Bad Land: An American Romance

6. Heavy Weather

NED WAS ASHAMED OF HIS FIRST HARVEST. After the grand harvest of his imagination, the reality was disappointingly threadbare, though if Russian thistles had had a price per bushel, Ned would have been a rich man. Percy, eight years old, would remember the crestfallen expressions on Ned and Dora’s faces:

In the Fall, Dad took the entire crop to market in one load. Not a very large load at that, and I sensed the frustration and worry as he and Mother looked at the small result of all their work.

But in that first year Ned had plowed and seeded only a fraction of his acreage. Nor was anyone in the neighborhood yet getting anything like the forty- and fifty-bushel-an-acre hauls that Campbell had shown to be possible. People traded figures over the fences and at the schoolhouse. Twelve bushels. Fifteen bushels. And these were high-end numbers. The honyockers were still novices at working the Campbell system, and they didn’t have the right machinery to follow Campbell’s instructions as closely as was evidently needed.

The 1911 harvest made the Wollastons falter in their stride, but only for a moment. The rain kept coming and the price of wheat began to climb. In 1911, you could get 87¢ a bushel at the Mildred elevator; by 1916, that had gone up to $1.61. When war broke out in Europe in 1914, the Germans closed the Dardanelles corridor and cut off the supply of Russian grain to Europe; so Kaiser Bill gave a tremendous fillip to the wheat farmers of the United States. Cattle prices, too, were on the up and up. In 1911, beef cattle were selling for $20.54 a head; in 1913, for $26.36; in 1915, for $33.38. Dairy cows went for twice that much. Anyone with a farm in the early teens of the century was in the right job at the right time.

As the first of the homesteaders began to “prove-up” their claims after their five years of statutory residence, the ground under their feet could be paced out in dollars and cents. At a fairly notional price of $15 an acre, an eastern Montana homestead was worth $4,800—and that was, surely, just the beginning. Land in the eastern half of North Dakota was going for close to $50 an acre; in Iowa, it was around $150. Staying on the homestead was like sitting on a fistful of stock that was bound to rocket when the good news broke. Depending on one’s mood, and on whether the rain clouds were grazing the tops of the buttes, almost any price could be put on it. Fifteen thousand dollars? Twenty? Thirty? Even the most niggardly estimate sounded like amazing, barely imaginable wealth.

It was the season of the smiling bank manager. The Wollastons had an account at the new Mildred Bank, run by a shock-haired young Missourian named Hayden Bright, who raced around the countryside in an open Ford tourer, accompanied by his jackrabbit-chasing brindled English bulldog, and pressed loans on his clients. All the homesteaders were undercapitalized, and it was the banker’s pleasant duty to lend them the means to buy the stock, the seed, the machinery needed to bring them into certain profit. Percy remembered Hayden Bright warmly, for his friendliness, his memory for children’s names, his bullet-speed driving, and his crazy dog. Once, during a small agricultural crisis, Hayden — as even young Percy knew him — passed a new checkbook across his desk, saying, “Take this and don’t come back until you’ve got some hogs. And when you write out the check, don’t act timid. Write ’er out as though you had all the money in the world.”

The bank lending rate was 5½ percent. $55 per annum on $1,000. Or, say, an acre and a half of next year’s wheat, set against a brand-new gas-engined tractor, which could double, or triple, one’s workable acreage. It was cheap money, and it was logical, inevitable, unturndownable money. There was almost no loan so large that it would not pay for itself handsomely within a farming year. Hayden Bright and the other local bank managers saw themselves as cashing in on the homesteaders’ success, and in their turn they too borrowed up to the hilt, to get as big a share of this surefire farm business as they possibly could. The homesteader had his milch cow; the banker had a milch cow in the shape of the homesteader; and so the line of credit stretched back eastward, to investors in Boston and New York who’d read the brochures, and wanted a slice of the brilliant future of the West.

Every Saturday at noon, the Dakota Farmer arrived in the mail. Its advertisement pages were a crowded shopwindow on the new world of mechanized, scientific farming. The homesteaders, who had come to eastern Montana as a result of sending away for an illustrated pamphlet, now filled in coupons (“Don’t Delay — Mail Today!”) in the weekly farmers’ papers, where they were addressed by the advertisers as men of substance. More pamphlets came back, supplying further details of: The Grain-Saving Wind Stacker; The Schmeiser Leveler (Will Work Wonders On Your Farm); The Russell Grain Thresher; The Improved Junior Revolving Rod Weeder; The Biggest Link in the Chain of Greater Crop Production — The Peoria Drill!; The Alpha Power Sprayer; The Dunham Culti-Packer — The Busiest Implement on the Farm; The Aeromotor Self-Oiling Windmill; The Fairbanks, Morse 40-light “F” Plant (One Cost for Light and Power); The Great Western Swivel Hopper Portable Elevator and Track Loader; The Moline 10-foot Grain Binder; The Acme Foot-Lift Weeder; The Holt Side-Hill Combined Harvester (It cuts, threshes and recleans your standing grain and delivers to sack or wagon at the rate of 30 to 60 acres a day); The Martin Ditcher, Grader and Terracer (The good old days of a pick and shovel have become memories); The Papec Cutter (Throws as it Blows — Fills the Highest Silo!); The American Midget Marvel Mili — The One-Man Roller Flour Mill (The surest and most profitable business in the United States and second in dignity only to banking. You can get into this money-making business with as little as $3000); The Perfection Milker (Put your finger in the teat cup of the Perfection Milker. Notice how it applies a gently, steady suction; second, squeezes downward; and third, releases your finger from the suction. This is the same way of milking as that used by the calf. It is nature’s way. No wonder the cow likes it.); The Colfax Loader (Could you load 75 sacks of wheat in 12 minutes?); The Wade Pulverizer; The Litchfield Low-Down Spreader; and The Moline Malleable Frog.

Possession of a tractor was, of course, the key to modern farming, and there were dozens of different makes to choose from. Like the rest of the machinery, the tractors were seductively illustrated in line drawings, rather than photographs, in which the artists were able skilfully to exaggerate features like chain drives, belts, spokes, fuel lines, ribbed cylinders, tire treads. The pictures try to make the new technology, in all its tooled intricacy, as physically desirable as the fruits and flowers in a Fantin-Latour still life. They deal in the poetry of the grille and sprocket.

The cheapest tractor on offer was the Avery 5-10 H.P. (Do In Hours With A Tractor Work That Takes Days With A Horse), at $550. Beyond that lay a glittering variety of more powerful and sophisticated models. The Holt Caterpillar. The Cleveland. The Advance-Rumely OilPull. The Monarch Neverslip. The Bates Steel Mule. The Aultman-Taylor 15–30 Kerosene Tractor, the Profit-Power Wizard. The Nilson, The Tractor With The Famous Lever Hitch. The Waterloo Boy Original Kerosene Tractor. The Lauson Full Jewel. The Cletrac Tank-Type Tractor. The GMC Samson Sieve-Grip Tractor (If you knew all the things that the men who designed the Samson Sieve-Grip Tractor found out about what a Tractor has to go up against in this Western country, you’d never think twice about your choice. It would be a Samson Sieve-Grip every time!). The Samson Sieve-Grip cost $1,575.

For the modern farmhouse, there was mechanized music. The Aeolian Player Piano. The Columbia Grafonola, with 8 double-face records, and 300 needles ($96.80). The New Edison Amberola, Mr. Edison’s great new phonograph with the new Diamond stylus reproducer and your choice of all brand new Diamond Amberol Records … Only $1.00 down! And there were laborsaving domestic machines, like the Maytag Multi-Motor Washer (The Foot on the Pedal Starts the Multi-Motor at its Task).

At Baker, Terry and Miles City there were fairs at which the new machinery was exhibited, with threshing demonstrations and tractor pulls, where one might sit in the driver’s seat of a gleaming red-enameled marvel (“strong and rugged as a locomotive, but having the mechanical perfection of a high-grade watch”), and daydream it on to one’s own half-section. These promotional jamborees (“A Half Million Dollar Educational Event! Power Farming Made Plain! One of the greatest and most comprehensive exhibitions and demonstrations of power farming machinery ever held west of the Mississippi”) drew big crowds from the prairie, and the crowds drew horseback evangelists and patent-medicine salesmen, each speaking in their own dialect of the language of American advertising.

It’s now hard to gauge the impact of that language on the isolated homesteads. Although the blank canvas of eastern Montana was rapidly filling with details, there was still a great deal more empty space in the picture than there was anywhere else in the United States, let alone in Europe. The bald ground cried out for more objects, more architecture, a more human shape and scale, and the farming papers supplied their readers with a weekly cascade of images with which one might imaginatively flesh out the unpainted areas of the canvas. Advertising taught one how to see the immediate landscape as it soon would be, under the transforming influence of “power farming.”

Looked at now, the backgrounds of the drawings are at least as interesting as the alluring machines in their foregrounds. We’re on the prairie, with all the prairie’s distance and emptiness. The next farmhouse is miles away. But on this idealized prairie, the hard edges — the outcrops, the eroded banks of coulees and ravines, the mushroom rock formations — have been softened into low, bosomy hills, like the rolling countryside of Hertfordshire. The rough pasture is gone — plowed under, into an orderly checkerboard of fields, half fallow, half cross-hatched with ripe wheat. The farmhouse and its barns are shaded by a mature shelterbelt of poplars, oaks and chestnut trees. The road that leads the reader into the picture is not dead straight, like almost every real road in the West, but sweetly curved, like an English country lane.

And out in front sits the tractor, its engine casing unstrapped to expose its handsome cast-steel innards. There, says the advertisement, is your true landscape architect: buy the tractor, and the rest of the picture will fall into place behind it.

It was good to sit out in the dusty yard on a Sunday afternoon, leafing through the Dakota Farmer. The copywriters chatted intimately with the reader. They knew his problems. They wrote about getting adequate traction on hilly ground, about the difficulty of breaking sagebrush land. They assured the reader of the millions of dollars of seed money that had gone into developing their product, the years of design and experiment by scientists and engineers, the superb craftsmanship at the factory. They promised him the earth.

OIL AND SWEAT DO NOT MIX

“A drop of sweat to grow a grain of wheat!”—that was true when perspiring men and lathered horses toiled in sun-beaten fields.

But modern machinery has helped to lift the burden of horse and man drudgery. Today a drop of oil raises a hundred stalks of wheat!

But make the change from horses to a tractor in one step — not in two! You will soon be dissatisfied with the limitations of a cheap machine. Is it any better to sweat over a tractor than behind a horse?

The “Ball Tread” has in seven years developed from an experiment to a triumph! Discriminating farmers now buy the YUBA because it relieves them from the worry of field breakdowns — because it makes them independent of soil or weather conditions — because, though not inexpensive, it is a lasting investment.

The YUBA is as free from wear and trouble as human ingenuity can today devise.

Cross the stream from horses to tractors in one stride — not in two! Get the best machine.

Let oil raise your crops — oil and distillate!

As one read along, the voice of the advertisement seemed to blend with the voice of the bank manager. When you write out the check, don’t act timid.

In the pamphlets put out by the Milwaukee Road between 1908 and 1912, the presiding image was of a man in boots and shirtsleeves guiding a lightweight plow pulled by one horse, sometimes two. The great promise of the homestead scheme was that you could farm here without capital. The equity was in the ground itself (those fat gold coins, stamped, as I see now for the first time, under a magnifying glass, with the figure of Liberty holding her torch) and in the plowman’s own hard work.

That is part of the essential mythology of the place, and it has bred a ritual line that condenses the mythology into a set piece of a dozen words. “When Dad came out here, he had $25, a wagon, and a mule.”

The line has to be led up to by around thirty minutes’ worth of equally ritualized stage business. It goes like this. You are visiting a ranch owned by the descendants of homesteaders. After coffee, you and your host boot up in the porch (your boots will take a lot longer to get on than his do), and stroll past the barns, the plant and machinery, the aircraft in its hangar. You pass the pen where a granddaughter is bottle-feeding a dogie. (A dogie, as in “git along little dogies,” which I always used to confuse with doggies, is a motherless calf.) You climb aboard a dust-caked Ford pickup, and your host drives you four or five miles across the ranch to a convenient butte, where you step ashore, and gaze out over your host’s spread of twenty-five or thirty sections — the irrigated squares of green wheat and alfalfa within reach of the creek; cattle, like ants, on distant pastureland; an eagle afloat on a thermal of air; the enormous prairie patchwork of grass and sage and rock, and rock and sage and grass. Host leans back against the hood of the pickup, pecks at the brim of his old Stetson with forefinger and thumb, squints at the sky, and says, slowly, ruminatively, as if the thought were taking him by surprise, “When Dad came out here …”

You could sing it in chorus with him. The only permissible variant is the substitution of Granddad for Dad; the $25, the wagon and the mule are immutable. Guests could save their hosts a fair bit of time and a gallon or so of gasoline by saying boldly, on entering the ranch house, “I suppose your father came out here with $25, a wagon and a mule?”

It is a nice line, and true in all the ways that matter. Families like the Wollastons, who came to the prairie in an emigrant car packed end-to-end with cattle, farm implements and furniture, could fairly claim it for themselves. The contents of the car, unpacked in the middle of a 320-acre claim, amounted to no more than $25, a wagon and a mule. The settlers came out here with, figuratively, nothing except their willingness to work the unproven soil of their homesteads. It is astonishing to see how much they managed to acquire, on what seemed like easy terms, in such a very short space of time.

Two pictures. The first is a postcard reproduction of the bespectacled plowman harrowing gold from the soil south of Terry. The second is a sepia panorama, 14 inches by 5 inches, which hangs on my study wall. It is a photograph of harvesting on the prairie, taken by Evelyn Cameron in 1915 (I think), and given by her, with a pile of other prints, to her friends the Wollastons. Along the middle of the picture, between the stubble and the sky, stretches a dark horizontal band of people, horses, wagons and machines.

We’re looking at a community event. Six or seven families have clubbed together to cut, bind and thresh the wheat, and haul it off to the grain elevator. At least twenty-five men, women and children are standing atop wagons, tractors and the threshing rig, posed against the sky in attitudes of self-conscious relaxation. They’re too far away for their faces to be identifiable; the real subject of the photograph is not the people, but their technology.

The blinkered horses, waiting on standby in their traces, are still useful for the simple jobs, like lugging the grain to market. But the fancy work is done by the machines. Gasoline tractors tow the binders. A steam traction engine powers the thresher. There’s something that looks like a Papec Cutter, throwing as it blows. There is someone’s Model T.

It might be titled Credit, this haunting picture of low interest and great expectations. Searching the photograph for details, one’s eye drifts to the wheat stubble in the foreground. It is sparse — surely too sparse to support the hundreds of tons of machines that lie above it?

The settlers were, in general, thrifty to a fault. Hardy Campbell’s waste-not-want-not homilies on soil conservation chimed with their own innate sense of what should be. They dressed year-round in blue-jean bib overalls and hard-wearing gingham. They were expert at eking-out, making-last and making-do. They made their own furniture. Lunch might be a scrape of ketchup on a slice of dry bread. The editorial pages of the farmers’ weeklies were full of hints and tips on household economy:

TO PROLONG LIFE OF TOWELS

To make kitchen towels last longer when they begin to wear thin, place two together and stitch all around the edge, then lengthwise down the middle of the towel and once each side of the middle halfway to the edge of the towel.

Carving the Sunday joint was a show-off display of forward-thinking conservation. After the ceremonious honing of the knife, Ned Wollaston would divide the pork roast into shavings as fine as photographic transparencies, with daylight showing through the lean meat, the roast seeming to grow bigger and bigger with each slice. Their schoolbooks drilled the settlers’ children to be frugal: “Save your clothes. Mark your things. Save your paper.”

When it came to farm machinery, the same people spent like kings. The banks egged them on. The advertising copywriters told the prospective customer that he was not really buying the new tractor but saving by its purchase. It was an investment, that cherished adman’s word. Its percentage yield would be incalculably higher than the 5½ percent needed to service the loan. The extension lecturers drove from schoolhouse to schoolhouse, counseling the homesteaders to mechanize and prosper. Government, industry and finance worked in consort to persuade people that ownership of a Bates Steel Mule or a Lauson Full Jewel was itself a symbol of their thriftiness, and perfectly in keeping with the patched sleeve and the turned shirt collar.

That lesson stuck. Eighty years later, I grew used to being startled by the farmers’ way of signaling their own brand of conspicuous consumption. Just past the shelterbelt, over the cattle grid, as the driveway took a sharp bend and the ranch house swung into view, there stood the latest giant toy, in its livery of John Deere green. Its function was lost on me. It probably spun alfalfa into titanium. High aloft over the guts of the thing, the cab was an air-conditioned module, wired for stereo, like a penthouse apartment with a six-county view.

This beast was not parked but posed — on an artful diagonal, so that one would see the ranch house and the machine in a deliberate composition. It was a real-life ad from the pages of the Dakota Farmer, and it was cleverly designed to show at a glance both the wealth of the household and the admirable, weathered frugality of the house itself. Coastal Indians, rich on the sale of sea-otter pelts, raised vast, painted, labor-intensive and magnificently useless totem poles to exactly the same effect.

A complicated symbiosis was going on between the extravagant machines (how many days’ use a year can anyone get from a luxury combine harvester built like a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud?) and the houses whose driveways they adorned. I had never seen American interiors so handsomely threadbare, so apparently indifferent to the fads and gadgets of the late twentieth century. They were furnished with grandparental hand-me-downs: the old rug, old stove, old lamp, old chest, old sofa. In the houses that belonged to people descended from ranchers, these things went way back, to the 1880s and 1890s. A glass-fronted cabinet held hand-painted china ornaments, plaster fruit, a fluted gilt workbasket, a cup and saucer souvenir from the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St. Louis in 1904. On the living room wall, a newish decorative quilt, with birds of paradise and sequins hung side by side with a sampler, embroidered by a turn-of-the-century child (“Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst — John 4, 14”). At one end of the wall was mounted the original hand-cranked telephone; at the other, the CB rig now used for long-distance talk across the 30-section ranch. Grandfather’s first car stood out in the barn under a tarp.

These people weren’t antique bibbers, self-consciously reverencing the past. They simply disliked throwing things away and lived convivially with the past because it was still serviceable. You could sit in the past without its stuffing coming out, and walk on it comfortably (having first pulled off your boots with the bootjack at the front door). I loved the ranch houses for the unassuming way in which they remembered each family’s life on the prairie.

There was a conundrum here. Had so much been spent on the splendiferous green engine outside the house that there was nothing left to spend on modernizing the interior? Or was it, as I preferred to think, that ownership of the green engine exempted the family from further participation in the status-symbol racket, and left them mercifully free to live in the homespun style that best suited them?

On the oak chest, along with the Billings Gazette, the Wall Street Journal and Feedstuffs, was a color brochure:

When it comes to harvesting your crop, a Maximiser Combine is all heart (and muscle).

Looking for more capacity? Cleaner grain? Easier harvesting? Better overall productivity? Put a Maximiser Combine to the test.

Starting with the feeder house. It is wide and long for a smooth crop flow and better operator visibility. The cylinder is large and moves at slow speeds for gentle, thorough threshing. The concave wraps more threshing area around the cylinder.

Look over the cleaning system. We call it the Quadra-Flow^™ system for the new precleaner, high-velocity fans, modular chaffer, and sieve. You’ll call it “fantastic” for the way it cleans up your grain sample. Even the walkers are different. They’re longer and more aggressive …

It was like reading a poem in an almost-familiar language like Danish or Dutch. I kept on having the illusion that I was getting it, then was faced by the certainty that I wasn’t. Later, I called my local John Deere dealer, and asked him to put a price on (I said glibly) the 9600 Maximiser with Hillside conversion.

“Two hundred and forty three thousand dollars?” he said, his voice rushing fast through the numbers, and finishing on a high-note query.

Extending credit to the farmers was a way of bringing them within the ambit of society at large. Since Jefferson, it had been de rigueur (at least on the stump in the agricultural heartland) to speak glowingly of the small, independent farmer as the quintessential democratic American. Boosting the homestead scheme, James J. Hill wrote (in 1912):

Land without population is a wilderness, and population without land is a mob … The first act in the progress of any civilization is to provide homes for those who desire to sit under their own vine and fig tree.

A prosperous agricultural interest is to a nation what a good digestion is to a man. The farm is the basis of all industry … We must preserve jealously the right and possibility of free access to the soil, out of which grow not only all those things that make happy the heart of man and comfort his body, but those virtues by which only a nation can endure, and those influences that strengthen the soul. This is the safe-guard not only of national wealth but of national character … The man on the farm must be considered first in all our policies because he is the keystone of our national arch.

But this kind of feel-good speechifying was sharply at odds with the melancholy findings of Roosevelt’s Commission on Country Life, in which the American farmer was depicted as a backward-thinking loner. The fear was that the plains were filling up with self-reliant misanthropes, undereducated, irreligious, lacking in all the developed social impulses that are required for a functioning democracy.

People came up with all sorts of solutions to the problem, some of them bizarre. The land swarmed with traveling preachers and extension lecturers. In The Country-Life Movement (1911), L. H. Bailey wrote with lyrical naïveté of the need to instill among farmers a proper sense of community and belonging. He advocated healthy country sports and pageants, madrigals in the schoolhouse, improvised folk rites (“Why not have a festival or a generous spectacle of Indian corn, and then fill the whole occasion full of the feeling of the corn? As pure entertainment, this would be worth any number of customary theatricals …”), and (his ace in the hole) Oberammergau-style passion plays.

But the most binding tie, attaching the solitary homestead to a wider society, was the line of credit. Self-sufficiency is politically dangerous. Good citizens need to meet monthly payments. In 1916, Congress passed the Federal Farm Loan Act, which established a string of farmland banks offering forty-year loans at 6 percent. This was powerful government encouragement to farmers to get into as much debt as they could manage to service. The three thousand dollar loan, at $22.00 a month, bought Woodrow Wilson the farm vote and secured his reelection to the Presidency in November 1916.

His new indebtedness gave the homesteader a serious stake in the national economy. His note at the bank kept assembly-line workers in jobs in Akron, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit. His spending was watched from month to month, and factored into the zigzag profile of what would come to be known as “consumer confidence.” He in his turn now had reason to keep an anxious eye on the economic “indicators,” the upturns and downturns, the half-point rise by the Fed (which was legislated into existence in 1913). Sears, Roebuck, where the homesteaders shopped by mail for everything from bees to perfume, had an Agricultural Foundation, which sent out to rural customers free crash courses in farm economics.

It’s hard to remain a free spirit when the reminder notices pile up on the mat. The brown manila envelope with a window in it is one of society’s great subjugating forces. People had arrived on the prairie with the lightness of being that goes with owning, and owing, very little. Within a few seasons of working their free land, almost every family was in debt to the tune of several thousand dollars — not because their enterprise had failed, but because it seemed to be succeeding. They were — in the American word that perfectly expresses the real consequence of debt, and the feelings of the debtor—leveraged. The government and the banking system now had a solid purchase on the homesteaders, a lever to pull to bring them into line.

Debt may have helped to mold the homesteaders into more responsible and responsive citizens. It certainly made them watch the Montana sky with increasing apprehension.

The neighbors bought tractors. Then they had to buy new plows to fit the tractors. Once you started to mechanize, you were in for the long haul, coupling expensive gizmo to expensive gizmo, until the chain of farm machinery stretched far over the foreseeable horizon.

Ned Wollaston was good with horses. He’d always been a rider. He was justifiably vain of the skills he’d picked up working as a cowhand in his twenties on the North Dakota ranch. None of the neighbors could touch him when it came to roping a runaway calf on open rangeland: galloping over the sagebrush, hat flying, rope spinning overhead, Ned, at forty-two, could be mistaken for a man half his age.

In the quiet of the early morning, riding his fence lines to check for breaks, he’d smell the stink of its exhaust, then see the snorting Boanerges rearing up over a knoll beyond the fence, with a deafened, oily-faced neighbor at the wheel. Tractors terrified the horses, and Ned was generally on the horses’ side in the debate. When his cows aborted, he blamed the tractors, though not with any great conviction: he was simply marshaling in his mind all the available excuses for not submitting to the inevitable and buying into the new technology and its sons of thunder.

Yet in the expansive mood of 1913 and 1914, Ned Wollaston, like everyone else, visited with Hayden Bright and came away with forms in triplicate, to be read over carefully and signed with an anxious flourish.

Immediately to the east of the homestead, across the gumbo road, lay an unsold section of railroad land. Both the Wollastons and the Dockens had used it for pasture, but lately strangers had been turning up with a view to farming it. It is the roughest tract of country in the whole of Township 9—deeply fissured with dry creek beds, lumpy, cratered, with more shale outcrops than grass. It looked to me like prime rattlesnake habitat. But in the boom years, with the government homesteads all claimed and in working order, and most of the railroad land now sold or rented, even a wretched snake pit like Section I could look like someone’s last chance to cash in on the bonanza. Ned knew (and so did the Milwaukee Road people) that it was unfarmable, but that wouldn’t stop some dizzy-headed barber or store clerk from Back East from trying.

He took out a ten-year lease on the section, and tripled his acreage. With this extra square mile of grazing land, he had the beginnings of a small cattle ranch, and his earnings from beef should cushion him against possible losses on the much more fluky, high-risk, high-yield wheat harvest. With a loan from Hayden Bright, he bought forty Hereford calves and quartered them on the new section. Following his father’s pronunciation, Ned talked of the breed as Herrerfuds; his neighbors called them Hurf’ds.

The next year, after another trip to the bank, the Wollastons drove into the machine age in their own Model T. Leafing through the Dakota Farmer, Ned now found himself pausing thoughtfully over ads with headlines saying “Make a Tractor of Your Car” and “We Harness Your Car For Farm Work.” With clever patented accessories, a Model T could be persuaded to cut wood, milk a cow, generate electricity, pump water, run a flour mill, pull a plow. Ned filled in the coupons, but neglected to put them in the mail.

In 1913, Evelyn Cameron at last bought a Victrola gramophone for $75.00, along with 16 Red Seal records ($51.00) and 31 Black Seal records ($28.75). Ewen, now fifty-nine, looked older. His clothes were too big for him. His shirt collars sagged widely round his turkey-wattle neck. His eyes appeared to be enlarging as they receded into sockets as dark as emery paper. His voice tended to crack into a thin treble in mid-sentence. He was always tired. But the new machine momentarily enlivened things at the ranch. On January 4, 1914, Evelyn wrote in her diary: “Victrola concert went wonderfully.” The hit of the evening was a Red Seal record of Maud Powell singing the “Ave Maria” cavatina.

The homesteaders had come to the prairie during a long spell of fair and settled weather, with mild winters followed by cool wet springs. In 1911, ’12, ’13, the weather came close to living up to its glowing description by the Milwaukee Road’s in-house pamphleteer:

The climate of Montana is excellent and is usually a great surprise to visitors, who sometimes expect Canadian weather. The clear, dry air is extremely invigorating and, combined with the large percentage of bright days, makes the climate one of the most healthful and pleasant in the world. There are few days during the entire year in which outdoor work cannot be done in comfort. No one need fear the winters of Montana. The summer days are long and, although at midday the sun is quite hot, sunstrokes are unknown. The nights are always cool and pleasant.

It was clear that the arrival of the railroad, the plow, and the market towns had worked wonders on the climate, bringing not only much more rain but warmer winters. Religious people quoted Exodus 3: God was doing for Montana what He had lately done for Canaan, and turning a famous desert into a land of milk and honey. At the Dry Farming Congress, James J. Hill and his son Louis vigorously lobbied to have the word “Dry” removed from the title, since the climate of the northern plains was dry no longer.

People built their houses for the new improved Montana weather, and borrowed money against it. They had enough time to get comfortable, spread themselves over the land, start meeting their payments, and generally feel that their adventure was turning into an assured success. Then the weather broke. It had not been cured, as the optimists claimed. It had only been in remission.

The winter cold gave the settlers their first taste of the pitiless and extreme character of the climate. When stable, high-pressure Arctic air settled in over the prairie, it brought blue-sky days without a cloud to insulate the earth at night. There was almost no precipitation. A meager dusting of snow mottled the fields. Hoarfrost turned the cottonwoods along the frozen creeks into brilliant fringes of white lace. With no shelterbelts of trees to divert it, the north wind raked the homesteads; keening and whistling through every crack in their amateur carpentry, prying apart their tar-paper siding, lifting papers on a table, fingering the sleeping child in the crib. The temperature dropped, and went on dropping; past zero Fahrenheit, into the minus tens, twenties, thirties, forties.

The Wollastons, bred to the big-minus-number winters of the northwestern interior, took the bitter weather in their stride. Their neighbors from the eastern states, from Britain, Sweden, Norway, Germany, had never known that cold could be so cold. They had expected snow, ice, the pitcher frozen in the morning, earth standing hard as iron, water like a stone. But the cold of Montana, when it finally came, had a shocking and insulting quality, like a boot in the face.

Driving back to Seattle during a January cold snap, I stopped for the night in Missoula. With the temperature forecast to go down to minus 35°, a motel room had to be found for the car as well as for me, and it was out of commission for the evening, safely garaged at a nearby Jiffy Lube. I took a cab to a restaurant for dinner, and, buoyed by three glasses of Merlot, thought it would be instructive to walk the nine-tenths of a mile from the Depot back to the Edgewater Red Lion Inn.

It was minus 27°. The moon was full and the sky over the city was thickly spangled with stars. I filled my lungs with warm restaurant air and started walking. The first block was a lark, the second an ordeal. It hurt to breathe. If I parted my lips just a fraction, I bit on a sliver of pure cold, as sharp and palpable as a knife blade. To breathe at all, one had to sniff — gently, slowly, ouch! — and conserve each sniff for as long as possible before the next painful, cautious indraft.

On the third block, two empty police cars were parked on a vacant lot, their engines running. Had they been on any subsequent block, I might well have borrowed one. As it was, I passed them with a glance of frank lust for their heated interiors, lit by the glowing dials on their dashboards. At the next open bar or café, I’d stop and call a cab. But there were no open bars or cafés in sight. I turned left on Broadway, heading east for the hotel. The constellations of Leo, Cancer and Gemini were printed in a diagonal line across the sky, every star sparkling, their message a good deal more distinctly picked out than the very distant neon arrow and the sign reading EDGEWATER RED LION. What the stars said was FOOL!

I had never felt my bones as bones before — the dry clacking of the joints of the skeleton. My kneecaps, thin and brittle as sand dollars, came to my attention first, followed by my wrists, knuckles, shoulder blades and ankles. I rattled as I walked, my trouser legs flapping round bare white shinbones.

For the first few blocks, I was Captain Scott, bravely leading the way across the ice cap. Then I became poor Titus Oates, with his enormous frostbitten foot. “Well,” said Oates, leaving Scott’s tent at 80°08’S, “I am just going outside, and I may be some time.”

Sniff … sniff … sniff. The neon sign was still far out there with the stars. The night was windless, but a polar breeze, raised by my own movements through the air, blew cruelly around my legs. I squinched my eyes shut: they seemed to be getting iced-up like a car windshield.

I couldn’t face thinking of the whole distance of this expedition. I urged myself from street lamp to street lamp. The cold had taken root in my stomach, wherein lay frozen pink filet mignon, frozen green beans and frozen french fries, as in a supermarket display case.

The walking skeleton at last gained the hotel parking lot, enormous, rimed with frost — the final glacier. Keep going, chaps; almost there. I wanted a flag to plant. A side door (Entrance D, as I remember) moved slowly forward to meet me … Locked! It required an agony of tomfoolery with a magnetically coded pass-card to get the damned thing open. In the hot hallway, I had to lean against the wall for a minute, breathing in sobs, before I made the bar, where a jazz trio was in the middle of a number, and the talk didn’t come to an abrupt stop when I made my triumphant entrance.

“I just walked here from the Depot,” I said to the attendant waitress. “On foot.” Still no response. “Christ, it is cold!”

“Getting chilly out, huh?” she said, her voice a long yawn.

Sipping at a Hennessy (the cognac that the St. Bernard dog brings to the stranded alpinist), I realized that my research trip through the streets of Missoula had put me a good deal further out of touch with the homesteaders than I had been when I left the Depot.

It was that cold. Each cold spell would last for up to three weeks at a stretch, with o°F as an average daily high, in the heat of the noon sun. People stuck it out in tar-paper shacks. They tended their animals through it, and did maintenance work around the farm. They dealt with the cold as best they could, and their best was often desperate. Lynn Householder, whose Log Cabin Ranch, a big spread of twenty-six sections, had begun as a half-section, homesteaded by his father in 1911, told me how his people had kept going through one memorable cold spell. “It blew for three days … a real heavy wind. Thirty below, and night and day it never changed. They had newspapers and cardboard glued up on the inside walls of the house, but that cold keeps coming through. In those winter blizzards, you still feel very much alone. You listen to the walls move — and that’s in a modern house. The pot-bellied stove ran out of fuel. They’d fenced the yard that summer; so they went out, took the fence down, brought it into the house, broke it up … and that’s how they survived.”

The original homestead, now a shed, stood within a few feet of the porch in which we sat talking, on a sultry August afternoon.

“With the wind and the cold and the snow, the worst was to keep warm …”

“I suppose that was everyone’s last resort — to burn their fences?”

“They’d put off doing it. They’d burn everything else that was burnable first. It hurt real bad to see the fence go up in smoke.”

Over at the Worsell place, Art and his father huddled around their cheap tin cooking stove, while the shack itself groaned and shivered in the wind — not so much trying to warm themselves, as trying not to freeze to death. It was as close to intimacy as father and son ever came.

Dreadful though the cold could be, it was not the most destructive element in Montana’s repertoire of violent weather. In summer, the air over the northern plains is turbulent: it moves in swirls and gyres, with fierce rip currents and whirlpool-like tornadoes. Here the northwesterly airstream, blowing from Alaska and the Arctic Circle, collides with warm southeasterlies blowing from the Gulf of Mexico and the southern U.S. interior. The exposed, treeless prairie, baking in the sun by day and cooling rapidly during the afternoons, intensifies the aerial commotion.

This is magnificent thunderstorm territory. The only time in my life when I have been seriously scared of lightning was in eastern Montana, on a dirt road miles from anywhere. It was a few minutes after six o’clock, at the end of a hot and cloudless July day. Ahead of the car, a sudden scurry of wind lifted the dust from the surface of the road, making a bank of pink fog, for which I had to brake sharply. To the west, where the sunset should have been, lay a swelling storm cloud the color of a ripe bruise. On the radio, an announcer with an AM station broadcasting out of Miles City was tonelessly reading the day’s grain and stock prices on the Chicago market.

The distant storm cloud winked, and winked again. Like photoflashes going off in the face of some celebrity on the far side of a city square, these blips of white light seemed no business of mine, and I drove on, listening to the farming news, as a premature dusk descended over the prairie. Closer now, the lightning flashes were like the skeletal, inverted leaves of ferns, and when the thunder came, I took it for some gastroenteritic flare-up in the car engine — a blown gasket or a fractured piston.

Then the lightning shafts were stabbing, arbitrarily, at the bare ground, and much too close for comfort. Zap! Wham! Powee! They were slamming into the buttes, a mile or less from the car. Right overhead now, the thunder was coming in avalanches, rock tumbling over rock, and the lightning was simultaneous with the thunder. Dusk had turned to darkness. I switched on the car headlights, saw 6:16 on the digital LCD, and switched them off again. Endowed with the stupid cunning that comes to one in emergencies, I switched off the radio, breaking the circuitry that connected me, the farming news, the telescopic antenna and the lightning. Should I switch off the ignition too? But I kept my foot down, thinking it better to be a moving target than a sitting duck — though I was moving at around 25 m.p.h. and the lightning was moving at … what? the speed of light?

The only piece of advice I could remember — Do Not Attempt To Shelter Under a Tree — seemed merely ominous here, where there wasn’t a tree in sight and, apart from the rock outcrops, my car and I were much the most prominent object in the landscape. A rapid series of brilliant flashes showed the land in ragged silhouette like a torn sheet of black paper. Later I read that a bolt of lightning can discharge into the earth with a voltage of up to 100,000,000 and an amperage of 200,000. You’d fry, in a millisecond of pure incandescence. Not a bad way to go.

A slight but audible interval opened up between the lightning strikes and the rock slides of thunder, and in the lee of the storm came hail, crackling against the windshield and sugaring the road. It lasted just a minute or two. Then the lost sun returned, the prairie was rinsed and green, tendrils of steam rose from the grass, and the dark thundercloud rolled away eastward into North Dakota.

The lightning kept the patent conductor salesmen in business and on the qui vive for romantic opportunities in lonely homesteads, but it was the hail that did the real damage. Sometimes these fierce thunderstorms brought welcome gulleywashers in their wake: the farmers would look up with hope, and keep their fingers crossed, when they saw the bruise forming in the western sky. It was a gamble, with the odds in the farmers’ favor. If the storm brought hail, it could wipe out the crop in a sixty-second blitz.

Hail falls in narrow swaths and streaks, which makes it seem vindictive and personal. It can neatly slice off the corner of a wheat field, or ruin one farmer’s entire crop and leave his neighbor’s standing. It has a habit of visiting itself on the people in the community who can least afford to bear the losses caused by its devastation. It prefers the uninsured field to the insured one.

I heard a lot about hail. Like tumors, hailstones come in standard sizes: the size of a pea, the size of a walnut, the size of a golf ball, a pool ball, a baseball, a grapefruit. There was talk of cars destroyed by hailstones, of light aircraft on the Baker airfield, their fabric torn to rags, of cattle killed on the open range, leaking their bespattered brains into the ground. The talk put a new slant on the phrase “heavy weather”: among the larger hailstones that have fallen in the United States, according to official records, and not bar legends, are the grapefruit-sized ice bombs that hit Potter, Nebraska, and Coffeyville, Kansas. These measured six inches in diameter and weighed a pound and three-quarters apiece.

Hail is a product of turbulence — of the spinning updrafts and downdrafts within a local storm system. A droplet of water is whisked aloft to freezing level, where it turns into a pellet of ice. The downdraft returns it to the soggy regions of the cloud, in which it gains a coating of moisture, before its next ascent. And so it goes. The hailstone bounces up and down like popcorn in a roaster, growing layer upon layer of alternate snow and ice, until its accumulated weight eventually causes it to come crashing down, on the head, perhaps, of an unsuspecting cow. The more powerful the vortex in which it hatches, the bigger the hailstone. If the updraft of air were strong enough to keep them from falling, we might have hailstones the size of basketballs, beach balls, geodesic domes.

The hail that annually wrecked the hopes of many homesteaders was usually of the pea and walnut variety. Falling as it did in the middle of the growing season, in June and July, it crushed the tender wheat, leaving acres of splayed and broken stalks to wither under the sun.

The hail battered the flimsy houses on the prairie, and forced their occupants to go underground to shelter from these afternoon air raids. Wynona Breen, remembering her childhood in the late 1920s and early ’30s, told me about the noise the hail made on the roof and walls of the homestead. “They were terrible sounds. They’d scare you to death … the thumping and banging. You’d swear that all the siding was coming off the house, at least. If there was a cloud in the sky, we just battened everything down, and people went to the root cellar. So we’d lay there, under the dirt roof, in the dark and the damp, with the turnips and potatoes. There were little niffies down there — a lot of little niffies …”

“Niffies?”

“Oh, ‘niffies’ was my mother’s word for them — bugs, rodents, any small creature like that. The root cellar was a great place for niffies.”

When the thumping stopped, the homesteaders would crawl out of their cellars, earth-stained, bugs in their hair, and take stock of the crop damage Hail insurance, almost unknown in the eastern states, became big business here. By the mid-teens of the century, a premium of around $1.00 would insure an acre of wheat for $10.00, an interesting figure. Where Hardy Campbell predicted yields of forty to fifty bushels an acre, the skeptical insurance agents were saying that six to seven bushels would be closer to the mark. Yet even on this rock-bottom assessment, the homesteaders were sometimes able to make more money out of the Lotto of hail insurance than they did from a hail-free harvested crop.

In a 1974 article, “Dry Farming Broke My Dad” (and how that title must have resonated with many of the readers of the Pacific Northwesterner, where the piece was published), Paul T. DeVore described what happened on his family’s half-section near Wibaux, Montana, about forty-five miles northeast of the Wollaston place.

The hail-insurance company adjuster, a much overweight man, arrived a week after the storm and on another blistering hot day. Walking to the top of the knoll not far from the buildings where the hail had hit the hardest, the adjuster tossed his hat down into one of the rows of wheat, and in the space from where he stood and the hat, counted the standing heads as measured against those flattened by the hail.

Dripping wet with sweat, he asked the distance to the field to the southeast and when advised it was half a mile said, “Oh, Hell, I’ll give you 100 per cent on the wheat!”

In fact the hail hadn’t touched the unvisited field, and the insurance money put the DeVores comfortably in funds for a month or two. With it they bought the first family car — a secondhand Model T — for $200.

So it was with the last, unhappy occupants of the abandoned homestead that I prowled through on my first visit here. The columns of scrawled figures show that a premium of $348 was paid for “hail ins.” It was the family’s only good investment. Under “Income,” the hail ins. payout was $1,360.80—the biggest single slice, by far, of the farm’s total earnings of $5,688.90. The papers aren’t dated, but, judging by the letters and postcards in the rubble nearby, they go back to 1961 or 1962.

With the lightning and hail came frequent dust devils and rare, scarifying tornadoes, known locally as “cyclones.” In the summer of 1915 a cyclone ripped through the center of Ismay and turned the town to flying matchwood. When the dog’s-leg funnel of black wind tore the community hall up by the roots, it left the piano intact, with the sheet music still open on the stand. Or so people say. Telephone poles were seen spinning, upright, in the sky. A chicken was seized by the wind, borne aloft, and returned to earth, alive, but stripped clean of every feather. The caboose of a Milwaukee Road train was uncoupled and overturned. Of the houses that still stood, most had their windows sucked out of their frames.

Vagrant cyclones lit on barns, granaries, claim shacks, homesteads, and absconded with them. They attacked at random, and usually devastated some uninhabited patch of prairie. Wynona Breen remembered finding a circle of bare earth on the northwest corner of the Wollaston place.

“There wasn’t a blade of grass left — no sage, nothing. It was a perfect circle, maybe thirty yards in diameter. It looked as if someone had cut it out with a shovel. Nowadays, I suppose people would say it was the work of aliens from outer space in their UFOs. But that was a cyclone, and we never saw or heard anything of it up here, and we’re only a mile away.”

As the buffalo grass dried out and yellowed in the sun, it became a serious fire hazard. A lightning strike, or a spark from a steam traction engine, might set the whole prairie ablaze. Driven at speed by the wind, the fires moved through the grassland like a breaking wave. They were sometimes a mile wide.

A rancher, Merle Clark, described the prairie fires for me. “The flames aren’t too big … often not much higher than your knee, but the smoke blows ahead of the flames, and you’re running into smoke. A fit man can outrun a prairie fire — and I mean run …”

“Ten miles an hour?”

“Something like that. It’ll go through a gully in a single whoosh. The wild animals escape it. They jump the fences. But livestock can get trapped …”

The fires destroyed the winter feed for the cattle. A haystack would go up in a surge of white flame. The settlers’ wooden barns and houses were occasionally razed by prairie fires. There is good reason why much the grandest building in Ismay now, and the focus of the town’s fund-raising activities, is the fire hall.

Wind, fire, lightning, ice … Montana’s violent climate came with the territory. People battened down (in Wynona Breen’s phrase) for these assaults, and came to accept them as part of the annealing process. Urban types, like Ralph Norris, the Chicago pole-vaulter, took pride in coming through each new calamity in one piece. They were learning to be farmers. It was exhilarating, just to find that one could cope. Facing up to the wrecked wheat field after a hailstorm, burning the fence to keep warm in winter, digging a fire trench to keep off the flames in summer, were emblems of the homesteaders’ growing competence and know-how.

In these early years, the outbreaks of fierce weather gave the settlers a common enemy. Neighbors looked out for each other, and the prairie communities that had begun to crystallize around the schoolhouses came together to fight fires, rebuild collapsed houses, carry fuel and food to the sick. The concern of Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission — that rural America was in danger of turning into a landscape of gruff anchorites, each on his hilltop, seems to have been utterly misplaced here in eastern Montana. By 1914, the Whitney Creek community was working much like a traditional village. It had its village pariah in Worsell, its lovable village eccentric in John Conlon, its upstanding first families in the Strykers, the Dockens, the Wollastons and the Robertses. The bare and lonely spaciousness of the land, and the melodramatic tendencies of the weather, gave people reason to treasure the supportive society of each other. They could take the storms and the freezing cold because they were sustained by an inner climate of buoyant hopefulness.

Until 1917. The previous year, barely five inches of rain fell between May and August, and the harvest was disappointingly thin — though the price of wheat was climbing daily, and people were beginning to talk of the $2.00 bushel. The arid summer was followed by a winter of shocking cold. Percy Wollaston remembered it:

One night our thermometer registered sixty-three degrees below zero. That wasn’t just a faulty thermometer, as Dad had gotten a good one which registered maximum and minimum temperatures and used to compare notes with Leon Clark who ran the store [in Mildred] and kept weather records.

Minus 63°. In The Worst Journey in the World, published in 1922, the coldest temperature, recorded by Apsley Cherry-Garrard on the Antarctic ice cap, in the depths of the southern winter, was minus 77.5°. The Montana winter of 1916-17 was in that league.

When the thaw eventually came, the ground was plowed, the spring wheat planted, and, on several successive mornings, a thin drizzle, more mist than rain, colored the soil before the sun emerged and baked it dry. In late May, the midday temperature was already in the low nineties. On the Wollaston place, the spring under the lone cottonwood tree, a quarter of a mile west of the house, dried up, and the watering hole turned white, like rutted concrete. The iron windmills that served the cattle troughs continued to creak monotonously overhead, but produced an alarmingly feeble dribble of yellow-tinged alkali water.

For years now, people had been conserving moisture on the Campbell system, turning their land into a reservoir that would see them through the inevitable dry season. With up to twenty inches of rain a year, the reservoir should have been topped up to the brim. In 1917, the homesteaders who had been using Campbell as their agricultural bible paid their first weary visit to Doubting Castle.

They searched the sky for signs of coming rain. Percy Wollaston again:

The most threatening clouds would build up, promising utter deluges of rain. Lightning would flash and the thunder rumble but nothing happened, and the storm, if any, would follow the course of Powder River or Fallon Creek. Many is the night I can remember Dad and Mother sitting hopefully and finally despairingly watching the course of those storms.

Like a cruel parody of rain clouds, dark swarms of grasshoppers rolled in from the west, and settled on the sparse and stunted wheat. Every shoot crawled with the insects. One could count up to 250 hoppers on a square foot of soil. The homesteaders tried to poison them with ingenious recipes of horse dung, molasses, crushed fruit, salt and Paris green; but as one farmer put it, “For each hopper killed, it seemed as though an entire family came to the funeral.”

The cattle grazed on the dry range until it was bald. Their ribs showed through their hides as they lay immobile in the standing heat. When the afternoon winds blew, they lifted the topsoil into a drift of fine dust, through which the sun appeared swollen and pockmarked, like an enormous overripe blood orange.

“Our crop,” Lynn Householder said, pointing to a color photograph in the family album. The picture might have been of the Arabian desert, it was so hard to distinguish between the 6- or 8-inch sandy stubs of wheat and the parched soil in which they had died. From horizon to horizon, the land was all one color, and in a green year I found it hard to recognize that it was the same land that lay outside the window of the room in which we sat.

“Nineteen eighty-eight. Our last hopper year. I shouldn’t say our last; I mean our most recent hopper year. We’ll see drought again. We’ll see some hoppers.”

“When do you know for sure that you’ve got a hopper year on your hands?”

“Usually you see small ones on the ground … and it’s dry, you don’t have much moisture. Then they fly in, about the first week in July.”

“What do they look like?”

“There’s a real big grasshopper that flies, I would say two inches long. Then there’s one about three-quarters of an inch long; they’re dark, almost black, and they’re the ones that destroy things. The big ones are called natives — but these ones aren’t natives, these ones that fly in and do damage.”

“So they’re aliens — like me.”

“You said it, I didn’t—”

“Let’s say visitors,” said Mrs. Householder from behind the breakfast bar.

“But they come in, and they’re dark—”

“They come in clouds,” said Mrs. Householder.

“They’re a dark color. You take your hand and shade the sun out, and on the edge you can just see them there, like a light smoke. It won’t darken the sun too much, but if you darken the sun with your hand and look around the edge, you can see them flying. They fly in, spend about four days, and then they pull out. They really work hard. You’ll see a wheat stalk top to bottom with them, they’re that thick on it. Then they’re gone again.”

When the sinister, alien hoppers showed up in July 1917, the United States was in a turmoil of war preparations. The Zimmerman Telegram had been published in February, and on April 6 Congress declared war on Germany. On the homesteads in the drought, able-bodied young men were a liability; they had big appetites. Squads of sons, among them several graduates of the Whitney Creek school, went to Miles City to enlist.

“The idea that Germany was about the size of Montana just didn’t occur to us,” wrote Percy Wollaston. “It seemed that it must be as big as the whole United States.”

The army was occupation, was three meals a day, was money to send home, where the Polite Notices and Final Demands were stacking up in the mailbox. Nineteen seventeen was a good year for education. Boys went to France; girls taught in school. The farm families tried to tap every possible source of additional income, and many homesteads were saved from bankruptcy by a teacher’s monthly salary. I once asked Wynona Breen — a teacher to her fingertips — exactly when she had worked in the school system. I expected an answer like “until 1990”; what she said was, “All the dry years.”

Most people were baffled and frightened by the disastrous turn in the weather. They had been assured — by the government, by scientists, by the railroad literature — that this couldn’t happen, that (in Campbell’s words) “the semi-arid region is destined to be in a few years the richest portion of the United States.” Now, as grasshoppers swarmed over the ruined crop, and farmland turned to desert, it seemed that there might be an ominous significance in the embossed gilt camel on the cover of the Soil Culture Manual.

But some homesteaders viewed the weather in a more constructive light.

Wynona Breen’s father, Henry Zehm, her uncles, Art and George, and her grandparents, Frank and Minnie Zehm, had filed on nearby claims to the north and west of the Wollaston place. Like the Wollastons, the Zehms had come to eastern Montana from Fairmont, Minnesota, but the two families had little to do with each other. The Zehms were, at least by Episcopalian Wollaston standards, religious cranks. They were devout Seventh-Day Adventists who set themselves apart from their neighbors by celebrating the Sabbath on Saturday and following the dietary rules laid out in Leviticus. They drank no alcohol (Lev. 10: 9) and ate only cloven-footed beasts that chew the cud (11: 3). There were no pig roasts for the Zehms (11: 7); the flesh of the swine was at one with that of the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole (11: 30).

Back East, Adventism was considered a far-out cult, and the Zehms came west in part, at least, to escape the narrow social and religious orthodoxies of small-town Minnesota. In Percy Wollaston’s manuscript, Frank Zehm is glimpsed, at a safe distance; an old man, alone, cutting fence posts at The Cedars, and walking home over the prairie with the wood strapped to his back.

“I doubt if Percy Wollaston would have noticed him like that if Grandpa Frank hadn’t been an Adventist,” Wynona Breen said. “My folks were eccentric because of their religion — so anything they did was likely to seem odd …”

Percy went on to note that in 1913 Frank Zehm died of food poisoning, after eating a plate of warmed-up chicken leftovers — an ironic fate for someone who believed that diet was a condition of salvation. The Wollastons sent a cardboard cross, decorated with blossoms from Dora Wollaston’s potted geraniums, to the funeral.

After Frank Zehm’s death, his sons, all staunch Adventists, went on farming his half-section along with their own claims. The Zehm family holdings added up to a biggish spread of land, and one might have expected them to be harder hit by the drought than most of their neighbors. But when the rain stopped and the grasshoppers descended on the earth, the Zehms’ disappointment at the lost harvest was tempered by rising excitement. At last, it was all happening as it had been foretold. The days of the end time had arrived, and the Second Coming was at hand.

The Book of Revelation supplied a more accurate synopsis of the weather than the railroad pamphlets had done. It forecast lightning storms:

And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth: and there were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings …

The hail was there in the Book:

And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail; for the plague thereof was exceeding great.

According to Cruden’s Biblical Concordance, a talent weighed from fifty to a hundred pounds; so it was hailing beach balls. With the hail and lightning came fire:

The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up …

The grasshoppers were clearly the locusts of prophecy:

And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

Combined with the news of bloodshed in Europe, the summer of 1917 on the Montana prairie gave the millennialists every important sign that the Rapture was about to begin — that blessed moment when the righteous, dead and alive, would be beamed up into heaven. To the millennialist, all of life is a vigil, a long waiting for the last trump and the ecstasy of being rapt, or carried away, on the wings of angels. The process is described by Saint Paul in his first epistle to the Thessalonians:

The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air …

The plague of locusts ate the miserable remains of the spring wheat. Lightning bolts set fire to the dry buffalo grass. Cannonades of hailstones pounded the buildings. The papers carried reports of the carnage at Verdun. Everything was set fair for the sounding of the last trump, the rending of the sky, the great shout of the descending Lord, come to whisk the righteous off to their eternal home.

“The righteous will rise up and live for a thousand years — I never knew exactly where, but not on this earth — and the earth will be cleansed by fire and made new …” said Wynona Breen. “It’s all in the Bible.”

We were talking in the bare but cozy living room of the old Zehm homestead — old stove, old rocker, old table, old prints on the walls. Only the pile of rental videos, ready for return to the store in Terry, gave away the fact that we were in 1995. Mrs. Breen herself, nut-brown, with big, capable hands, had put an intellectual distance between herself and her Adventist upbringing. “I think we’re all pretty much stuck with what we were taught to believe when we were children,” she said; but she, alone among her siblings, had moved to the secular perimeter of the church. Her independence of mind, and her humor, showed in her broad face, which was weathered in the style of the local landscape, fissured with gullies and dry coulees. With her round specs and curly gray hair, she was still the even-toned schoolmistress, weighing each sentence carefully as she spoke it. The children at the Bossert School, near Cabin Creek, must have been lucky to have her as their teacher.

“So the worse the weather got, the happier it made your parents?” I said.

“Well, there was certainly a good deal of satisfaction … at things like the grasshoppers … My folks never hesitated to mention those things, and quote the texts. I was very well educated in all the terrible things that happen to wicked people — and to good people too, it must be said.”

“But the Zehms would be saved on Judgment Day—”

“Oh, yes. We were the Saved, among the righteous.”

“But there must have been some frustration. All the signs were right for the Second Coming. Why wasn’t it happening? Was your family’s confidence in the prophecy at all shaken?”

“No — my folks certainly went to their graves believing that it was all planned out. It was coming to pass.”

They had had to wait a long time, through many false alarms and portents. The war years came and went. Wynona, born in 1923, remembered the drought of the 1930s, the Dirty Thirties, as the time of Book of Revelation weather, when she was discovering religious excitements of her own. In 1935 she went to Miles City to hear Mary Anne, the child evangelist, preach on the Second Coming.

“Can you remember what she said?”

“Oh, yes. She was dressed in a white gown like Aimee Semple McPherson. She was about my age — twelve, maybe thirteen — and she spoke of the coming in the clouds, and the bright lights, and the dead all rising … She was vivid. That made quite an impression on me.”

A year or two later, as a teenager, Wynona had sent away for the literature put out by a recent breakaway sect of Adventists, the Branch Davidians. “Being the little rebel that I always was, I liked to read it. I really did. They told some nasty stories on the church …”

So, in 1993, during “the Waco deal,” she had felt a powerful spasm of sympathy for David Koresh and his flock.

“Charlie and I were in Dallas at the time, staying with our daughter, who is a lawyer there. And she, of course, would have gone out with her little gun and shot Koresh herself … And Charlie and I couldn’t help but tell her — now, that man has the right to live there any way he pleases. He built that place, and paid for it. So far as we know, he wasn’t doing anything terrible. (Of course, all you’d have to do is to prove that he was doing something to those kids, and I’d change my tune. But they didn’t prove that.) That fellow was on his own property, and trying to keep anybody else from coming on, even if they were officials. And I definitely believe in freedom of religion — if what Koresh had was a religion, and he at least tried to make believe it was.”

I realized at that moment that I had missed something very obvious in the furor over the siege at Waco. The Branch Davidian “compound,” as the news media all called it at the time, was in essence a homestead. The labor that Koresh’s followers had put into its construction was their entitlement to enjoy freedom on their own land; and, like so many homesteads, like the house in which Wynona and I were sitting, it was a sanctuary for unconventional religious beliefs and social attitudes. People like the Zehms came to the West because they were queer fish back East, and the isolated homestead set them free from the conformist values of the small town and the city suburb. When westerners watched the confrontation at Waco on CNN, they could see their own family histories reflected in the Koresh place in the scrubland of Texas — and when the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms moved in, it was as if the family homestead were being violated. People felt tender for the Koreshites — not merely out of some Neanderthal dogma about property rights, but because their sense of themselves was under siege. Their parents’ and grandparents’ struggle to gain a foothold, a place, in the West was obscurely diminished by the ring of federal agents with their armored vehicles and bullhorns.

That Koresh should have chosen to await Armageddon in what looked from a distance like a badly constructed motel in the wilderness was, for most non-westerners, an alienating image: it was a feature of the Branch Davidians’ general dangerous craziness. But it wouldn’t look like that to any westerner with a homestead on the Plains in his or her family background: it would look like Grandpa’s farm — where, perhaps, Armageddon was just as eagerly awaited as it was in Waco.

I grew up in a temperate climate, and my childhood God was a temperate, maritime, clement God. He loved children. He saved the Queen, and, with certain reservations, He put the weight of His authority behind the English class system. When I thought of Him, I saw a twinkling, mild-mannered patriarch who, when not wearing His customary robes, would probably be dressed in baggy flannels and a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows. The act of violence at the heart of Christianity, the agony of crucifixion, was so veiled in archaic ceremonial language that it was more symbolic than real. “There is a green hill far away …” went the hymn; and Calvary was both very remote, and green as England itself.

We were high-church Anglicans, to whom the Book of Revelation has always been an embarrassment. My father, a priest, did not dwell in his sermons on the Mark of the Beast or the Scarlet Whore of Babylon. I called him up today to ask him if he had ever had reason to quote from Revelation in the course of his professional life. He huffed and hawed, and confessed that he did have a weakness for the phrase, “the lukewarm Laodiceans,” but found the stuff about the Great Beast and Judgment Day all a shade too highly colored for his taste.

My god was as much a product of the landscape and weather in which I lived as he was of the scriptures in which I read about him — and it seems to me entirely unsurprising that the Protestant gods of the United States should be so much fiercer and more temperamental than the one in whom I once believed. A land of earthquakes, deluges, hurricanes, lightning strikes, forest fires and grotesque extremes of heat and cold deserves a God in keeping with its wrathful climate. God in the far West is a different personage from his namesake in Worcestershire.

In eastern Montana, even in a run of moist years, I saw a landscape ideally suited to the staging of the millennium. Its sheer bald exposure opened it up to the vengeful gaze of the Almighty. Its fantastic weather left man in no doubt as to his littleness and vulnerability. Had I been born to this, I think I might listen to the end-time evangelists with something more than the mixture of alarm and scorn they now provoke in me. There is no Anglican mildness in the climate of eastern Montana.

“The drought years made people go back down on their knees,” said Lynn Householder. Framed biblical texts hung on the walls of his ranch house, and the mailbox at the end of the drive was decorated with the message, Spread the Good News! His talk was littered with easygoing, unself-conscious allusions to The Good Lord; and whenever I met him he would take pains to remind me that the Householders had managed to stay on the land, when so many others had been forced to quit, only because of their religious faith and the answering grace of God.

“Dad stayed with horses when our neighbors were going over to machines.” So when the first drought, and the first plague of grasshoppers, hit the prairie, the Householders were carrying a relatively light debt load. Like almost everyone else, they had gone to the bank in 1916, and taken out a $1,600 loan (they made the final payment on it in 1928).

“So many people got too big too fast.” We were walking round the original half-section claim, and I was struck by how closely it conformed to the image of the ideal farm as projected in the ancient tractor ads. Along its western edge lay a shelterbelt of mature, mixed woodland. A sweeping gravel drive curved prettily inward toward the house, which stood on a commanding rise, with an apron of trim lawn at its feet. To the north, near the creek (and more trees), were fields of wind-ruffled green wheat. Eighty-something years of patient cultivation had transformed this corner of the prairie into an almost-English landscape. Had John Constable set up his easel by the farm gate, he would have been able to make something of it — though he might want to edit out the flat-topped butte of bare rock, with two antelope, in the upper right-hand corner of the composition.

Lynn Householder pointed out the irrigation ditches, the gullies, or “draws,” where the snow piled up in winter and supplied a reliable source of moisture in the spring. The English greenness of the Householder farm was a product of tireless vigilance and ingenuity. It needed every snowflake, every raindrop, every trickle of water in the creek, to keep it so, even in a year as wet as this one.

“The people that came in with the steam engines and tractors, most of them were here just a short amount of time, and then gone. The machines just sat out where they’d stopped—”

“Some of them are still sitting.”

“I wonder if any one of them was fully paid for.”

He was a long, lean man in his sixties, with blue-yonder eyes. When he spoke, his voice was soft and slow, like the voice of a man gentling a horse, or saying his prayers.

Like most ranchers who were children of homesteaders, Lynn Householder still planted wheat, even though, at 300 acres, his wheat fields amounted to less than a fiftieth of his total spread. But they kept alive the idea of the homestead as a mixed farm, and they gave Lynn his best opportunity to expound the principles of frugality that he so admired in his father.

“Our philosophy is, we haven’t sold last year’s wheat yet, so we can lose this year’s wheat crop. We don’t buy a lot of new: the new catches up on you in a drought year. If you don’t spend, the good years get so that you can carry through on the bad years.”

The philosophy was there in his Ford pickup, his Stetson, boots, jeans, checkered shirt — all old, but washed, brushed, polished, pressed, laundered. It was there in his zealously taut fences, his haystack (a razored cube), in Doris Householder’s bare farm kitchen, with its conspicuous absence of the usual gadgetry. The ranch exuded an air of thrift and rectitude.

“The ones that did good in this country didn’t spend much money. The ones that didn’t do so good, the ones that had to leave, they were the ones that spent. My dad always used to say he was too broke to leave.”

In an earlier conversation, Lynn had compared the homesteaders with the Mayflower pilgrims. For god-fearing, plain-living families like the Householders, this comparison must have been exact and nourishing. They could see themselves as soldiers of Christ, shipped for service in the western world, there to build a city upon a hill. When Edward Johnson wrote of the Massachusetts colonists (in The Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour, 1654), “Thus this poore people populate this howling Desart, marching manfully on (the Lord assisting) through the greatest difficulties, and sorest labours that ever any with such weak means have done,” he might have been describing the situation of many of the homesteaders around Ismay.

“This land has been good to us. But people forget how cruel it can be. We’ve got an outstanding good year. Looks wonderful. And land prices are getting real high again — like they did in the late seventies. Then in the eighties in this area right here, the devastation was maybe just as bad as in the thirties. People forget that when we have moisture. We could have been dry. They predicted a hopper year this year — but we sure don’t have the hoppers they promised us …”

He sounded almost regretful. His theology, and his farm economy, were founded on the experience of hardship. Puritanism, here as in colonial New England, runs into difficulties in times of plenty.

“I know I’ve shared this with you before. But my dad’s theory was: when things get really tough, you get up in the morning; you work hard; you get tired at night, so you can sleep; and some way the Good Lord takes care of the rest.”

Homesteaders who wanted to identify their own western settlement with that of the early Pilgrims could see in the drought of 1917 a precise analogy with the drought of 1662, which God visited on the Massachusetts colony as a punishment for backsliding, sloth and excess. Michael Wigglesworth’s poem, “God’s Controversy with New-England,” written at the height of the drought, pictures the stricken land:

Yea now the pastures and corn fields

For want of rain do languish:

The cattell mourn, & hearts of men

Are fill’d with fear & anguish.

The clouds are often gathered,

As if we should have rain:

But for our great unworthiness

Are scattered again.

We pray & fast, & make fair shewes,

As if we meant to turn:

But whilst we turn not, God goes on

Our field, & fruits to burn.

So it was in Montana. Most afternoons, dry storms rumbled over the prairie, bringing darkness, thunder, wind and fire, but no rain, as if the big sky itself were retching on an empty stomach.

Bad weather is a great force for religious conversion: as West Coast fishermen and towboat captains like to say, when asked about the state of the sea outside the harbor, “It’ll make a believer of you.” Families like the Zehms and the Householders at least spoke a language in which the drought had meaning, as a sign, or a punishment. Excited by this evidence of God trampling out the vintage, they were able to work through the bad years in a mood of awed expectation, matching each new misery against the prophecies in the Book. Other families simply turned, in shock, from agricultural science to helpless prayer.

Years later, Percy Wollaston would confide to his son, close to midnight and over whiskey, that his haunting memory of this time was the sight of his mother, on her knees every day, crying and praying for rain. Writing his memoir for the grandchildren, he couldn’t bring himself to disclose that scene. He wanted his readers to enjoy the homestead as an adventure and an inspiration, and in his writing the faces of Ned and Dora are sometimes colored by anxiety and disappointment, but never by despair. Living alone as he did, he perhaps needed to rescue from his boyhood something wholesome and of heritable value, precisely because his keenest memories of homestead life were too bleak to bear. The image of the distraught mother weeping and calling on God had to be exorcised by an act of disciplined re-remembering and re-creation.

Writing about this period, Percy does let fall a couple of sentences that tell what happened in a taciturn and riddling form:

The awareness of the outside world and the questioning of foreign events that was developing in my own mind must have been in some way paralleled in our whole society and the changes came so rapidly as to be only a confused jumble to me now. The great and the humble, the dolt and the wise, all seem to have been living in some sort of play world where everything would turn out for the best.

The war in Europe and the drought in Montana are collapsed into a single catastrophe. Before the catastrophe, the world was in its childhood, full of foolish optimists building castles in the air — from Lloyd George and Lord Haldane to Ned and Dora Wollaston. Percy himself turned thirteen in 1917. He was young when the world was young. His narrative, which has been moving confidently forward up to this point, abruptly loses its momentum. It loops back to 1910, skips ahead into the 1920s, drifts sideways through assorted reminiscences about neighbors, coyotes, well digging, cowboys, an old rifle, a pet monkey. In the process it clearly adumbrates a large, sad space, about which Percy could not bring himself to write.

In 1917, 11.96 inches of rain fell at Miles City, the nearest weather station for which I can find figures. In 1918, 12.62 inches. In 1919, 11.24 inches. In 1920, 12.83 inches. Though the numbers fluctuate slightly, each year was worse than the last, with too little rain falling on ground already parched beyond hope. Fifteen inches of rainfall was the make-or-break rule of thumb. Much less than that, and the topsoil turned to dust, and the hopper squadrons darkened the sky round the edge of the sun.

In 1921, with 17.47 inches of rain, the land began a slow recovery. In the meantime, it seemed that the climate had changed. The green quilt of farms with their outbuildings and new machinery, their phone lines, their improving roads, dotted with Model T’s like giant cockroaches, their swelling riverside towns, were reverting to yellow desert. When the Milwaukee Road train now crossed the Missouri at Mobridge, South Dakota, it entered a 750-mile-wide landscape of frizzled grass and stunned people, their recent purchases heaped uselessly around them, as if to mock the temerity of their attempt to make a garden of this self-evident wilderness. The green did not begin again until the train was in the foothills of the Rockies, near Butte, where trees, at last, started to crowd in close around the line, and people’s faces lost that unfocused, furrowed stare, which had come to seem like a racial characteristic of the inhabitants of the northern plains.

The train that had brought the homesteaders in began to move them out. These early-leavers resumed their journey westward, as if their prairie farm had been an overnight stop, a waiting for the next connection. They turned their backs on the letter from the bank, the tax bill, the notice of repossession; at Ismay, they clambered aboard the familiar carriage, and, armed with more pamphlets put out free by the railroad, boosting the latest coming place on the company’s line, they settled into the next leg of their journey.

Of the people whose lives I’ve been trying to follow, Art Worsell was the first to escape. He was just seventeen when, in August 1919, he jumped a freight train and rode the rails to Butte. In 1972, when the Prairie County Historical Society was collecting material for its book of homesteaders’ memories and photographs, Wheels Across Montana’s Prairie, Percy Wollaston put the society in touch with Worsell, who was then living in a flophouse in Seattle. The book’s compilers, accustomed to getting sheaves of hazy and roseate memories of box socials and school picnics, were shocked by Art’s contribution. The seventy-year-old man was still bleeding from his childhood injuries.

… I used to enjoy sneaking over and getting a good home cooked meal at Dockens, Yeargens, or Wollastons. I did not realize at the time that I was being favored and helped because I had no mother. The last three summers I worked for Dockens whenever they had jobs that I could handle.

On August 22, 1919, they laid me off for a few days and paid me off in cash. Always before that, dad had grabbed my money, so on the next day I left. That was the first penny I ever got my hands on. I told Dockens that I was leaving. They wondered why I had stuck around so long. I haven’t seen the homestead since, nor dad either.

On August 24, 1919, I took a freight train out of Mildred for Butte. From then on I was a tramp miner. Anywhere from ten days to six months on a job. One mining camp to another via box car …

At the end of 1919, three years into the drought, the county agent at Glendive, in neighboring Dawson County, sent out a communiqué to the farming weeklies. It reads like a message in a bottle.

Nov. 16.—A very small amount of fall seeding was done this year, as the rainfall was very small, less than 10 inches for the entire season. Our farmers raise few hogs, and are not going into the pig business very fast. A two-foot snow in October and a long continued cold spell has put the stockman square up against a feeding problem, the most serious this country has ever experienced. The farmers are selling off everything they possibly can. It is impossible here to have social meetings, as we have few buildings suitable and the roads are impassable. No farm improvements are being made — most people are thinking about food and clothing. We are facing a very severe winter.

In 1920, the surviving businessmen of Ismay clubbed together to publish yet another promotional pamphlet, Ismay, Montana: An Opportunity for You. Advertising had created this country. Maybe advertising could now save it in its hour of need. The pamphlet looks weirdly shrunken, beside the splendid fictions of ten years before: octavo-sized, with a jacket of thin brown card, overprinted in hopeful green. The pen-and-ink sketch on the front at least has some of the zest for optimistic invention of its predecessors. Under a sky of towering cumulus clouds, presaging rain, a winding country road, busy with motor traffic, and shadowed by infant trees, leads over rolling farmland to a distant city. The signpost in the foreground says “Ismay—3 m.” A little way down the road stands a chateau-sized three-story farmhouse, with a huge barn and grain silo. A herd of dairy cows grazes nearby.

But the text is so chastened, it sounds whipped. Every sentence anticipates the reader’s skepticism, and tries to dodge it. Five men of Ismay put their names to the pamphlet — George J. Murphy, Waldo Broman, F. R. Zollinger, C. J. Danielson and H. M. Gilbert — and the wording of the piece sounds as if it has been hammered out, painfully, over a long series of committee meetings. It aims for a tone of man-to-man frankness.

It must be borne in mind that Montana is a land of scant rainfall. Montana has suffered in the past from advertising which overlooked this fact. Many settlers who had never had any experience in farming of any kind, came out here ten years ago for the sake of a free homestead. They and others tried farming as it is done in lands of greater rainfall. We do not say that all these men have been unsuccessful.

How many times was that last sentence rephrased? It must have begun as “Many of these men were successful,” but Gilbert wanted to change “many” to “some,” Zollinger wanted “many were unsuccessful,” Danielson wanted to see the whole sentence cut, Gilbert, as a homesteader himself (and a close neighbor of the Wollastons), argued that the settlers were being unnecessarily disparaged, and Waldo Broman came up with a feline compromise.

The Broman touch keeps on showing at paragraph ends, as when the question of wheat farming in eastern Montana comes under review:

Ten years ago a great deal was said about Montana as a wheat country. This was the central theme of a good deal of widespread, — some of it misguided, — advertising. Yet, so far as farming is concerned, we were then trying an unknown land. No one knew for certain just how profitable the wheat industry would be. For four consecutive years, the yield was excellent and it was assumed that this part of the United States would be the wheat belt of tomorrow. Later experience caused men to revise this judgment somewhat.

Only the most cautious of claims made their way past the committee.

There are some advantages to Montana farming which can not be found in any other part of the United States. First and foremost, consider the price of our land …

This was valued at $10 to $25 an acre, or about $5,000 for a proved-up homestead. At the end of the pamphlet, there is an attempt to lift the rhetorical pitch and go for the vision thing, but it comes across as chronically depressed:

The western pioneer days are over. Montana is now in a better way toward permanent prosperity than at any time in her history. We have profited by ten years of experiment. Men from a score of states have come here and lived here through all the vicissitudes which every new country has to meet and thanks to these same men who have persisted, who have not lost hope in Montana as a farming state, we now have resident farmers who have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Montana farming can be made to pay.

The pamphlet clearly wasn’t much of a success. Seventy-five years after publication, there were still dozens of copies to be had for the asking.