Bad Land: An American Romance

5. Plain Sailing

THE FIRST WEEK OF JUNE 1995 BROUGHT PERFECT SPRING weather to the prairie. A stone-gray ceiling of cloud was draped from butte to butte. The temperature was in the chilly forties. Every creek and coulee brimmed with water like milky cocoa. Water swirled round the knees of the cottonwoods and filled the irrigation ditches. The earth was almost black, the grass and sage were emerald green, and the young wheat stood in the fields as close-packed as the bristles on a toothbrush. Cows, still suckling their calves, lowed from hilltop to hilltop, across a land of dripping plenty.

In Baker, the bar talk was — as usual — about moisture, and the voices were exultant. One guy had had nine inches on his place in May alone; another had had seven and a half. Three inches had fallen in a day down at Knowlton, and, on the evening I arrived, there were flood warnings out for Prairie and Custer Counties. The new rain was pure bonus. It had rained handsomely last October, and there had been a good snowfall during the winter, with snow heaping up in the draws around the badland hills and melting steadily into the soil below. All this moisture translated into a social atmosphere of complacent good humor.

“One good thing you can say about that gumbo clay — it sure holds the water,” said a beaming gardener over the top of his Okalaka Times, and it was as if the whole of local society was buoyantly afloat on the sodden clay. Everyone was in an expansive mood. The sole fly in the ointment was that, as the rainfall figures mounted, grain futures were sinking in price on the Chicago and Minneapolis exchanges.

My room at the motel had been modestly refurbished during the winter. More water pictures had been added to the walls: a thatched cottage on the bank of the Stratford Avon, an autumn scene of a brook flowing through a sycamore wood, and two works, both alarming in certain lights, in luminous paint: a silver-and-gold lake in the Alps, and a line of winter trees in a flooded meadow. This time, though, the country outside the room was as wetly pretty as the landscapes behind their fly-specked glass.

Next morning, I was at the drive-in window of the Baker bank, where the elderly teller, noticing my accent and out-of-state plates, apologized for the unseasonal weather. A thin drizzle was falling. I had the heater in the Jeep going at full blast.

“But this must be the best June you’ve had in years,” I said to the microphone grille in the wall.

“Oh, we like it.” The teller’s amplified voice came back, broadcasting across the forecourt. She enunciated each phrase as if she were yelling into an early barbed wire telephone. “Those Droughts. Are Quite. Horrible. I Hope. I Do Not Live To See. Another One. In My Lifetime.”

At Sakelaris Kitchen, the late breakfasters were swapping inches. Three-quarters yesterday. Maybe as much again today. At the next table, two men were discussing the rain’s capricious routes and favors. It had dallied with one farmer, and spurned his neighbor. It regularly strolled down the winding paths of Cabin and Fallon Creeks, often spending the night with Ismay, while blowing a chaste kiss at Terry. All this spring, it had been having an extravagant affair with Marmarth in North Dakota, eighteen miles east of Baker. The men weren’t speaking of mere precipitation: they were talking of the flighty goddess of the Plains.

Mrs. Sakelaris had decorated the walls of her restaurant with the tools of long-gone honyockers — their saws and washboards, scythes, mangles, drills and plow blades. I thought of Dora Wollaston, Mike’s grandmother, on her knees in the homestead. Was she praying for rain, or to it?

There were no half-measures with this goddess. Either she treated you with contemptuous disdain, or she was all over you. In an indulgent mood, she could make eastern Montana look as green as Eden. I drove out to the Wollaston place, slithering over a bad stretch of gumbo road that the rain had turned to a skid pan. Everywhere there were specks of bright color in the grass. The prairie was putting on a flower show. Though the festival mood was broken, momentarily, by the severed head of a coyote, nailed to a juniper fence post. The crows had pecked out its eyes, its fur was turning to wet mold, its teeth protruded. In another month, it would be a bleached skull. Et in Arcadia ego.

Turning on to Ned’s claim, I saw, more clearly than before, why he had lit on this happy patch of ground. There was the low murmur of flowing water in the swale, and, on the apron of flat land between the hills, the turf was as thick and spongy as a tended lawn. Meadowlarks caroled overhead, accompanied by the string section of crickets underfoot. Near the site of the house, Ned and Dora’s things lay scattered in the grass as if by dynamite. I picked up the crescent of a broken wagon wheel and put it over my shoulder; the damp wood was soft and crumbly, and I could flake it away with my forefinger from the holes where the spokes had been.

The previous year, I’d tried and failed to fit the huge sweep of the prairie into the tiny black chamber of my Pentax. Now I went close up. Spread-eagled in the wet grass, I focused carefully on the raindrop-burdened petals of the flowers on Ned’s homestead. The resulting pictures were a distinct improvement on my earlier efforts.

Here they are. The sky-blue trumpets of Penstemon angustifolius. The miniature white florets on the sturdy, crooked stalk of a butte candle, Cryptantha bradburyana. This busy yellow splash on a shale outcrop is Lesquerella alpina, from a cadet branch of the mustard family. The cactus, Opuntia polycantha, is about to break into bloom — as is the pale sheathed phallus of the Yucca glauca. Bluebell … wild rose … flame mallow … lupine … All these pictures were taken within a hundred yards of each other, on the southern slope of Ned Wollaston’s little valley.

The botanizing was done, on site, out of a book, Claude A. Barr’s Jewels of the Plains—a work of taxonomy so engaging, so improbably well written, that I found myself staying up until 3 a.m. one morning for the pleasure of reading it cover to cover. Under the dry guise of compiling a classified list of the flora of the Great Plains, Barr had managed to write a compelling autobiography and an extended lyrical description of the land itself, where (in tacit rebuke to Robert Louis Stevenson’s horror at the bleak emptiness of the region) “The distant view has a lovely, quieting effect, bringing a sense of things as they ought to be and a wonderment that any portion of the earth’s surface could be so perfect.”

Claude Barr was a homesteader. Born in Arkansas in 1887, he went to Drake University in Iowa, majoring in English, Greek and public speaking. On a summer vacation from college, selling stereoscopes around South Dakota, Barr filed a claim on a quarter-section homestead in Fall River County, just south of the Black Hills, on much the same kind of gumbo-and-badland terrain as the Wollaston place. He tried growing wheat and fruit trees, and raised cattle; by the beginning of the Dirty Thirties he was broke.

He had always taken an interest in the wildflowers on his land, and in 1932 he mailed off to House & Garden magazine in New York an article about the pasque flower, Pulsatilla patens, the state flower of South Dakota.

In earliest spring the buds rapidly enlarge and push tentatively upward, warm-robed in silver fur, preferring to dodge severe weather. They open into lavender satin beauties, with gold centers and deeper lavender to blue and deep purple outer wraps …

The piece was picked up by a receptive editor, and Barr was astonished by the magazine’s “munificent” payment of $20.00. Writing evidently paid better than cattle ranching.

One by one, his neighbors abandoned their farms and headed out to the far West. Barr alone was able to stay on. He became a regular contributor to House & Garden and to other, more specialized horticultural magazines. He turned a large part of the homestead into a nursery, selling his jewels of the Plains to rock-garden enthusiasts in California and back East; and he started work on the great book that would occupy him until the very end of a very long life.

The book was still a jumble of notes and incomplete entries in 1962, when Barr’s second wife died. The seventy-five-year-old widower took off on a series of solitary field trips across the Plains states and provinces, from New Mexico to Saskatchewan, Missouri to Wyoming. A snapshot of him, taken in 1976 when he was eighty-nine, shows a rugged, humorous, weather-beaten man who might be pushing sixty. His hair is full, and he is only now beginning to go gray at the temples. Crisscrossing a region roughly the size of the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Poland combined, Barr went on collecting samples, taking photographs and making notes. Over such an enormous territory, every subgenus had developed a mass of distinct variants, and each plant description in Jewels of the Plains is sensitive to these mutations of color and habit as the migrant flowers adapt themselves to new soils and terrains. Barr had set himself a project that might reasonably have been undertaken by some government-financed research institute, with outposts, and teams of graduate students, in a score of universities. He refused to die until his book was done.

At last he came to write his preface and acknowledgments. The book had been nearly fifty years in the writing, and by all the usual laws for such things, it should have been a loose and baggy monster, extending into many volumes. It is just 236 pages — so tight and sprightly, so fast on its feet, that the reader can only marvel at Barr’s formidable gift for distillation. His own voice is there in every entry. If the book’s most characteristic note is one of “wonderment,” in Barr’s word, it is also nicely tart:

Oxytropis campestris v. gracilis, to voice a well-considered opinion, is a pauperish, slender spike of weather-worn cream. It was finally banished from my garden.

The long-lived perennial of the genus, Mentzelia oligosperma, wide, dense, and low, has no admirers: its inch-wide stars are the color of spoiled oranges.

Barr died in 1982, five weeks short of his ninety-fifth birthday. Jewels of the Plains was published a few months later, in 1983, by the University of Minnesota Press. He must have just had time to correct the proofs before he handed in his dinner pail.

My copy of Barr’s book traveled with me on the passenger seat alongside Peterson’s Western Birds. I braked for each new pinpoint flash of color, and pressed plant specimens between the pages. Now the book is full of brittle ghosts. Haplopappus … prairie-pink … Their yellow and purple dust stains the paper.

As Evelyn Cameron and L. A. Huffman show the big-picture version of the landscape, Claude Barr alerts one to the crowded panorama in the grass at one’s feet. In his company, you find yourself suddenly forgetting the treeless distances of the prairie, and looking at it, instead, from the low, foreshortened perspective of the gopher or the snake. The spreading sage towers over the ground-hugging townsendia and the miniature tombstone cactus. Seen from this viewpoint, the vegetation is as complex, layered, richly scented and full of vistas as an old-growth forest — and it makes a picture in the frame according to the classic, Claude Lorrain rules of composition.

The weather was a stroke of luck for me, as for the farmers in Sakelaris Kitchen. For I was seeing the prairie as the homesteaders had seen it during their first Montana spring. They’d arrived in a run of moist years, and the land was living up to its description in the railroad pamphlets. The old hands — the ranchers and early, quarter-section honyockers — could not remember a time when it had been so wet and green, while the anxious agricultural experts, the railroad magnates and the newly arrived settlers were able to look at the brimming creeks and fenced squares of tender wheat, and see them as a prophecy come to pass. It was a conclusive rebuttal of all those jaundiced and shortsighted critics who had argued, in Congress and elsewhere, that this country was unsuitable for the small farmer.

Professor Agassiz was right. Rain had followed the plow, the railroad, the new towns, drawn by magnetism to the altered electrical field of the earth. The rising curve of the graph proved the theory to be true: 15 inches, 16 inches, 17 inches … As more people settled, and more land came under cultivation, so more rain would fall. You could bet your bottom dollar on it. If the rainfall figures continued to increase at their present rate, in a few years eastern Montana would be as moist as Iowa.

“Scientists say.” The spell of scientific authority, expounding the higher cockamamy, was hard to resist. Agassiz was a name to conjure with in American science, and Alexander Agassiz (the son of Louis) was both an eminent zoologist and an eminent capitalist, who had made a fortune in the mining business. His combination of superior knowledge and superior wealth gave fresh legs to the electromagnetic theory of rainfall (which had been discredited in serious scientific circles many years before the publication of the railroad pamphlets).

It didn’t take a scientist to notice that both the railroads (along with the farms and settlements they spawned) and the rain clouds had separate reasons for following the line of a major creek, and were therefore often seen in each other’s company. Topography affects railroad building and rainfall alike. But this obvious fact didn’t embarrass the Agassizites. It was a fine theory, people badly wanted it to be true and, if you happened to be on the prairie in the June of 1911, or the June of 1995, the confirming evidence was everywhere, in the wet grass and the curdled sky. You could taste the evidence on your tongue and wring it out of your socks.

The rain gave everyone a chance to practice the Campbell Method of “scientific soil culture.” As soon as it stopped, you were to harness your horses to a disc harrow, and pulverize and loosen the surface of the soil. This was to prevent the loss of precious moisture by evaporation, to open the soil to the nitrogen in the air, and to prepare the ground for the next shower. Rain falling on loosened earth would percolate faster down to the subsoil, where it would top up the building “reservoir” of stored water. The novice dry farmer had to learn that his great enemy was Evaporation, which has much the same role in Campbell’s Manual as Sloth and Wanton have in Pilgrim’s Progress. Give in to Evaporation, and you are on the road to ruin.

Evaporation of the rain water on the great plains country had made many a man hopeless and homeless. Prevention of the evaporation of the soil waters by proper cultivation means better crops, better homes, better people, happier children, and a better and more prosperous country.

Creating the reservoir, on the twin principles of percolation and capillary attraction, was like laying up credit in Heaven. It was as much a moral as a practical goal. For Campbell’s new science was really an old Presbyterian sermon on the virtue of thrift. Waste not, want not. Hoard today’s rainfall against tomorrow’s dry spell — and turn the arid plain into the Land of Beulah.

The two horses dragged the creaking harrow up the slope. The 14-inch revolving discs sliced into earth as moist and dark as fudge. That spring, everything seemed to be falling into place. The rain was there, as forecast. The Campbell Method gave even the urban tenderfoot the complacent assurance that he was doing more with his land than generations of born-and-bred farmers had managed to do with theirs. His wheat and barley were coming up exactly as Campbell said they would. He looked forward to a bumper harvest of perhaps forty, maybe fifty, bushels per acre, and by fall, with any luck, he could make the down payment on his own threshing machine.

Percy, remembering the Wollaston family’s first year on their claim, came up with image after image of abundance, of the wonderful fertility of the virgin soil.

When the cows that Ned brought from Madison were let loose on the new pasture, they nibbled at the grass for twenty minutes, then sank to their knees and lay about on the landscape like so many overstuffed sofas. “They had grazed almost continuously in Dakota,” Percy wrote, “and at first we thought there was something wrong with them, but then realized that there was more nutrition in the grass so that they were quickly satisfied.”

Plowing began in the spring of 1911. “Dad started the first furrow. That was a ceremony in itself, to see the first of the long strips of sod turn like a wave away from the blade of the plow.”

Much of the grass was what we called niggerwool and I don’t know any other name for it. It was a very short, curly grass, highly nutritious and nature’s own answer to soil conservation. The roots matted together so that the sod would turn in strips several feet long before breaking. Just under the grass there was a black layer of fine rich soil from half to three-quarters of an inch thick. I realize now that this was the accumulation of centuries of fertilization and the only really good soil there was.

The most spectacular producls of this magic humus were the giant turnips.

Our turnip crop was something you are going to find hard to believe. We had planted the seed at random in the rows of a corn field as there wasn’t very much plowed land to begin with, and we were doubtful whether the turnips would grow. We had rain every day in June that year, and everything grew madly. By late summer we could see that we had turnips, and lots of them; but not until we began to pull them did we realize the size of the things. Imagine, if you can, a zipound turnip. We raised one, along with a number of 18-pounders and loads of six or eight pounders. The storage root-cellar was filled to the brim … That thin, tremendously rich layer, which we saw with the first breaking of sod, would have grown anything that moisture and temperature permitted.

Looking back on the Plains from his Rocky Mountain home in the 1970s, Percy saw that the whole civilization of his childhood had been erected, perilously, on a finger-thick crust of decomposed vegetable matter and dead beetles. From the moment that the first plow blade bit into the crust, the homesteaders began unwittingly to destroy the foundations of their new life, and in a very few years the crust was gone — used up, scattered, blown away by the dry summer winds.

The idea of that treacherous half-inch seam of good soil haunts Percy Wollaston’s memoir and shapes its rueful tone. It came to haunt me too. I went hunting for “niggerwool,” and found clumps of it still growing on patches of land too rough, angular and inaccessible (as I thought) to have ever been injured by a plow. Digging with a penknife, I eased out fist-sized lumps of sod. The tight, curly grass with its matted root system was exactly as Percy described it, but the layer of soft black soil had disappeared.

I talked to two people who still farmed on land close to the Wollaston place. Both were children of homesteaders; both, born in the 1920S, were too young to remember the unsullied ground of Percy’s memory. But they doubted his account. “Niggerwool” is threadleaf sedge, and got its common name as much for its densely tangled jet-black roots as for its curly tops. Percy must have mistaken the roots for soil, the farmers said.

“It wasn’t the soil. It was the rain,” said Wynona Breen, whose ranch now includes Johnnie Conlon’s place, just to the north of the Wollastons’. “When the rain came again, in ’39, ’40, the old people said that everything came up just like it did in the beginning.”

Mike Wollaston insists that his father was too observant, too great a stickler for detail, too passionate a gardener to be faulted on this point. He knew about soil, and the black soil that he saw under the grass was soil, not roots.

The disagreement exposes a rift between the homesteaders who left the land and those who managed to stay on. Percy came to believe that the homesteaders, ignorant of soil conservation, dedicated to a show-off but destructive style of straight-line, up-hill-and-down-dale plowing, had stripped the land of its goodness. A few seasons of their harsh agriculture, and the marvelous black stuff, laid down over hundreds of years, was exhausted, like a wildcat miner’s vein of gold. When they struck lucky, in the fabulous autumn of 18-pound turnips, the homesteaders were (if only they had known it) staring their future ruin in the face.

The tiny handful of survivors saw it differently. They and their parents had taken good care of the soil. They had wasted nothing. The land was as fertile now (and in drought years as barren) as it had been when the homesteaders arrived. Rain was the key — a divine dispensation, beyond the realm of man’s responsibility or control. So the survivors were deeply predisposed to say that Percy Wollaston had got it wrong.

Day after day it rained, and every day more pallid, wormy things broke out of the damp ground, straightened up, gained color in the light, and added themselves to the amazing green welter of that spring. The grass in the coulees stood waist high. The yuccas came into late bloom. Mushrooms with feathery, salmon-pink gills appeared overnight in the pasture. The serried wheat went on climbing, and, when the wind came up in the afternoons, it passed through the grain fields like a deep-sea swell.

Up at five in the dawn overcast, nursing a mug of coffee at the open kitchen door, one could look out through the fine-sifted rain at the herd of fat Herefords, their tan flanks steaming, and the bulge of green wheat against the silvery-new fencing wire. At 99¢ a bushel, forty bushels to the acre … Every morning, the same soothing exercise in mental arithmetic, and the numbers kept on adding up to a substantial future. To people unused to the experience of success, the view from the doorway was catch-in-the-throat beautiful.

The growing season of 1911 was also a great building season, as the settlers took heart from their flourishing crops and cattle, and began to spread themselves confidently over the landscape, raising structures meant to last long past their own life-times. From Rocking Chair Butte, you could see the airy timber frames of a dozen half-built schoolhouses — giant one-room homesteads, their pine scantlings rooted in cement, strong enough to stop a tornado in its tracks. By August, they’d be planked and painted. In September, they’d be in commission, with children’s voices sounding raggedly over the top of the insistent tink-tonk-tink of the upright piano.

Built to code, with 14-foot ceilings and tall sash windows, the schoolhouses are as formal and austere as Saxon churches. Like churches, they are self-conscious landmarks. Sited on hilltops, so that the kids could find their way from farm to school in all weather, they each subordinate their own parochial landscape, and convert ten sections or so of lumpy grassland and shale outcroppings into a distinct ambit. Bleached now to the same ash-gray, short of doors, windows, roof tiles, they exude a wan authority, like toothless, deaf old teachers unable to give up the habit of instruction.

Two miles southwest of the Wollaston place, Whitney Creek school was still, just, in working order when I first visited, with three pupils and a teacher who drove out each day from Baker. It was a Saturday morning, and a woman from the farm across the way let me have the key.

“They’re closing it down next month,” she said. “They’re bussing the kids to Plevna. It’s going to be lonesome. We’ve gotten so used to the children out in the yard … that’s always been part of our lives here. It’s going to leave a chill—”

Inside, the schoolroom was swept and tidied for the weekend; the piano closed, the blackboard sponged clean, the flag furled neatly on its pole. Framed in heavy ornate gilt, the turn-of-the-century print of George Washington was blotched and pimpled with damp. In ruffles, stock and silver wig, the hero of Saratoga and Yorktown looked quite startlingly like Mrs. Doubtfire.

The VCR, the bilious shagpile carpet, the electric convection heater were late additions; otherwise the room was exactly as it must have been when Percy, an inky-fingered eight-year-old, labored through the class recitation of This-is-the-forest-primeval-the-murmuring-pines-and-the-hemlocks:

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosome …

Druids of eld! Harpers hoar! The children were aged from six to thirteen. Their accents were Norwegian, German, Cockney, Irish and midwestern. Their teacher was Earl Smith, a lanky farm boy with a couple of years of high school under his belt, and hardly more familiar with hoar harpers than were his pupils. Still, he conducted the recitation with a vigorous fist, punching out the meter of Longfellow’s tongue-twister dactyls, and leading the pack in a loud but squeaky baritone. Under the flag, and the disconcertingly pert gaze of the first president, the homesteaders’ children stumbled gamely through that dubious American classic.

The schoolhouse was an emblem of the fact that people were here for keeps. Its foundations were dug deep enough into the prairie to hold one’s own ambitious roots. It was a showcase for everyone’s best efforts at carpentry, painting, needlework, plumbing. And it was a political nursery. Forming a school district, electing a school board, dealing with county and state education agencies, the honyockers learned how to work the American system of do-it-yourself grassroots democratic government.

Some European immigrants, like the Lutheran German speakers from the Ukraine, who took up adjoining claims to the north, on the benchlands around Fallon, close to the Yellowstone River, built their church first and bowed to the leadership of their pastor. For most people, though, the schoolhouse was the center of things. They had the family Bible, parked on a high shelf in the parlor. The churches of Mildred and Ismay, a long and dusty hike away, were close enough for weddings, christenings and funerals. In 1911 in the new West, it was bracing to live without benefit of clergy. For everyday inspiration and enlightenment, for a code of practical morality, for as much in the way of uplift as a body can reasonably stand, one could look to the schoolhouse on the hill. The building and its books stood for a creed that everyone believed in: progress; self-improvement; a faith in the great meta-physical abstraction of America.

The Wollastons got together with the Leif Youngs, the Fauses, the Jarretts, the Harnacks, the McAtees and the Strikers to build the Whitney Creek school. The McAtees volunteered an acre of land on the northwest corner of their claim as a suitably central site, and the work was done in the evenings and on Sundays. The bachelor Johnnie Conlon put in as long hours as any parent. One Sunday afternoon, Worsell showed up, to announce that Mrs. Docken was visiting in Minneapolis and would return next week by train, with young Art, now nine years old. Art, said Worsell, hands in pockets, would be a pupil when school opened in the fall. Watching the carpenters maneuver a high roof beam into place, Worsell remarked that a man alone on a claim without a wife was at a terrible disadvantage, and that it must be a fine thing to have time left over to work on a project like the school. He wasn’t seen again.

With schools going up all over the prairie at five- and six-mile intervals, qualified teachers were headhunted like CEOs. A few of the homesteaders were college-trained professionals, with experience in the school systems of Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis. On the prairie, they took the title Professor, and they were almost invariably unavailable. Most of the teachers were young, single men and women with a high school diploma, who had filed on a nearby claim and spent their salaries on seed, machinery and livestock. Some, like Earl Smith, were the teenage sons and daughters of homesteaders, put out on temporary loan to the school board for as long as their labor wasn’t needed at home on the farm.

The child-teachers, themselves barely out of grade school, were as much in need of instruction as the children they taught. They were policed by the state, with guidelines, printed examinations for each grade and alarming notices of school inspections. The state-approved textbooks laid out lessons complete with stage directions and props for the novice teacher. From Around the World with the Children: An Introduction to Geography:

Chapter VII … Bring Chinese pictures to class. Have children impersonate Ah-Chee and Yee-Tsoo.

Chapter X … Bring out characteristics of the Red Race. Have children make tents and dress dolls to represent Indian children. Have boys impersonate Bald Eagle, and girls, Humming Bird …

At the Whitney Creek school, Earl Smith, just turned seventeen, with his big ears, his half-broken voice, his coyote traps and his secret attempts to smoke a Havana cigar without going green, pored over these instructions, his lips moving as he read. Eavesdropping on the world of his classroom, one needs to set the pietistic nationalism of the textbooks, their relentlessly improving tone, against the figure of the young teacher in muddy boots and blue-jean overalls. The textbook writers must have been haunted by the prospect of Earl Smith and his young colleagues — Education’s unlikely but enthusiastic messengers. Percy Wollaston remembered Smith as a fine teacher:

I have never seen better discipline in a schoolroom or a teacher who gave more to the student. Any whispering or inattention brought a snap of his fingers, which restored instant attention to the business of learning. When recess came, he was one of the kids, joining in the fun and tactfully seeing there were no arguments. The world lost a natural and gifted educator when Earl went back to his farm.

Educating the educators was an important part of textbook writing. So Randall J. Condon, Superintendent of the Cincinnati Schools, and general editor of the Atlantic Readers series (epigraph: Character is higher than intellect — Emerson), tried to take Earl Smith in hand with a private lecture in the foreword:

Are these books intended as “basal texts”? By all means, for they deal with the most fundamental things in life: character, courage, service.

He went on sternly:

These books teach peace founded on justice, but they teach also the beauty of a willingness to die if need be for the sake of truth and honor, for freedom of conscience and of country.

The problem, as Condon clearly knew, was that the schoolrooms of America were full of ragamuffin kids with foreign accents who were perfect strangers to the kind of “strong, self-reliant nationalism” that the Atlantic Readers were trying to foster. He wrestles bravely with the shaping paradox of American nationalism — that it must be multicultural, a nationalism of all the nations.

Far and near, selections have been sought that would help to deepen a sense of good will and fellowship and kindly consideration for others by emphasizing the fine qualities of all mankind. We have endeavored to teach that our pledge to the flag, “one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” means a national unity of spirit that cannot be divided into groups or sects or races — into rich and poor, into weak and strong, into those who work on farms, in factories, forests, and mines, and those who do not have to toil — this nation to include all, with liberty of conscience and conduct for each; and that full justice must be done to all if America is to realize the great dream that our fathers dreamed, of social amity, with religious and racial equality for all the people.

Despite Condon’s eagerness to prepare his ten- and eleven-year-old readers for a heroic end, pro patria mori, nothing in his fifth-grade anthology really bears out that ambition. There is a story, “Onawandah,” by Louisa May Alcott, in which an Indian boy dies while rescuing two young white friends from the camp of a hostile tribe. But his death is pointedly accidental: he is bitten in the chest by a cougar, which, in an “overbold” moment, he has tried to shoot with his bow and arrow. Otherwise, all is sweetness and light, with folktales from around the world, the lives of Haydn and Giotto, poems by Christina Rossetti, stories of faithful dogs, a lot of nature writing (“The young Regal Fritillary will be feeding on violets. He wears tawny red above and may be decorated with silvery white spots”) and useful maxims: “When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred. — Jefferson.”

It is a pleasant book. The nationalism of which Condon makes so much fuss in his foreword turns out, in practice, to be a simple pride in America for having gathered so many traditions under one flag and for incorporating so many beautiful landscapes in one political geography. Native Americans get a fair shake; black Americans are nowhere to be found — any acknowledgment of their presence in this generous land would have been hard to square with Condon’s “great dream” of “racial equality for all the people.” An extract from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, might have landed Earl Smith in more difficulties than he could handle.

The children at Whitney Creek school were decently served. When I was ten and eleven, at school in England in the 1950s, we were fed the merry saber rattling of Sir Henry Newbolt, the manly racism of Kipling (we were, after all, born to rule those lesser breeds without the law), the lives and adventures of great British military commanders. Our English teacher, a wartime major in the Scots Guards, spoke airily of “wogs,” “frogs,” “eyeties” and “jew-boys.” Nationalism to me meant Rule, Britannia and Play up, play up, and play the game! Condon’s anthology, reaching out to the back of the classroom to include Harnack the German, Young the Norwegian, McAtee the Ulsterman, was attempting something infinitely more ambitious, and more admirable, than its British (or French, or German) counterparts. Even at its most milk-and-water; it was sensitive to the complex fate of being an American, as to the traumatic process of becoming one.

Earl Smith’s favorite anapestic poem was James Whitcomb Riley’s “The Name of Old Glory.” He knew the whole thing by heart. He led the class through the people’s address to the flag:

Old Glory, — speak out! — we are asking about

How you happened to “favor” a name, so to say,

That sounds so familiar and careless and gay

As we cheer it and shout in our wild breezy way—

We — the crowd, every man of us, calling you that—

We — Tom, Dick, and Harry — each swinging his hat

And hurrahing “Old Glory!” like you were our kin,

When — Lord! we all know we’re as common as sin …

and the flag’s solemn response to the people:

By the driven snow-white and the living blood-red

Of my bars, and their heaven of stars overhead—

By the symbol conjoined of them all, skyward cast,

As I float from the steeple, or flap at the mast,

Or droop o’er the sod where the long grasses nod,—

My name is as old as the glory of God … So I came

by the name of Old Glory.

Yet this is one of the few moments in the textbooks when God, with a big G, makes a personal appearance. There are many little-g gods and goddesses: Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Minerva, Apollo, who fit very well into the turn-of-the-century western craze for the Graeco-Roman. The big hotel in Miles City was a lineal descendant of the Parthenon, and as in every town of any pretension in the West, Main Street was liberally decorated with friezes, pilasters, entablatures, to inspire and ennoble the Stetson-hatted, cowboy-booted throng at ground level.

In the classroom, as in the architecture of the city, a second humanist renaissance was under way. In 1911, the pledge of allegiance, recited daily at 8 a.m., when Earl Smith entered and stood self-consciously to attention by the blackboard, was still Godless. Under Eisenhower, the phrase “under God” was snipped out of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and spatchcocked into the pledge by an act of Congress in 1954. In May of that year, Newsweek magazine reported:

The man who started the drive is the Rev. George M. Docherty, pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, where President Eisenhower worships. In a Lincoln Day sermon, the Rev. Docherty observed that there was “something missing from the pledge,” which, he remarked, could just as well be repeated by little Muscovites pledging allegiance to the hammer and sickle.

So, in a small skirmish in the Cold War, “one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” became subtly divided into “one nation, under God, indivisible …”

The America to which the textbooks welcomed the children of Whitney Creek was secular, progressive, rational, scientific and can-do practical — a world full of the glory of man and his achievements. Side by side with the tales of Ulysses’ adventures, Jason and the golden fleece, Orpheus and Eurydice, Theseus and the Minotaur, were the fabulous life stories of great Americans like Franklin, John Paul Jones, Washington, William Cullen Bryant, Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. The living (Theodore Roosevelt, the naturalist John Burroughs) were painted with the same broad, heroic brush as the famous dead.

Much the most powerful of the godlike moderns were the scientists — Franklin and his kite, Morse and the telegraph, Bell and the telephone, Edison and the electric light, Marconi and the wireless. The textbooks’ standard word for their discoveries and inventions is “miracle”—and justly so, since the textbook version of the life of Bell or Marconi leaves one little better informed about how the telephone or the radio actually works than one is about exactly how Jesus fed the five thousand or raised Lazarus from the tomb. The scientists habitually speak in parables and Christlike riddles:

One evening while Bell was calling at the Hubbard home, he illustrated on the piano some of the mysteries of sound.

“Did you know,” he said, “that if I sing the note ‘G’ close to the strings of the piano, the ‘G’ string will answer me?”

Mr. Hubbard who was a lawyer asked what this indicated.

“It is evidence,” said Bell, “that we may someday have a musical telegraph which will enable us to send as many messages over one wire as there are notes on that piano.”

They are really Horatio Alger stories, in which the willpower and genius of real-life magicians have been substituted for the stroke of luck, the runaway horse and carriage, that brought fame and fortune to Ragged Dick and Tattered Tom. So Marconi, the Italian farm boy, gets to hobnob with Queen Victoria. Young Tom Edison, from a village in Ohio, makes a spectacular killing on Wall Street.

Edison and his assistants went to bed in the knowledge that they had solved the problem of electric lighting. While he slept the story of his achievement was flashed around the world. The value of the stock in his company rose from one hundred and six dollars to three thousand dollars a share.

Alexander Graham Bell, the Scottish immigrant, whose mother was deaf and dumb, is granted, on his twenty-ninth birthday, “the most valuable single patent ever issued,” and comes to be on first-name terms with the Emperor of Brazil. As an immigrant, Bell has a special meaning for the kids at the back of the room.

When you go to the telephone to call up a friend, don’t forget the little Scotch boy who “made the iron talk.” Perhaps, who knows, you may be able to do an equally great thing for yourself and for the world — for you have the same chance that he had.

From Zeus’s thunderbolt, to Franklin’s catching of electricity from the lightning storm in the sky, to Bell’s making the iron talk, was an easy, logical progress of heroes. And there was still space in the pantheon, for you. The world outside the classroom was perfectly in tune with the brave new world of the textbooks. Nineteen eleven was the year in which Henry Ford added an electric self-starter to the now-four-year-old Model T; and in 1911 the first coast-to-coast flight was made, in a Wright biplane, from New York to Pasadena, by Calbraith P. Rogers, who crashed his plane fifteen times en route. Art Worsell and Percy Wollaston enjoyed intense daydreams about being Calbraith Rogers, in helmet and goggles, breasting the high Montana sky. So did their teacher.

The content of the textbooks is secular and materialist, but their tone and language are churchy. Every story is a sermon. They appeal to Faith — in the miracle-working power of reason, and, by implication, in the miracle-working power of education. Their modern heroes all worked hard at their schoolbooks. The scene of homework (the textbook open in the pool of light spread by the kerosene lantern) is a ritual ingredient in every biography. Above all, they appeal to faith in the flag, in America as the land that enables miracles to happen, where the farmhouse door opens on a path that leads, via the one-room school, to glory.

The scientist with whose work everyone in the class — with the possible exception of Art Worsell — was familiar, Hardy Webster Campbell, presented himself as a hero in the textbook mold. He liked to be known as “the evangelist of dry-farming,” in a phrase that nicely marries his twin personalities as a preacher and a man of science. His miracles of grain production (sixty-seven bushels to the acre!) were in the feeding-of-the-five-thousand class. In his Soil Culture Manual, Campbell reprinted sheaves of testimonials, like this one by a journalist writing in The World’s Work magazine:

Mr. Campbell, without irrigation, can make crops grow on hundreds of thousands of semi-arid square miles of “desert” that otherwise would be fruitless and flowerless. In the natural habitat of the cactus, he grows wheat, corn, and vegetables.

Twentieth-century magic. Campbell’s kitchen-table demonstration of capillary attraction had the same vatic function as Alexander Graham Bell’s singing ‘G’ to the piano string; it was designed to establish his credentials as a prophet. See that? Believe in me.

So the homesteaders’ children knew that they were in on yet another modern miracle. After the telephone, after the automobile and the airplane, came the harvesting of the desert. They could watch the miracle happening as they walked home from the schoolhouse: the ripening corn; the cows with their calves; the electrically induced rain. It was like the wireless. It was like the five loaves and the two fishes.

Art Worsell’s arrival in the summer had sent a ripple of motherly concern through the community. Worsell’s shack was now a notorious folly, as famous a landmark as the tallest and grandest of the new schools. Jagged tongues of tar paper stuck out from the walls at a variety of angles, and in a breezy dusk it resembled an enormous, wounded, crowlike bird struggling to get airborne. Lack of insulation round the stovepipe had made the roof catch fire on several occasions. After each fire, Worsell nailed down a few bits of scrap lumber over the new hole, and his roof was growing into a crazy woodpile. The yard was paved silver with the squashed cans that had survived Worsell’s rare deliberate bonfires, and the pool of tobacco juice on the floor was getting big enough, so one of the Docken brothers reported, to go fishing in.

Chateau Worsell was not — said the Dockens, the Wollastons, the Yeargens — a fit place for a child. The man was a scandal, his house a hog pen. It was like Pap and Huck Finn. When Mrs. Docken agreed to chaperone young Art on the train from Minneapolis, she did so against her own and everybody else’s better judgment — and for the next eight years she would feel guiltily responsible for the boy.

In a photo of the Whitney Creek school picnic, Art Worsell sits at a slight tangent to the circle of children sitting round a tablecloth spread on the grass. He’s a famished city shrimp, with a cowlick of black hair above his right eye. He is the only child in the picture wearing obvious hand-me-downs from his father’s wardrobe. His shirt with rolled sleeves sits on him like a priest’s surplice. His eyes are as small and dark as raisins. His mouth, winched up into an obedient grin for the camera, looks frightened.

Art arrived on the prairie speaking in a purse-lipped Swedish accent, which, with its long vowels and rolled r’s, sounded to a British ear like Edinburgh-genteel … a tea-and-scones voice. The London phrases that he picked up from his father fitted his mouth hardly better than his shirt fitted his back. Speaking like a gentlewoman from a forbidding granite crescent, he said: “Cobblers!”; “a belt round the ear-’ole”; “ferkin ’a’p’orth!” This amused Ned Wollaston, who encouraged him, while Dora frowned at her husband from behind the boy’s back.

Neither English nor Swedish, and too grim, too lusterless, too hungry skin-and-bone to fit the honyockers’ sunny conception of twentieth-century America, Art Worsell was on the conscience of the entire neighborhood, like some obscure communal sin of omission. So the child was showered with invitations, like a famously eligible bachelor. He was regularly bidden to the Wollastons’ for Sunday lunch — and in 1973, when he was seventy-one and dying in Seattle, Art would remember these square meals as the sole high spots of his childhood on the homestead.

In Art’s view, Percy Wollaston and his dog Pat lived in a palace, and the mile-long walk north, along the slippery gumbo track, was a journey to a foreign land of extraordinary largesse and sometimes baffling niceties. There were second helpings there, and cups and saucers, and the house was often loud with the talk of grown-up visitors, grandly dressed up in neckties and cravats, long skirts and starched white blouses. On some Sundays there was a motorcar — a new Ford or Oldsmobile — parked with the buggies in the driveway; and after lunch, a regal spin around the neighborhood, with the women hanging on to their hats and the boys in a heaven of brand-new, late-model technical terms.

One could have comfortably fitted Ned Wollaston’s whole farmhouse into the drawing room of Percy Sr.’s Fairmont mansion, but it was full of touches and echoes of the Wollaston family past. As the youngest son, Ned hadn’t inherited much after his father’s death, but the few pieces that came down to him were prized and brought out when guests came to visit — the East India Company dinner plates; the Cloisonnier dish, for dried figs and apricots; the crystal vinegar cruet in a silver holder. For rare, red-letter Sunday lunches, the crested silver was unwrapped from its baize pouch. Four dessert spoons. Five forks. The Wollaston family crest, which went back to 1616, was a demi-griffin (salient), like a winged squirrel, atop a mural coronet, and brandishing a mullet (pierced) in its talons. There was a crested silver mustard pot, also a gold-plated serving spoon and serving fork. Family ate off tin plates; guests were given the eighteenth-century silverware and best china.

On one wall hung a framed photograph of Fairmont; on another, a studio portrait of Percy and Catherine Wollaston looking like the bearded Edward VII and the elderly Queen Elizabeth I. The patriarch and his wife seemed to be gazing, possibly aghast, at the row of five- and ten-pound lard cans on the shelf beyond the stove. These bore the name Swift’s Silver Leaf Lard, and were labeled in neat copperplate pen-and-ink: Cocoa, Coffee, Salt, Flour, Sugar, Baking Soda, Raisins.

More than anything else in the room, the lard cans awed Art Worsell. The Wollaston kitchen was equipped on the scale of a grocery store. A further lard can held cookies, and Art had never seen it halfway empty. He guessed that Mr. Wollaston (whom his father called Old Wally Wanker) must be very rich indeed.

There were three shelves of books (a set of Dickens, Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, The Bee-Keeper’s Vade Mecum, Dissertations by Mr. Dooley by Finley Peter Dunne, Plutarch’s Lives, Shakespeare, Gibbon, Emerson, Bunyan …). On a low oak chest, the latest magazines were spread in a fan—Harper’s Monthly, McClure’s, the Century, Youth’s Companion, the Dakota Farmer, the Saturday Evening Post, Scientific American. To Art Worsell, the place looked like a Carnegie library, and the Wollastons’ appetite for literature seemed on a par with their appetite for cocoa and cookies. Both were beyond Art’s experience.

Once, on an evening visit to the Wollaston place, he was treated to an after-supper performance by Mr. Wollaston, who read aloud from a book about a character named Mr. Weller. The voice he put on for the role sounded to Art exactly like the voice of his father — and when the family laughed at Mr. Weller, Art had the growing conviction that they were laughing at Mr. Worsell. He felt shamed. Wordlessly turning down the offer of a cookie at the end, he slunk home, with the grass whispering in his ears, taunting him. “Wery glad to see you, indeed, and hope our acquaintance may be a long ’un, as the gen’l’m’n said to the fi’ pun’ note.”

But Art was back in place a couple of Sundays later, and only fractionally more tongue-tied than usual. He could see the spine of The Pickwick Papers on the shelf. The book looked like a bomb that might go off at any moment and blow him up, while the Wollastons and their visitors laughed. Years later, in a mining camp in Butte, Art saw the title again, and felt his stomach turn in a spasm of reminiscent nausea.

When the Wollaston table was laid for company, with the crested silver and the mustard pot and vinegar cruet, Art was enlisted by Dora Wollaston as “honorary family,” and commissioned to put out the plates with the peacocks on them. “Uncle” Johnnie Conlon, another early arrival, brought his Victrola, along with his newest purchase, a Kodak No. I Box Brownie. The official guests came later: Professor and Mrs. Todd, who farmed a claim three miles to the southeast (Professor Todd had nearly agreed to become Whitney Creek school’s first teacher, but had pulled out at the last minute, saying he needed to work full time on the homestead), and Lord and Lady Cameron. Lord and Lady! Though the Wollaston parents, to Art’s astonishment, called them Ewen and Eve, as if they were real people. Even Percy, who was as near to a best friend as Art ever had, seemed mysteriously unabashed in the presence of all these titled personages.

The room was scented by the twigs of sagebrush that Mrs. Wollaston put to scorch on the top of the stove, and by the smell of pork crackling in the oven. A place in the corner was found for Lady Cameron’s mound of photographic apparatus (she was riding south, to Knowlton, on assignment), while Johnnie Conlon shyly slid his Box Brownie underneath his chair. Art found himself being watched, in the most alarming way, by Lady Cameron, then questioned by her in her low, gruff, drawling voice. “Really?” she said. “Really!” Art croaked and whiffled in his panic. She wanted to know what his name was, where he lived, who his parents were — unanswerably complex questions. She cocked her head to one side. She regarded him this way, then that way, as if she were considering how best to eat him. Art saw her as a hook-nosed vulture, her mouth a clacking beak.

She rose suddenly — a pillar of hairy, horse-smelling, checkered tweed. “Marvelous face, that one,” she said to Ned Wollaston. “Simply marvelous.” Art feared that he was going to disgrace himself by crying in front of the guests.

He was saved by Ned, calling people to table. Everyone stood at attention, eyes lowered, while Ned said, “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful,” then instantly began the flashing swordplay of carving knife and sharpener, as the talk burst out around the table.

Art, enormously cheered by the sight and smell of the pork roast, had all his attention concentrated on the clean descent of the knife through the meat, the slices stacking up like so many pages in a book. Mr. Wollaston’s left fist, clenched around the carving fork, had a star-shaped tattoo on it: Art didn’t dare to begin to guess what this might mean, but the strange tattoo was part of the mystique of the Wollaston household. It was up there with the long words, the thick books, the peacock plates and the dragons on the forks and spoons. It wouldn’t have much surprised Art Worsell had Mr. Wollaston come to the table in a conical black hat decorated with the signs of the Zodiac.

They had roast pork, roast potatoes, applesauce, cabbage and green beans. Then they had raspberry fool. Then they ate crackers and moldy cheese. The cheese was the only part of the meal that reminded Art of life at home, and he politely dodged it; it gave off a horrid stink, like a dead mouse. After lunch, Lord Cameron handed round cigars to the gentlemen, and gave one to Lady Cameron, too. Uncle Johnnie Conlon produced a bottle of whiskey from inside the case of the phonograph, and announced the program of his Victrola concert. He played “Uncle Josh,” “In My Merry Oldsmobile,” Adelina Patti singing arias from La Traviata, and three marches by John Philip Sousa—“The Washington Post,” “Semper Fidelis” and “Hands Across the Sea.”

A spirited conversation followed between Lady Cameron and Johnnie Conlon, about the relative merits of various brands and models of the gramophone. Evelyn Cameron had set her heart on buying an instrument, and Conlon, with a screwdriver, enthusiastically disemboweled his Victrola to show off its inner secrets. The little screws were everywhere; under the dog, in the pile of the rug, in the cracks between the floorboards. The boys collected them in an envelope. Hours after the guests had left, Conlon was still reassembling the Victrola.

For Percy and Art, Lady Cameron laid out nine matches on the cleared table. You had to pick up all nine with one match. She was the star of the party. Coaxed by Lord Cameron, with a chorus of “Oh, please do!” from the rest, Lady Cameron recited a poem she had written, titled “The Bucking Bronco.” After Patti’s soprano came Lady Cameron’s foghorn baritone, declaiming:

Then a bronco he’ll bring one of his string, and mount the saddle-tree.

With a snort and a bound, he’s off like a hound, with his tail in the air so free.

Down goes his head, for to buck he is bred;

His back is a billowing sea;

The rider sits tight, as the mariner might, if lashed to the helm was he.

After the applause, Professor Todd, whose judgment seemed to be sought on the poem, said that it was as good as anything in Robert Service.

Finally, Johnnie Conlon persuaded everyone to go outside and have their picture taken. He lined them up against the wall of the Wollaston homestead and shot them with his Brownie. After the Todds and the Camerons had gone, Art was mystified to overhear Mr. Wollaston say to Uncle Johnnie, over a refreshed glass of the Conlon whisky, “I’m afraid that Evelyn can be rather a trial.” He had thought that the grown-ups worshiped the ground she walked on.

The schoolhouse was the center of more formal social life. The homesteaders got together as the Whitney Creek Community Club, with meetings once a month, over a potluck lunch. These events were parties to which everyone — children included — was invited; but they kicked off with an agenda. For the first hour, people discussed how best to pool their small stock of machinery, how to market and price their home produce, how to arrange transportation to the stores and grain terminals in Ismay and Mildred. They reported on the latest innovations in dry-farming (Campbell was forever issuing updated bulletins and revisions to his system). Then, with a great pot of coffee brewing on the stove, they got down to the serious business of knitting themselves into a real community. The deepening pool of shared gossip was at least as important as the pooling of farm machinery.

On Sundays, roving evangelists with accordions (the letters JESUS SAVES descending in a vertical column down the keyboard) commandeered the schoolhouse for revivalist “hymn sings” and Sunday School. But they got few takers. On weekday evenings, young men in baggy flannel pants and city shoes turned up at the schoolhouse in new Model T’s with government plates, to deliver another kind of improving message. Armed with cyclostyled statistics and homilies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, these juvenile extension lecturers were bent on teaching the homesteaders to be better farmers, better community members, and better Americans. No one saw it then as the beginning of a war, but it was in schoolhouses like Whitney Creek that the first hostilities were exchanged between the western farmers and the people who would later become known, derisively, as federal agents.

The Roosevelt administration had forcefully backed the homesteading of the dry West. From the point of view of Capitol Hill, the movement had three great benefits. It would relieve the pressure on the overcrowded cities. At a time when there was real fear that America might soon be unable to feed itself, homesteading dry-farmers would vastly widen the wheat belt, and raise cattle on a tiny fraction of the land required by the old-style ranchers. And the homesteaders would finance the completion of the transcontinental railroad network. Homesteading was the win-win-win solution to a whole raft of problems. Everybody came out of it in pocket. The homesteaders got their land, the corporations got their railroads, the cities lost their slums and America had more food on the table.

But the Wollastons and their neighbors did not see themselves as a convenient solution to a government problem. They had bought into the idea of the West as the last refuge of the pioneering individualist (as the government had encouraged them to do). They were embarked on a great personal adventure. They’d made the break, they were on their own at last. Out on the prairie, a world away from Washington, D.C., they were creating a brand-new society for themselves; a society that was as detached from its parent body, in its own twentieth-century way, as the original Plymouth Colony had been detached from the government of Jacobean England. They were deeply, quietly proud of the independence of mind that had led them to their homesteads in the first place, and would have been appalled to think of themselves as useful cogs in a government-sponsored social-engineering project.

One of the books on Ned Wollaston’s shelves was an early (1903) edition of Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World. I have his copy here beside me as I write. Its maroon cloth binding is scuffed and worn with many rereadings, and the folding map at the back of the book, showing Slocum’s westward route, is beginning to come to pieces. It might seem an odd book to find in a homestead more than a thousand miles from the nearest patch of salt water. But Ned, with his wanderlust and his compass-rose tattoo, clearly found in Slocum’s voyage a satisfying mirror of his own adventure on the prairie.

For Joshua Slocum, the failed sea captain, unemployed and unemployable at age fifty-one, doggedly building his boat in the field at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, watched by a skeptical audience of townsfolk, might be a homesteader himself. “Great was the amazement. ‘Will it pay?’ was the question which for a year or more I answered by declaring that I would make it pay.”

Slocum made it pay. On his own, in his tubby, homebuilt craft, he plowed three oceans and made his way back to Fairhaven in triumph. By the time he reached Australia, halfway round the world, the beached middle-aged captain was having poems written in his honor and newspaper editorials extolling him as a modern hero. His voyage was an epic demonstration of Emersonian self-reliance put into practice. The world had mocked. He’d gone it alone and made the world eat its words.

For a man building a shiplike house in a field in eastern Montana, Slocum was an inspiring doppelganger. You could cheer yourself up in the evenings, reading a few pages of Sailing Alone by lantern light, fancying the broken prairie outside as your private ocean, and fancying yourself as the intrepid solo navigator of the plains.

Yet to the lawmakers in Washington, it was Ned Wollaston’s self-reliance that turned him into a social problem for which a cure needed to be found. In February 1909, President Roosevelt’s Commission on Country Life had delivered its report to the Senate, and its findings were somber. Rural society in the United States was in a bad way, and much of the fault lay in the inherent character of the American farmer:

Even when permanently settled, the farmer does not easily combine with others for financial or social betterment. The training of generations has made him a strong individualist, and he has been obliged to rely mainly on himself. Self-reliance being the essence of his nature, he does not at once feel the need of cooperation for business purposes or of close association for social objects.

So, the report continued:

The time has come when we must give as much attention to the constructive development of the open country as we have given to other affairs. This is necessary, not only in the interest of the open country itself but for the safety and progress of the nation …

The Country Life Commission report is a classic text of Progressivism. It was government’s responsibility to socialize and educate the farmer, to bring him into line with his well-drilled, well-ordered fellow citizens in the suburbs. Rural state and federal agencies needed to be strengthened in order to subdue the crew of tousle-headed individualists working on the land. Inspectors were to be appointed, to see that official standards were being met in “herds, barns, crops, orchards and farms.” Extension lecturers would go out into the wilds to preach the Progressive gospel. The country church required reorganization, to counter the dangerous tide of both rural irreligion and the growth of narrow and divisive sects and cults. Everywhere, the commission found “evidence of an uncorrelated and unadjusted society”—or too many antisocial, go-it-alone Joshua Slocum types, and not nearly enough obedient and forward-thinking Babbitts. Yet the report was able to strike a blandly upbeat note in its conclusions:

Both state and national government … might exert a powerful influence toward the complete organization of rural affairs.

The assertion that the finger of government should be firmly planted in every pie ran hard against the grain of American cultural tradition — as it ran against the grain of the Roosevelt government’s own propaganda when it settled the novice farmers on the western lands.

This contradiction made itself painfully felt in the Whitney Creek schoolhouse, when, a couple of years after the report was published, the first of the know-all extension lecturers showed up. Percy Wollaston went with his parents, and would remember the occasion, in bitter detail, for the rest of his life:

A young county extension agent came from Miles City, which was the county seat. This young man must have been just out of school and perhaps the first of his kind, for he surely knew nothing of the problems confronting his audience. His main theme was the need for shelterbelts of trees and he could see no reason why people hadn’t planted them. Each home should be surrounded by a large grove of trees. The grown-ups maintained a stolid silence but some of us younger fry were rude enough to snicker. He rather icily explained that those who had never lived anywhere else of course couldn’t appreciate the value of trees. We never saw him again, as he probably gave us up as a lost cause …

Every one of the families represented at that first meeting with the county agent had transplanted trees, carefully nurtured them, and carried buckets of water to them, only to see them rejected by a soil which simply refused to raise trees or scorched by a sun that baked the earth. This in spite of the fact that it had been a “wet” summer.

Of course the extension agent had a point. Years in the future (after the introduction to the plains of the Russian olive, under F.D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration), every home on the prairie would have a shelterbelt of trees; so the cocksure agent was really two decades ahead of his time. What is interesting about Percy’s account is its angered tone, its prefiguring of that familiar rhetoric of complaint about snotty-nosed college kids from the East, driving around in shiny, new, tax-dollar, government automobiles, issuing impertinent injunctions and trying to teach their grandmothers how to suck eggs.

The homesteaders saw themselves as free and independent spirits. The land was theirs, by right of their own hard labor on it. The county extension agent represented the forces of bureaucratic conformity. And the homesteaders loathed him.

The Wollastons were bent on self-sufficiency, on making the homestead pay. Many, if not most, of their neighbors were subsidizing their farms by taking outside jobs. They taught school, or left their claims in the care of their wives while they worked on the railroad or hauled logs back in Minnesota. The Wollastons, with their experience of running a country store and farming in South Dakota, were among the best-equipped of all the homesteaders to turn a clear profit on their half-section of land. Unlike the dozens of gimcrack craft that now dotted the nearby prairie, the Wollaston ship was unusually well found.

Diversification was the key to making it pay. Grain and beef cattle would produce the long-term income, but the daily cash flow had to come out of the kitchen garden, the henhouse, the milch cows. (One of the big projects undertaken at the research farm of James J. Hill, the railroad magnate and homestead promoter, was the development of a new breed of “general-purpose cow,” good for milk during her lifetime and for meat after her execution. But this happy animal never really got off Hill’s drawing board.)

So Dora Wollaston sold eggs and vegetables to Clark’s store in Mildred. She spent hours every week making butter: patiently beating the churned cream with a paddle until the pale globules of milk fat and curd at last combined into a single primrose-colored slab. Dora’s butter had a fine reputation in the neighborhood: the store sold it under the Wollaston name, and Dora authenticated each 1-pound package with her signature.

Closely following the instructions in Holmes’s Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, Ned built eight hives, which he set out in the slight declivity in the low buffs to the south, across the swale from the farmhouse. The site was as near as he could find, in this treeless country, to the “speckled glade” recommended by Holmes in his book. It was at least sheltered from the worst of the north and west winds. The bees came by mail order from Sears, Roebuck.

As the bees multiplied in the hives through the spring, Ned thought of them, fondly, as his eager labor force, foraging through the surrounding country on his behalf, supping on the yuccas and the butte candles, working the new fields of nectar-rich alfalfa. He enjoyed visiting the hives most evenings, an hour or so before sunset. He would drape a swath of butter muslin over the top of his Stetson, and Dora would tack it down round his jacket at chest height. Veiled and gloved, he once frightened the superstitious Johnnie Conlon half out of his wits. For days Conlon refused to be persuaded that he hadn’t seen a banshee in the hills.

It gave Ned deep pleasure to watch the mail-shocked Sears, Roebuck immigrants settle and grow into eight big and prosperous bee communities. They were tough little survivors, bred from European stock, now on the loose in America (which has no native honeybees). They flew low through the sagebrush, dodging the marauding kingbirds. They fought off a dark swarm of foreign robber bees. They turned out in force to repel wax moths, ants, yellow jackets. A mouse found its way into one of the hives. A squad of sacrificial bees stung it to death, then died themselves; the rest of the hive embalmed the large beast in wax.

Ned gently lifted the hive lid, exposing the building combs of honey in their frames. Deeper down, in the brood chamber, lay the stuporous queen in her bed of banana-shaped eggs. Every day a new generation of bee laborers joined the swarm and quickened the pace of the construction work on the combs. In late fall the hives were harvested, yielding nearly seventy pounds of honey apiece. The Wollaston honey was on sale direct from the homestead, and jars of it stood on the shelves at Clark’s, Harper’s, Bonesho’s and Mildred Mercantile, and at stores in Ismay and Terry, at 12¢ a pound.

From the bluff by the hives, Ned, in his banshee-beekeeping gear, could look down over the homestead. The elongated shadows of the buildings, reaching almost to the gumbo road, gave a satisfying heft and substance to the place, as if it had been darkening the land like this for a century. The lantern was lit in the downstairs room, where Percy was seated at the table, making inkblots in lieu of homework. Dora was out in the yard, feeding her plants with the slops left over from doing the dishes.

It was a view to linger over. The family was under way. The weather seemed set fair. Things were generally on course — and Ned was in a flippantly good mood when he descended from the place that it amused him to think of as the crow’s nest.

PERCY’S HOMEWORK. From The Learn To Study Readers:

Book 2, Grade 3.

TEST

Who were in this country when the white men first came?

In what three ways were the Indians different from the white men?

What did the white people think of the Indians?

What was one of the strangest things which the Indians did?

What strange things did the Indians believe about spirits?

What did the Indians think made them sick?

What did the Indians try to do to the evil spirits?

Whom did the Indians have for doctors?

What strange things did the Indians do to drive the evil spirits away?