hopeful country lives the taint of the Bethnal Green slums. His reputation for dirtiness and cadging soon spread far abroad, and his name became a byword. It was a noun, a verb, an adjective. A lost tool was worselled. Dishes left unwashed overnight were worsells. Anything poorly made was a worsell job. Nearly seventy years later, young Art, himself an old man, dying in a Seattle flophouse, would remember his father’s shack with resentment and shame.

Other people saw his home as a dingy box, ten feet by twelve; but Worsell himself saw only space and light. He could walk the broad reach of his own acres for a mile, and still be at home. The jackrabbits and porcupines, the commanding view over the plains, even the eagle overhead, were his. Landlord’s perks. In September and early October, before the frosts began, Worsell, in his costive fashion, was on top of the world.

Beyond the Worsell homestead, the road led down to the confused and lumpy plain, where wind waves swept through the grass in traveling bands of sunshine and shadow. A troop of pronghorn antelope veered off to the right ahead of the Jeep, leaping, skimble-shanked, at 40 m.p.h. I slammed on the brake; so did the antelope. Standing stock-still on a dusty swell of ground, within easy rifle range, they stared at us with vast bedroom eyes. Rarely have I felt myself to be an object of such engrossed and trusting fascination.

“And people hunt these things as game? It’s like shooting Bambi.”

“You want to strangle one with your bare hands?” Mike said. “What you do is lie down in the middle of the road and wave your arms and legs in the air. The little darlings will come right up to you.”

I invited him to demonstrate, but he remembered his age and claimed a bad back.

The antelope, all eyes, took a delicate step forward. They were close enough for one to see the single blemish on their beauty — whiskers encircled their lips in unkempt toilet-brush beards.

“You’ve eaten antelope?”

“Sure. Many times.”

“What do they taste like?”

“Kind of midway between a hummingbird and a whooping crane. Same as venison. I couldn’t tell you the difference. When you skin them, they look like German Shepherds, and if you get a tough one, it tastes a lot like German Shepherd too.”

Plains Indians stalked the antelope, dressing themselves in their skins and waving flags of colored cloth to woo them. Buffalo hunters used the antelope for target practice and picnics. Then hungry settlers came and blew the antelope away in their hundreds and thousands. Yet these vegetarian innocents of the Great Plains managed to outlast the Indians, the vacationing sportsmen, the buffalo and the homesteaders. The animals gazed down at us, transfixed — dim of brain, helplessly inquisitive, good to eat and amusing to shoot at, they had hit on a secret of genetic survival well known in human society, where pronghorn antelope may be seen grazing at all the most desirable tables.

We tacked east, then south, then east again, as the road made 90-degree turns along the section lines. One could no longer get really lost on the prairie: these roads, with their slavish devotion to the cardinal points of the compass, had converted the land into a full-scale map of itself. But one could lose count of the turns, and feel the prairie begin to spin disquietingly on its axis. Sometimes I found myself driving east into the sunset, or saw that the shadow of the car was falling on its south side. It was a long way from the dazed early travelers, afflicted with “the lone-liness” or “the peculiar sickness,” but it was enough to remind one of them. Take out your jackknife and play mumblety-peg, or sing a song …

Our course converged with the drab green rift of the cottonwoods on Fallon Creek. We crossed a wooden bridge over the river, still swollen and turbid from the recent rains, jolted over the one-track line of the old Milwaukee Road, and were in Ismay — or what had been Ismay but was Ismay no longer. The name on the sign had been painted out and replaced with Joe. Population 28.

When it first came into the world, Ismay had been idly, capriciously named, as if it were a goldfish or a hamster. It had nearly jettisoned its name in 1912, when the Titanic went down and Bruce Ismay, the chairman of the shipping line, allegedly elbowed his way ahead of the women and children in the race for the lifeboats. Then the town had voted, narrowly, to remain Ismay and tough out the jokes at its name’s expense. It had even made it into the gazetteer of the Times Atlas of the World, where Ismay, Montana, is sandwiched between Ismaning, Germany, and Ismetpasa, Turkey. But the glue on the name had lost its sticking power, and Ismay was now Joe, at least on a part-time basis. On local maps it was variously represented as Ismay (Joe) and Joe (Ismay). If this went on much longer, the town would boast a patrician string of names like George (Herbert) (Walker) (Bush).

Its new a.k.a. was a bid to cash in on a celebrity’s celebrity. In 1993, when the Kansas City Chiefs bought the star quarter-back, Joe Montana, from the San Francisco Forty-Niners, Montana, at thirty-three, was an old man. His knees were going, his upper torso was a monument to the unceasing labor of the surgeon and the chiropractor. He was in his sunset years, and the Chiefs purchased him more for his name, and the glory of his past, than for his continuing abilities on the field. They played him sparingly, a quarter here, a quarter there, wheeling him out on special occasions, as a Mediterranean village might display its famous reliquary of saint’s bones.

It was a disc jockey at a rock radio station in Kansas City who came up with the idea of turning Joe Montana, or, rather, Joe, Montana, into a place on the map. What was needed was some ailing townlet in the deep sticks, just big enough to have a U.S. Post Office for the souvenir mail frankings. It could become an object of tourist pilgrimage. It could build a museum of Joe Montana memorabilia. It could make a big killing with Joe, Montana, T-shirts. As the people at the radio station saw it, this was an offer that no ailing townlet could afford to turn down.

They began calling around the great length and breadth of Area Code 406. They called the one-stoplight towns, the no-stoplight towns, the wide places in the road — and met with a surprising number of gruff refusals. People are sentimentally attached to the names that served their parents and grandparents, even when the names are of the kind that you would have thought anyone would be glad to be rid of, like Molt, Iron, Straw, Yaak, Stumptown, Twodot, Agency, Crackerville. Zero, Montana, might have been a likely taker, but it had lost its post office in 1957.

Finally, they got through to Ismay, the smallest incorporated city in the state, six miles from the nearest blacktop road and largely in ruins. Ismay bought the pitch and changed its name. It had been Joe for nearly a year when we arrived, and already the fame of the football player had rubbed off on what was left of the town and set it ostentatiously apart from its moldering neighbors.

Fame transforms — even fame at second remove, like the dilute solution of the stuff that gets sprayed on the brother of a First Lady or the one-time roommate of a celebrated murderer. Taciturn lummoxes suddenly acquire self-consciousness and start taking their own mumblings seriously. They learn to pose for the camera, sticking out their chins to lose their drinkers’ jowls, and make the awful discovery that they are interesting. Sprinkle a few droplets of the substance on people who have been mutes for the better part of a lifetime, and they cannot be persuaded to stop talking.

So it was with Ismay. The town had grown garrulous with signs and messages. From the railroad tracks, it looked much like its sister, Mildred, sixteen miles down the line: a scattered wood-lot; the fuel supply, apparently, for the two or three houses that were still inhabited. Nearly all of the buildings were deeply stooped, sunk to their knees, or pancaked flat and melting rapidly back into the earth. The difference was that in Ismay (Joe) or Joe (Ismay), every heap of bleached gray timber had acquired a new varnished shingle telling the visitor what the heap had been. The Cass-Hamilton Store. Grey Gables Hotel. J. E. Prindle, Real Estate. Brackett Hotel. Robert, Livery. A lump of scabbed concrete in the grass had a shingle saying that it had once supported the safe of the Ismay First National Bank. The bank itself, like the high school and the department store, had long gone, its bricks carted off by the local ranchers to build add-ons to their houses.

Where Mildred was a wreck, Ismay was a museum. Its dereliction was curated, and the shingles had turned it, at a stroke, into a tourist-attractive objet, a slice of authentic Americana. Ismay reached its semiological climax at the mustard-yellow Catholic church, whose south wall had been covered in graffiti. In letters of varying sizes, some in red, some in white paint, the wall now read:

I thought the peculiar symbol at the base of the design was an eye, of the kind that Maltese fishermen paint on the prows of their boats to ward off the evil spirits of the deep. Mike, a dour literalist, thought it was a football. I conceded that though it might have been intended to be a football, it was also an eye; Joe’s eye, brooding over his damaged body below.

“Superstitious people have sometimes seen it wink.”

Mike, searching for his childhood here, was lost. All his remembered landmarks were gone, and the shingles were no help.

Ryan Clothing — Millinery & Maternity.

“I don’t recall any Ryans.”

“Do you think there might be anyone still here from then?”

“No — they’re all planted in the marble orchard now.”

Aside from the grain elevator, much the biggest thing in town was the cinder-block hangar of the new fire hall and community center. It straddled two blocks, and was an evident statement of faith in Joe’s future. We looked through a window at an unfinished room large enough to seat several hundred people. If everyone who lived at present within a twenty-five-mile radius were to assemble here, there would still be rows and rows of empty chairs. It would require some astounding renaissance for this great white elephant to earn its keep.

“Maybe my grandmother’s house is somewhere under there,” Mike said.

Five minutes later, he relocated the house on a patch of empty waste ground a block east of the patch of empty waste ground that had been the First National Bank. He walked slowly, making abrupt right-angled turns, opening invisible doors and going from room to nonexistent room. “I think this is it—”

Ten minutes later, he found it. The house was still, just, standing, though its roof was hogged, drooping at both ends like the keel of a rotten ship, and it had lost most of its tiles. Here and there, flakes of white paint still clung to the bare planks of the one-story cottage, and a stubborn wisteria vine lived on, trailing from the eaves of the porch and blotting out the front door in a bushy green cascade.

“I missed it first time round because of the porch. That porch is new.”

New? It appeared to be every bit as old and ruinous as the rest.

“Shall we go in?”

“No. This is enough. I wouldn’t want to trouble the mice.”

A dust devil haunted the remains of Ismay. It kept on showing over the balding roofs, a whirling cyclone of blown dirt, whose shifting, angular track kept pace with our own. At a street end, it revealed its source: a frizzy-haired woman in specs and stretch pants, astride a bright red garden tractor with balloon tires. The postmaster. She wore her government name tag on her blouse: Loreen Nemitz.

Her official title did not do her justice. Mrs. Nemitz was the genius loci of the town. The Nemitzes, newcomers by local standards (Mrs. Nemitz and her husband had arrived in Ismay from the Midwest in the 1970s), ran the place. Her husband ran the trucking business; a son ran the grain elevator and was the mayor; her daughter-in-law was the treasurer of the Joe business.

The family HQ was a double-fronted trailer, set in a sort of rusty shrubbery of trucks, cars, loose boxes and assorted machine and auto parts.

“Nice place you have here,” Mike said warmly. He was evidently missing his boatyard. Mrs. Nemitz, scenting sarcasm, put his face on trial for a split second, but found it not guilty.

Inside the trailer, the mayor and the city treasurer were eating warm brownies from a baking tray and the next generation of Nemitz children were engaged in clumsy espionage activities from behind partially closed doors. Mike explained about his childhood evacuation to Ismay — how he and his brother and sisters had been sent to stay with their grandmother at the house with the wire fence and the wisteria. The old Amundson place …?

“We own that.”

“So what is it you want to know?”

Watching the children play at being spies, I thought that perhaps Mike and I were being mistaken for plainclothes investigators from some federal agency, like OSHA or the EPA. In my bland, know-nothing English voice I said that I was interested in Ismay’s transformation into Joe.

“You a reporter? You work for a magazine?” Mrs. Nemitz said.

“No—” But she had my number. And I was a spy.

“They did an article about us in Sports Illustrated.”

A copy was produced. The smiling Nemitzes were in color, and center-stage. The text of the piece, about the little town that changed its name, was predictably larksome.

“We’ve been in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times …”

“USA Today …”

“We’ve been in all the newspapers.”

The town now had an agent — a man in Billings, from whose fax machine regular news flashes about the affairs of Joe, Montana, were issued, coast to coast, from New York to Los Angeles. Not since around 1910 had Ismay been the focus of such publicity.

The whole town had been flown to Kansas City, where they had watched the Chiefs play and had an audience with Joe Montana. They’d returned home with a clutch of autographed footballs. A San Francisco TV station had made a film about them. Next month they were going to be on David Letterman.

“All twenty-eight of you?”

“They’re flying us out to New York, all expenses paid.”

“The date’s not quite fixed yet, but they’re talking about June 23rd.”

“Dave himself is real eager to have us on the show.”

“That’s going to be a big boost for Joe Montana Day.”

Joe Montana Day was to be on July 3, with a parade, a rodeo, cowboy poetry, the Ismay school reunion, a fiddlers’ jamboree and dance and a fireworks display. The first Joe Montana Day, held the previous year, had drawn two thousand visitors, even though it was advertised only locally and — in a reversal of the usual story — had been wrecked by a violent rainstorm. The proceeds had financed the building of the new fire hall and community center. They’d sold more T-shirts, sweatshirts, bumper stickers, baseball caps and souvenir mugs than they could count, and done a fine trade in commemorative cards and letters franked Joe, Montana.

This year, after the Letterman show, the Nemitzes were forecasting something more on the scale of the Gold Rush or the Normandy landings. Retired couples in Winnebago motor homes, roaming the country in search of novelties and “attractions,” were already on their way. The media would be there; and where the media went, the people followed, like rats marching to the pied piper.

“Joe Montana is coming—”

“Maybe. We hope.”

“Our agent is talking to his agent.”

“Already they say the moteis are booked solid for the week-end. You won’t find a room between here and Billings …” Billings was 200 miles distant.

“Sounds like a nice piece of business for the Porta Potti man.” This was Mike’s contribution to the dialogue, and it earned his face another brief trial, and another not-quite-guilty verdict.

“You want to see the film the San Francisco people made about us?”

The tape was already lodged in the VCR. Maybe it dwelled there permanently. The mayor aimed the remote at the set; a picture of an empty, buff-yellow landscape bloomed on the screen.

The film began in happy comedy. In a rented car, on the deserted ribbon of U.S. Highway 12, the TV crew was trying to find Joe, Montana. That we were way back in the back of beyond here was established when the reporter turned on the car radio and set the sean button to march up and down the airwaves on the FM band. From 76 MHz to 108 MHz, the radio, empty of voices, held only static, like the sound of wind in dry grass. The car stopped. The crew sought directions from a farmer. He’d never heard of Joe, Montana. The name Ismay rang a faint bell with him, however, and he gestured vaguely northward, to Saskatchewan. And so it went — with people racking their brains, shaking their heads, and pointing unconfidently in the wrong direction. The blacktop gave way to dirt; the crew — a merry bunch of prairie sailors — sighted Joe, MT, painted on a plank nailed to a fence post, and eventually discovered the Nemitzes, living, as it were, in Ultima Thule.

In the Nemitz trailer, the film was going out under Jesus’ name. On top of the TV set was a puzzle, made of ivory-colored plastic blocks; correctly assembled, it spelled JESUS, and this peculiar object, set over the wide screen like a title, was a troubling distraction for the eye. One kept on trying to forge a connection between the title and the picture. The thing generated a kind of wanton irony that attached itself to whatever was happening on-screen.

The crew was now riding down Main Street on a horse-drawn wagon while the mayor and the city treasurer pointed out the major buildings in the town.

“That one?” asked the reporter.

“Condemned,” said the mayor.

“And that?”

“Condemned.”

Tax delinquency had put nearly all of the real estate in Ismay into the hands of the city. The city was, to all intents and purposes, one family. So if the fortunes of the city boomed … But the TV crew was not interested in going down that avenue of speculation: after their long drive from Billings airport, they had found the warm, pulsing heart of the heartland, and they were in a celebratory mood.

A rubicund cattleman allowed that his ranch was somewhat larger than the entire city of San Francisco. Another was asked to put a price on land hereabouts. Oh, he said; it varied. Could go for as much as a hundred, hundred and twenty; could be as little as fifty.

“Fifty! Dollars! An Acre!” said the reporter to camera in his hear that, folks? voice.

The wrap-up was an earnest paean to life in this crime-free community, where everybody knew everybody else and everybody pulled on the same oar together under an unpolluted sky. The TV crew would, the reporter said, take back with them to San Francisco something more than mere fond memories of Joe: they would carry with them values learned here that had been long lost in urban America — the elemental values of people who live in daily contact with nature, like neighborliness, humility, good humor and serenity of mind.

The camera, which had been tight on the reporter’s face, tracked back to take in the cheerful huddle of farming families behind him, and their enormous country, turning gold in the evening light. Its empty treelessness, once famously daunting, was balm for the eye, and the camera loved it.

It was a new slant. First, this landscape had been seen as lawless and violent. Then it became a problem to be solved — hard to get in focus, hard to paint and photograph, hard, but possible, to farm. Now it was being perceived as Arcadia; a blessed land of pastoral simplicity and happiness, and going for a song at fifty bucks an acre.

The eighteen-minute film was an updated video remake of the railroad pamphlets — and it was every bit as alluring to the 1990s tourist as the pamphlets had been to the 1909 settler.

After the show, Mrs. Nemitz mounted her tractor and led the Jeep back to the fire hall so that we could buy souvenirs. Inside, the place was even bigger than it had appeared through the window; a gaunt, incomplete secular cathedral, littered with saw-horses and smelling of Sheetrock and gypsum. Thousands of caps and T-shirts were stacked up in anticipation of July 3; enough to clothe a Third World army or the victims of a historic catastrophe.

Mike splurged on a lurid Joe, Montana, football jacket to scandalize his wife. I bought the cheapest and plainest variety of Joe, Montana, coffee mug.

“See you on Letterman—” I said.

Driving out of town, past the double-fronted trailer, we were chased by a howling mutt.

“Someone,” Mike said, “ought to oil that dog.”

At the Montana Hotel in Baker; a little over twenty miles from Joe, I asked the owner if there was any chance of my finagling a room for the great weekend. She looked in the book. “Sure. No problem. What room would you like? Number 1 again?”

That Ismay now had an agent and a busy round of newspaper interviews and TV engagements was perfectly consistent with its past and with the character of its landscape, where nothing got in the way of the newcomer’s eye or put a drag on his ambitious imagination. I’d felt it myself. No sooner had I set foot on the prairie than I was having designs on it and thinking big. It was dangerously elating to be able to see so very far under a sky so very clear.

When Ned Wollaston showed up here in September 1910, he had more reason than most of his neighbors to be thinking big. Worsell could build a slum-tenement room on his land and still feel that his life was grandly enlarged. But when Ned set about constructing a life for his family on the prairie, the picture in his mind’s eye was of high ceilings and broad lawns. To his half-section he brought a strong sense, part memory, part daydream, of the comforts and dignities of the Victorian upper-middle class.

He was the youngest son of a youngest son. In England, the Wollastons were a family dominated by philoprogenitive clergymen, Cambridge-educated and better known for their scholarship in the natural sciences than for their orthodox piety. From their vicarages and rectories, they published papers and books on botany, moral philosophy, church music, entomology, Newton’s Law, the variation of species and the thermometrical barometer. They were elected — in droves — to fellowships of the Royal Society, but were passed over for bishoprics, on the grounds of excessive rationalism and likely heresy. Ned’s great-great-grandfather, Francis Wollaston, the Rector of Chislehurst, was a typical family member: he became a scandal in the Anglican Church by denouncing the Athanasian creed, wrote a series of books on astronomy, and fathered nineteen children.

Ned was born in England, the thirteenth child of Percy Wollaston, a Liverpool shipping agent and son of the cloth (Percy had grown up in the rectory at East Dereham in Norfolk). Ned was aged four in 1876 when his father, aged fifty-one, brought his family to the United States. For Percy Wollaston, it was a little late in the day to start a new life, but he had capital and fizz. Hawk-nosed, spade-bearded, he arrived in the brand-new town of Fairmont in southern Minnesota and took the place by storm.

He began by building a house the size of a palace. It had six-teen rooms. Its wraparound porch was supported by elaborately ornamented timber columns. Oaks shaded the winding drive to the Wollaston mansion, whose green-shuttered windows lorded it over the parklike grounds. While the builders got on with the work of raising this splendid confection, Percy started a bank, the Farmers & Merchants, founded the Episcopal church of Saint Martin’s (and became its first churchwarden), opened a general store, and farmed 460 acres of wheat and barley.

But it was Percy’s windmill that people would remember best; a Norfolk-style saltshaker with 30-foot sails. The windmill stood on a low hill, above the rolling, recently logged flatland of this part of Minnesota, and it could be seen for miles. With its white sails spinning in a brisk summer norther, and the line of farmers’ wagons bringing wheat to the grindstone, the mill was Percy Wollaston. The tireless Englishman, a whirlygig of businesses and projects, was a Minnesotan landmark.

In a photograph taken sometime in the nineties, Percy and his wife, Catherine, stand on the lawn in front of the Fairmont house. Thirty-seven assorted children and grandchildren are seated on the grass in front of them. Percy, now snowy-haired, is the most powerful man in the picture. In a consciously relaxed pose, hands lodged in his jacket pockets, he is still as straight as the oak pillars of his handsome porch. His bow tie is knotted as if for a morning at the bank. His gold watch chain reposes on his barrel chest. Beside him, his wife, grimly corseted, is clad in crepe. Her helmet, a weird creation of wire and feathers, must be the latest thing in old-lady chic from Minneapolis. One needs a magnifying glass to see her face properly, and it is a shock: she looks old enough to be her husband’s mother. The children and their children, fanned out across the lawn, look like a distinct tribe — a long-faced, long-nosed, cut-glass Anglo-Saxon tribe. The dog in the foreground, a black Labrador, has the Wollaston nose.

To be a child to such a father must have been a tough assignment. None of Percy’s sons bore much resemblance to a windmill. One became a grocer, one a surveyor, one a Colorado miner. And so it went. When he was sixteen, Ned (then a junior clerk in a Fairmont business) enlisted in the Minnesota National Guard, where in five years he climbed to the rank of sergeant. His discharge papers list his height as 5 foot 9 inches, his eyes as Blue and his character as Good. For a spell after his discharge in 1893 he knocked about the West, trying to find a footing for himself. He went to the Dakotas and worked as cook, carpenter and cow-hand on ranches there. Somewhere — and perhaps because he felt he needed a reminder about his life’s direction — he got his compass-rose tattoo. He kept on coming back to his parents’ house, and it’s easy to imagine Ned’s anxiety as Percy, his after-dinner cigar now drawing nicely, leaned back in his chair and brought his youngest son’s future into focus. I wonder what was said about the tattoo.

Responsibility and direction settled on Ned all at once, in 1900, when, at twenty-eight, he married a Fairmont widow, Mrs. Dora Marietta, and found himself a stepfather to a fourteen-year-old daughter and two sons — Harold, aged six, and Raymond, three. This ready-made family helped to even the score with his father, and Dora was keen to have more children. The newest Wollastons took the train to Madison, South Dakota, where they ran a store for a year, then rented a small mixed farm a couple of miles south of the town. At Christmastime in 1903—at last — Dora conceived, and Percy, Mike’s father, was born in the farmhouse in September 1904.

Ned, now a father in his own right and making a living as a tenant farmer, still felt that he was living in the intimidating shadow of Percy Senior. His land was not his, and it was a hand-kerchief-sized scrap, compared with the Wollaston holdings in Minnesota. Ned’s farm could comfortably fit into the grounds of the Fairmont house, and his entire wheat crop would keep the Fairmont windmill busy for an hour at most. By 1908, he was closely following the reports in the papers on the proposed new Homestead Act. The bill endured a rough and uncertain passage through Congress, with the big ranchers and their Washington lobbyists opposing it at every stage. The western congressmen and senators were pretty equally divided, between those who were in the pay of the railroad magnates and those who were in the pay of the ranching and mining outfits. The railroad interests needed the bill, and feared bankruptcy if it failed to pass; the ranching interests saw in it the ruination of the West. Ned was as anxiously protective of the measure as James J. Hill: he felt every new maneuver by the ranching lobby as a personal blow, a cunning and vicious attempt to cheat him of his hopes and deny him his right to become an independent landowner.

When Theodore Roosevelt, the one-time North Dakota rancher, signed the bill into law on March 3, 1909, Ned Wollaston was high on the news — though it was shortly followed, on June 30, by the news of his father’s death in British Columbia. For ages, Ned had seen himself showing his father round his own acres.

Mike’s father, writing his memoir in the early 1970s, remem bered Ned and Dora talking in the evenings at the time of the Homestead Act:

I remember my parents discussing something about “taking up a claim.” The imagination and curiosity of a four- or five-year-old boy began to conjure up pictures of some vague object being taken up bodily. This must have been about the same time that the Indians of Dakota were dealt out of some of their Standing Rock Reservation for homestead purposes, as I remember Dad saying he “wouldn’t mind taking a shot at Standing Rock,” and pictured him shooting at a large stone column. On another evening Mother said, “Percy and I could hold down the claim if you had to go somewhere to find work,” and I envisioned Mother and myself trying to hold down a huge tarp or canvas in a terrific wind.

The pamphlets began to arrive at the Madison farmhouse. Ned was expert at gutting them. He skipped the high-flown stuff at the beginning and went straight to the rainfall figures. He knew what he was about. Unlike the schoolteachers and clerks, barbers and bottle washers, who were jumping aboard the emigrant trains, Ned was already an experienced farmer, and he could see the difficulties that the pamphlets tried to gloss over. Although eastern Montana was only 400 miles northwest of Madison, the climate there was a lot dryer than that of North Dakota, and he would have to make do with, on average, five or six inches less rainfall in a year. With twenty inches or more, you’d be in clover. With fifteen or less, you could be in trouble. The latest rainfall figures for Miles City, Montana, were: 1907, 14.75 inches; 1908, 19.08 inches; 1909, 13.31 inches. Right on the margin. But nearly all this rain did fall in the growing season — and Mildred and Ismay generally did better, by as much as an inch, than Miles City. It looked as if there should be enough. Just. And at least one could count it as one’s own rain.

In the spring he rode the train alone to Mildred, where he scouted out the land, now crowding with home seekers. The lobby of the Mildred hotel was a polyglottal din of Russian, Swedish, German, Irish, English, Greek and American voices. The locators, aboard lightweight stylish buggies, had the intolerably superior air that goes with a full diary and more clients than you can shake a stick at. Ned found for himself a glorious site for a farm, though it was an inconvenient ten miles out of town. Old buffalo trails and newer cattle tracks converged on a spring, shaded by a gnarly cottonwood tree. A coulee bisected the half-section, making a green valley where the coneflowers were in bloom. To the east lay a big tract of rough ground, where stock might graze but only a mad-man (he thought) would try to homestead. He hired a locator to check the property, filed his claim at the Land Office and rode back in an exultant mood to Madison, where he saw his crops through to harvest. When the harvest was done, Ned and Dora put up for sale their goods and livestock, keeping only the animals, tools and furniture that would fit into a single emigrant car.

The auction was held at the Madison farm on September 12. At noon, Dora laid out a free lunch for the prospective buyers. At 1 p.m., Dr. Kinney, the auctioneer, put the Wollastons’ South Dakota life under the hammer. The bill of sale included six horses and five colts, nine milch cows, a full-blood Holstein bull, 35 Berkshire shoats, 80 full-blood Barred Rock hens, 7 Mallard ducks, a sweep rake, a corn sheller, a fanning mill, 2 scoop boards and “Lounge, Tables, Writing Desk and other articles too numerous to mention.”

It’s exhilarating, and scary, to lighten ship every so often — to kiss goodbye to the accumulated tonnage of one’s life so far. Ned and Dora, ten years married, had accumulated a lot, and they came away from the auction feeling strangely weightless and powerful. They had never had anything like so much ready cash. By comparison with most of the homesteaders whom Ned had seen on his trip to Mildred, he was going out to Montana in much the same affluent and expansive spirit in which his father had emigrated to Minnesota. Ned had been close to young Percy’s age then — and he remembered the adrenaline of that move, his father’s ebullience and bounce as the new Wollaston house rose above the oaks at Fairmont, the round-the-clock plans and projections, the atmosphere of high good humor that had seemed then to be part of the reliable climate of America.

Building his own house on his own land in 1910, Ned thought often of his father. Among the first crops raised in the virgin soil of the homestead were some freakishly big turnips. One weighed 21 lb. In 1911, Ned took the train back to Minnesota, to buy more cattle at the Minneapolis stockyards. He made a detour to Fairmont, nursing in his arms a giant turnip. He presented this amazing vegetable, scrubbed clean and sliced in half to prove its integrity, to the new president of the Merchants & Farmers Bank. For several weeks, the turnip stood on exhibition in the window of his father’s old place of business, an emblem of the bounty of the western plains. You could raise a four-figure loan on the surety of such a turnip.

The yards of the hardware stores in Ismay and Mildred were packed solid with bales of fencing wire. Freight cars laden with wire stood in the railroad sidings. The wire, double-stranded, with barbs twisted on one strand, was shipped from the Glidden factory in Illinois. Its trade name was The Winner.

Each homestead needed around five to seven miles of fences. There was the three-mile perimeter fence, most of it usually shared with neighbors. Then there were the internal fences, to keep the cattle out of the wheat and the hogs out of the vegetables — the categoric divisions and subdivisions required to create the orderly, rectangular world of a mixed farm. For every mile of fence, one needed to cut and haul some eleven hundred posts — and this in a country where timber grew in isolated pockets, often many miles distant from the homestead. From the first fall through to the following spring and beyond, the new arrivals lived and breathed fencing. It was a hard, cold, tedious labor; a much bigger job than the building of the house and the barns. But fencing was also the beginning of community life on the prairie. Before the first schoolhouse, and long before the first church supper, came the fences — and, with the fences, the slow transformation of an ill-assorted bunch of dazed railroad passengers into a coherent society.

From the Wollaston place, the nearest stand of wood suitable for fence posts lay five miles to the east, in an outbreak of badlands close to Fallon Creek. After a couple of false starts, Mike and I found the remains of the track that Ned had made across the rough ground to the east of his claim, on which he used to let his cattle out to graze. The track had faded to no more than a trick of the light. I was wearing Polaroid shades, and saw it as a faint discoloration in the grass, which vanished the moment I took my glasses off. We pursued this phantom in the Jeep.

Rough ground gave way to choppy ground, which in turn gave way to bone-breaking ground, as the track reared up and plummeted over waves of solid rock. The Jeep spat shale and dust from under its rear wheels. After twenty minutes of this heavy-weather passage, the odometer, set to zero back at the homestead, had clocked up 1.3 niggardly miles. Ned in his wagon, with seven-year-old Percy riding shotgun in the back, perched on the heavy canvas bag holding the tent, would have been lucky to make a fifth of our speed. It was a hell of a journey to have to undertake, just to collect a load of fence posts.

A little below the crest of one particularly fierce hillock, the bare clay surface was printed with several long grooves, each about three inches wide. Ned’s own spoor. His wooden wagon wheels were so delicate and slender, the terrain so incongruously robust, that I heard Mike catch his breath at the sight of them. We rode boorishly over Ned’s traces on 9-inch Goodyear radials.

In a rare grassy interlude, Mike said, “When my mother was alive, I put on my uncle’s old chaps, to do some work in the yard … Reached into the pocket, and came up with a fistful of fencing staples. When she saw those staples in my hand, my mother got a little weepy. The staples brought back memories — of a horrible amount of hard work.”

Mike’s mother, born Myrtle Amundson, had grown up on a Norwegian homestead over at Cabin Creek, twenty-five miles from the Wollastons, and fences had loomed as importantly over her childhood as they had over Percy’s.

“I’ve got some fencing pliers in the trailer back at the boat-yard. They’re a nice piece of design. They’ve got a hammer for knocking in the staples, a spike for pulling them out, a little gizmo for twisting the wire, a lockjaw for pulling it tight. Everybody had them.”

“Except Worsell. Worsell borrowed them. Worsell worselled his fencing pliers. I bet he worselled a pair off Ned.”

The track grew steadily more obvious as it joined company with other wispy tracks that came angling in from the north and south. Every homesteader for miles around had had to find a route to the place they called The Cedars, and the land was cob-webbed with forking paths, now visible only if you had faith and a pair of Polaroids.

We skirted a mass of eccentric geology. The crumbling rock-faces were striped with alternating bands of lavender, mud-brown and rosy pink. The badland formations looked like a giant cheese, tunneled by a family of industrious mice. Once upon a time the tops of these cliffs, buttes and pillars had been part of the floor of a smooth alluvial plain. Snowmelt and rain, feeding torrential coulees, had eaten away the intervening soft rock and washed it down to the far southeast, to make states like Arkansas and Mississippi.

A shadowy path branched away to the right, leading down into the badland valley. At the base of a striped cliff was an exposed seam of gray lignite coal. This was the place that the homesteaders had called The Coal Mine. The coal looked like sorry stuff; it was already the color of ash, and must have sounded like a gunfight when it burned in a grate. I didn’t dare trust the 4WD Jeep to the precipitous track down which Ned had led his horse and wagon. Mike would have driven it without a second thought, but I was chicken — and the more I followed the route of Ned’s life, the more I felt only the enormous distance between his life and mine. I could as easily star in a ballet, or become an Olympic skater, as do what he did. Yet half the homesteaders who detrained at Ismay station were chalk-faced city brain workers, and I might well have been one of them. I would have made a terrible hash of things.

Fifty minutes in the car, and we still had not reached The Cedars. How long had Ned and Percy been going? Five hours? They would have left before dawn, the wagon creaking through the dew-wet pasture. Mike and I should now be almost level with them at 11 a.m.; El Ropo time.

The low hills ahead were full of dark, buttocklike clefts; as we neared them, these clefts turned to the inky green of Rocky Mountain juniper. The trees had grown back — though these were infants by juniper standards, in which 2,000 years is thought of as a credible old age. The track was now a broad highway, the sum of twenty or thirty separate ways of getting to The Cedars. Here the crowding wagons quickened as they came in sight of the tents and fires, and caught the first whiff of the aromatic wood, resinous and bittersweet.

It was a rare thing for young Percy to be allowed to ride with his father on a post-cutting trip, and he would remember The Cedars as the most exotic and beautiful region in the geography of his childhood. He watched and listened to his first chickadees here, and climbed the rock-gothic towers of scorio and gumbo clay. He wrote:

There was something enchanting about these juniper pockets that I have found in no other place. There were scattered trees on the hills, but the real thickets were in the heads of little canyons, surrounded by the steep cliffs and weird rock formations of the area. Here … was a tranquility that had lasted for untold ages.

Each settler chose a pocket of timber as “his,” made some sort of access road to it and began cutting posts. There were large, gnarled trees, some of them probably two or three hundreds years old. These were low shrubs, twisted and dwarfed by the elements but fairly large in diameter. The larger ones were split with wedges into post size. The beautiful reds and creamy whites of this wood deserved the treatment of skilled cabinet makers rather than to be used as posts.

Out at The Cedars, Worsell came as close as he would ever come to being a popular figure. He was a lousy carpenter, but he knew how to use an axe. He surprised himself with his own expertise; he had learned more than he had realized during his time on the Minnesota logging camps. He had a good eye for the angle of the undercut, and the strange, writhing trunks of the junipers would split cleanly down the middle for Worsell as they would split for almost no one else. He was full of hints and tips, and liked giving demonstrations, especially in the pockets of timber that had been claimed by single women. He paid generously for his free meals round other people’s campfires, in neat stacks of colored, scented posts.

Ned Wollaston usually managed to fill the wagon with posts by the afternoon of the second day at The Cedars. The return journey to the homestead was an epic westward trudge in failing light; Ned leading the horse, Percy tagging along beside him in cut-down dungarees.

Mother would place a lamp on the table so that it would shine through the window toward the road to the East and it could be seen for a mile. How long that last mile seemed to the tired man and boy on those cold evenings!

The fences that they made are still a wonder. You can sight along a surviving line of posts, and not a single one is out of true, though the ground on which they’re set dips, rolls and breaks, and the unwavering vertical of the fence keeps on being lost to sight, then popping up again, exactly — but exactly—on its marks. The wire, where there is still wire, now dangles uselessly from its staples in rusty tendrils. When the fence went up, it would have been tensioned like a violin string. People were justifiably proud of their fences, their straightness and tautness. The fences were not merely functional. They were a statement of the belief that this unruly land could be subdued. Rectangles rule.

With the posts standing firm, ten feet apart, in their appointed places, the coil of wire was unrolled alongside. At each new post, the wire was drawn tight with a block and pulley, then nipped in position with a staple.

The ranchers watched with affected disdain as the newcomers put up their fences and stole the open range from under the ranchers’ noses. They’d lost the political battle against the Enlarged Homestead Act. They were outnumbered by the homesteaders. The “fence wars” of the 1880s, in Texas and elsewhere, had only rallied public and editorial opinion to the homesteaders’ side. The ranchers were east as villains long before they reached for their wire cutters. So, in 1910, the best hope of the Montana ranchers was that the homesteaders would quickly fail, pack their bags, and take the damnable train back to wherever it was they had come from. They fought, mostly, on the morale front, losing no opportunity to broadcast the view that the prairie soil was far too dry to farm, that even a small herd of cows would starve on a miserable half-section of land, and that the homesteaders were poor fools, the unwitting dupes of a bunch of conniving politicians and railroad barons, whose only hope was to get out as fast as possible, before they were overtaken by inevitable ruin.

At a rodeo in Marmarth, North Dakota, just over the border from Montana, I sat next to a rancher in his eighties, Bud Brown, who said that he’d grown up on a three-hundred-section ranch in Custer County.

“That’s a hell of a big ranch, isn’t it?”

“Not then, it wasn’t.”

Mr. Brown’s voice told one something about the grand isolation of a ranch upbringing. Although his grandparents had emigrated from England to the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mr. Brown himself had not yet learned to talk in an American accent. He spoke in a queer, fossilized version of Broad Norfolk. When I was a small child in a Norfolk village in the 1940S, I used to hear voices exactly like Bud Brown’s, and it came as a jolt to hear this accent in the mouth of an old man in a white Stetson, while a cowboy riding a bull bit the dust below.

“So from your three hundred sections, how did it look? — to see these guys farming a half-section apiece?”

“Honyockers!” Mr. Brown laughed. “They couldn’t do it. They’d just starve out—” Thoi’d joist stoorve oit, with the last word delivered on a rising, querulous note, in the Norfolk way.

He was married to the daughter of honyockers, but it was impossible for him to say the word without loading it with derision. It came out as a ribald chuckle. Honyockers! I don’t know where the word comes from. The Harvard Dictionary of Regional English says that it may be a blend of “Hunk” (for Hungarian) and “Polack,” but that sounds like a grope in the dark. What it effectively does is to travesty the word homesteader syllable by syllable, and render the homesteaders themselves as ridiculous oafs, saps, dimwits. It gathers up all the anger and contempt that the ranchers felt for the newcomers, and squeezes them together into a single utterance, like the sound a man might make when delivering a gob into a spittoon. Hon-yockers!

The fence builders took much of the sting out of the word by adopting it for themselves. The hostility of the ranchers helped to sharpen the honyockers’ sense of community. They were in this together, and they would prove the ranchers wrong. The straighter and tighter the fence, the more defiantly it talked back to the scoffing ranchers. The ranchers’ own fences (as one can see in Evelyn Cameron’s pictures) were sloppy by comparison, their posts more widely spaced, their wire slack.

Everyone claimed to know of someone who, at the end of a day’s fencing, found that while he had been working in one hollow, the wire cutters were quietly busy in the one behind him, so that his entire fence lay in barbed wire snippets, with every post gone. But this was — probably — just a necessary fable. Some fences were vandalized. When the Road to Damnation saloon in Ismay emptied, it let out into the night a fair number of young cowhands who were not yet ready for bed, for whom pulling up a section of a honyocker’s new fence was an irresistible diversion.

Fencing along a common boundary, watched from a distance by a rancher riding his high horse, neighboring homesteaders became friends and allies. Barbed wire belongs to the iconography of war, which was how the ranchers saw it; but putting up a fence together was, for the settlers, a fine way of bridging their different languages and social classes.

The Wollastons shared the northern boundary of their land with John Conlon, a fat Irish bachelor in his early fifties; and Ned and Conlon worked in consort on their fence. Conlon lived in a sod-thatched dugout, on a south-facing slope, a hundred and fifty feet above the Wollaston valley, and his domestic arrangements were on a par with Worsell’s. When the day’s work was finished, Conlon made his way down over the mounds and ridges to the Wollaston house for supper. He walked with exaggerated care, holding in his arms his precious new Victrola. After the meal, Conlon played Gus Edwards singing “In My Merry Oldsmobile”:

Young Johnnie Steel has an Oldsmobile;

He loves a dear little girl;

She is the queen of his gas machine;

She has his heart in a whirl …

Percy was taught to call John Conlon Uncle Johnnie.

The network of fences, spreading out across the prairie, helped to knit the infant community together in another way, as a telephone system. Long before the Bell company reached the area with its poles and dedicated lines, people rigged telephones (or “talkaphones”) to the fences, and called each other up, homestead to homestead, down the barbed wire.

The wall-mounted phones, made by AT&T, were daunting contraptions, with a fixed microphone and a trumpet-shaped earpiece on a flex. A wet-cell battery gave enough juice for voice transmission, but to ring the bells in one’s neighbors’ houses one had to crank the magneto at the top of the instrument: one long crank for the Flusses, two for the Brubakers, and so on. If everything worked — and if everybody had remembered to close the wire gates to keep the circuit intact — one might hear human cries over the noise of ocean surf. It was necessary to yell into the mike, there was no privacy, the quality of the reception was dreadful, but the barbed wire phone service was enough to spread news of strayed cattle or an illness in the family, or to pass on an invitation to a potluck. The phone on the wall, like a saint in a niche, was a deeply comforting presence. In the first euphoria of possession, it would seem that this marvel of technology had washed away the loneliness of prairie life at a stroke.

In 1893, a writer for the Atlantic Monthly, E. V. Smalley, published a well-observed and fiercely argued piece in which he deplored the emerging shape of rural society on the Great Plains. He wrote about the Dakotas, where he had lived, at a time when a homestead was 160 acres, a quarter-section; but his article, “The Isolation of Life on Prairie Farms,” isn’t trammeled by either its location or its date. It fits Montana in the teens of the twentieth century, and it reflects back a lot of my own feelings as I’ve hiked around the western states in the 1990s.

“In no civilized country,” Smalley began, “have the cultivators of the soil adpated their home life so badly to the conditions of nature as have the people of our great Northwestern prairies.” He makes a rather too rose-tinted sketch of life in a European farm village, with its stone houses, its green, its well, its church, pub and school. In Smalley’s picture, old men suck at their pipes, the children play, the priest goes from house to house, the young men pitch quoits on the green, and “The post wagon, with its uniformed postilion merrily blowing his horn, rattles through the street every day and makes an event that draws people to the doors and windows.” From this village, people go out daily to work in the surrounding fields, returning in the evening to the social hugger-mugger of their clustered buildings.

Cut to the Dakotas, and the homestead system — the solitary flimsy houses, standing at least half a mile, and usually more than a mile, apart; the great tracts of unoccupied land owned by the state and the railroads; the inability of each settler to talk in a relaxed way with his foreign neighbor; the isolating effect of the long and bitter winters, when “the silence of death rests on the vast landscape, save when it is swept by cruel winds that search out every chink and cranny of the buildings and drive through each unguarded aperture the dry, powdery snow.” Here, “each family must live mainly to itself, and life, shut up in the little wooden farmhouses, cannot well be very cheerful”:

An alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new prairie states among farmers and their wives. In proportion to their numbers, the Scandinavian settlers furnish the largest contingent to the asylums. The reason is not far to seek. These people came from cheery little farm villages. Life in the fatherland was hard and toilsome, but it was not lonesome. Think for a moment how great the change must be from the white-walled, red-roofed village on a Norway fjord, with its church and school-house, its fishing boats on the blue inlet, and its green mountain walls towering aloft to snowfields, to an isolated cabin on a Dakota prairie, and say if it is any wonder that so many Scandinavians lose their mental balance.

I know what Smalley means. In Washington and Oregon, east of the Cascades, as in Idaho and Montana, the remains of the homestead system are still bleakly centerless. The mail and newspaper boxes stand a car drive away from the houses they serve. The small towns, never much in their heyday, are shells, reduced to a gas station and food mart (“Video Rental” in neon in the window), a Church of God, and a ravaged motel for migrant, un-documented farmworkers. Restaurant? From the food-mart part of the gas station, you get a microwaved burrito in a plastic bag, and slop it down with a 32 oz. “Big Gulp” Diet Pepsi. The surrounding land, dotted, at wide intervals, with houses, looks like an engine for the production of surly, misanthropic loners, or of people pining unrequitedly for company and conversation. I wonder, what would I belong to here? Not the Church of God. Maybe the NRA. Maybe some troglodyte band of tax protesters and survivalists, clad in army-surplus camouflage.

Smalley’s proposed cure for the social maladies of the West was drastic: America should go back to the European model, and try to re-create the very society that the immigrants had escaped. “The isolated farmhouse must be abandoned, and the people must draw together in villages.” This, Smalley agreed, was easier said than done. “It will take a long time to modify the settled American habit of isolated farmsteads.” But he went on to advance his plan:

Let us suppose that the owners of sixteen quarter-section farms, lying in a body and forming four full sections, should agree to remove their homes to the center of the tract and run new dividing lines radiating to the outer boundaries. Each settler would still have 160 acres, and no one would live more than a mile from the remotest limit of his farm. The nearer fields could be used for stock, and the distant ones for grain. The homes of the sixteen families would surround a village green where the schoolhouse would stand …

From this “nucleus of population” would soon spring a church, a store, a post office and a little hive of collaborative cottage industries, like cheese- and sausage-making and the bottling of preserved fruits. In a wink, places like Gackle and Lignite would take on the old-world intricacy and charm of Zeal Magna or Itchen Abbas.

The experiment would be widely discussed by the news-papers, and this extensive free advertising could hardly fail to attract as purchasers a class of people with faith in the idea and possessed of such a sociable, neighborly disposition as would open the way to harmonious living and to considerable practical cooperation in field work and the care of animals. One successful community would soon lead to the formation of others, and the new system would steadily spread.

Smalley, though, was both a realist and generous in defeat. He knew he was crying for the moon. Given the tenor of his piece, one can only admire him for this damaging admission:

I have known instances … where effects at more neighborly ways of living have been made on a small scale and have failed. In the early settlement of Dakota, it sometimes happened that four families, taking each a quarter-section homestead, built their temporary dwellings on the adjacent corners, so as to be near together; but a few years later, when they were able to put up better buildings, they removed to the opposite sides of their claims, giving as a reason that their chickens got mixed up with their neighbors’ fowls.

Smalley’s decent-minded project didn’t stand a chance. As an American tourist, he had seen the European village as tranquil, gregarious, picturesque — which isn’t how it would have struck most of the villagers. To be a villager was to be a tenant of the whims of the Big House, whose demesne extended to the meanest hovel stuck away behind the back of the fourteenth-century church; it was to be defined as a laborer in the service of the local landowner, or, at best, as his vassal, farming a smallholding and putting coins away in a jar against the approach of the Michaelmas quarter day. Villagers did not pack up and travel in steerage on emigrant ships in order to become villagers in America. They wanted land of their own. So landowners were often lonely. But there was an enviable dignity in their proprietorial solitude.

Many more of the settlers came from crowded industrial cities. They ached for space, and in the empty spaces of the plains they had at last found something commensurate with their own inner hunger for unobstructed liberty. Very few of the people who came to homestead around Ismay wanted to squash up together like prairie dogs in a burrow. They were proud of their new isolation, and had no wish to trade it for Smalley’s promise of the merry postilion and the small talk round the parish pump.

The tall Chicagoan, Ralph Norris, who had once, for eight minutes, been the pole-vaulting champion of the world, began to unhitch the two horses from his new wagon, which was laden to the brim and beyond with lumber and provisions from the Mildred stores. Norris had more business in town, at the telegraph office, and hoped to mollify the horses by letting them out to graze for an hour while he sent a telegram to his fiancée back in Chicago and lunched at the hotel.

His relationship with the horses had been strained from the start. Though he bribed them with sugar lumps and cajoled them with baby talk, they remained aloof and incorruptible, going indifferently about their horse affairs and paying an insolent lack of attention to anything said to them by Ralph Norris. But he went on trying to woo them with unexpected kindnesses.

So now he lifted the heavy neck yoke from the animals. The wagon, parked on the road leading down to Fallon Creek, began to roll slowly forward. As the horses felt the sudden weight of the wagon on their rumps, they bolted from between the traces and headed for the open prairie. The wagon kept going. As it gathered speed on the hill, it hunted from side to side, shedding a window frame here, a tin kettle there. Parents grabbed for their children. To Norris at least, the wagon seemed to move with horrible deliberation. Time after time, it slowed, came almost to a stop, then struck confidently out on a new bearing. The trail of spilled things lengthened, took on dwindling perspective lines. The wagon’s long, eventful solo journey was finally curtailed by a cottonwood tree that overhung the creek. The cart yielded to the tree with a loud and complicated series of crunching noises. The last few pieces of lumber slid over the tailgate into the water, where they drifted in languid circles on the current. Norris had made his name by defying gravity: that a wagon might need chocks was a thought that hadn’t crossed his mind.

The runaway wagon made a nice greenhorn story. Percy Wollaston remembered it vividly in the 1970s. “Mr. Norris had started to learn the hard way, as so many others had to do.” Ralph and Virginia were “both fine, cultured people, but seemingly so ill-suited to life on a claim.”

There is a photograph of Norris in Mildred Memories on the O’Fallon. He has heartthrob good looks. His black hair is trim and brilliantined. Like the urban plowman on the cover of the Milwaukee Road pamphlet, he is wearing glasses that go a little oddly with his western chaps. He is riding a huge sow in his yard and waving his Stetson in the air. He doesn’t look as if he was easily abashed by experience.

The fence in the background of the photograph is a model of what a good fence should be: the posts are 8 feet or less apart, and the wires are so taut that they might be tuned to high C. Norris patiently read his way to becoming a farmer and a carpenter. He did things by the book, and the things he did generally turned out at least as well as if they’d been done by natural handymen like Ned Wollaston.

Working alone, and following to the letter the instructions in the home builders’ manual, Norris made a house for his bride-to-be, on a claim five miles north of the Wollaston place. He laid the floor 24 inches proud of the ground and planked it in mahogany, marrying the grain of each board to the grain of the next as he bedded them snugly down. The first two rooms of the homestead, which would later ramble out across the yard, growing a new room every year, were big by claim-shack standards: 14 feet by 16 feet, with high ceilings. Using flour-and-water paste, Norris glued muslin to the walls, then whitewashed them. He built a balustraded porch and sat out on the rocker that he’d bought for Virginia.

He had in mind a picture of an Alpine spa or hydro. When he was done, the Norris house, at 2,700 feet in the clear prairie air, would be as good for Virginia’s lungs as any health resort in Vevey or Montreux.

By the late fall of 1911, most of the fences were up, and one could look out across a settled country, each farmhouse set a mile apart from its neighbor, the southward drift of coal smoke from their chimneys mingling. The houses themselves were a motley, scattered fleet. There were stone bothies from Scotland, shaggy Norwegian sod houses, English farm cottages, vaguely Jacobean in appearance, American log cabins, beetling Swedish clapboard, and far-western claim shacks of wildly various degrees of competence and ambition. In the pitch of a roof, or a rough-and-ready second-floor balcony, or a severely narrowed window frame, one could spot a bit of Denmark here, a touch of Germany there.

After dark, the electric lights of Ismay and Mildred made pale patches on the sky. Children, in bed in the farmhouses, would remember the companionable whistle of the train, muffled by the intervening hills, and, from across the fields, the urgent, self-important dring! — dring! — dring! of a hand-cranked telephone — sounds that were now far more common than the tremolo howl of the wolf and at least as likely to be heard as the coyote’s manic giggle.

This was no longer mere land, it was a landscape; and it was an American classic. It was American in its newness, its hard angularity, its generous spaces and solitudes, as in the mix of its people and their individual architectures. The great imaginers of the West, from Jefferson to James J. Hill, had conceived exactly this landscape. Custer and Prairie Counties were, as the Gospelers liked to say, as it was written—a fulfillment of prophecy. Here was the rational agrarian democracy, a community of small independent landowners (Jefferson’s “chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people”), taking root.

One looks now at the faces of the honyockers in their photographs. The books and the newspapers were all telling them that they were embarked on a great experiment and were bound, if they worked hard, to succeed. The men, at the plow, or holding a saw, or standing at the door of a just-finished house, wear the same broad, gap-toothed, pre-orthodontic grin. That grin stirs the memory. It’s the same grin to be seen on the faces of young men in uniform, pictured as they climb the gangplank of the troopship that will take them to Flanders in 1914. They’re on a lark, and everything is going to work out just fine.