Bad Land: An American Romance

7. Clinging to the Wreckage

WHEN THE PEOPLE I MET put a date on the homesteaders’ downfall, they nearly all said that it was the 1930s — the Dirty Thirties. Most of them had lived through the thirties, and they could remember the great storm of May 10, 1934—the sun rising in a grotesquely enlarged ball of fire, the sudden wind, the sky going black, the dust cascading down the inside walls of houses, and how they had floundered, blind, in the swirling, stinging darkness of their own backyards. With the memory of the storm came memories of the neighbors who had quit farming shortly thereafter.

“The Jess Coopers were among the first ones to leave, and then the Munyans. The Eighmans left — they shipped out of Ismay in the fall of ’34. My uncle left — and then came back, and then left again, and sold to the government. And before that, the Paul Nabbles left, and his sister that homesteaded, she left earlier than that …” said Lynn Householder; and everyone could recite his or her own litany of the names of the departed.

Telling the story like this put Ismay in sync with the nation at large. The homesteaders were victims of the Crash, the Great Depression, the Dustbowl Years — events with which outsiders could be expected to be familiar. It turned the defeated homesteaders into familiar characters — they were the Joad family, lighting out for the coast in The Grapes of Wrath; they were the bib-overalled sharecroppers and migrant farm workers in the Farm Security Administration photography project. Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans and James Agee had recast them, or their close kin, as famous American icons.

The story could be told differently. Close to 800 family memoirs are collected in the Prairie County Historical Society’s Wheels Across Montana’s Prairie, and most people name the date on which they left the homestead. Such a book must inevitably be weighted in favor of the families who stayed in the area, left late in the day, or were still in touch in 1972, but even the entries in Wheels make it clear that more people quit between 1917 and 1928 than between 1929 and 1940. Homesteaders who left the land in the late teens and twenties did so in private obscurity, while those who went in the thirties would be remembered as participants in a celebrated exodus.

The dry spell that began with the rainless spring of 1917 came to a climax in the dreadful winter of 1919. I met several people who remembered it. Bud Brown, the English-accented rancher, was aged eleven then. “There was no feed to get. The ground was barer than hell. It was cold — by God, it was cold … twenty, thirty degrees below zero for months straight. That made a lot of skeletons out there.”

Modern ranchers told me that, as a rule of thumb, twenty to twenty-five acres of grazing land were needed to pasture one cow. The homesteaders kept herds of fifty or sixty cattle on a hundred or a hundred and fifty acres of land. The cows nibbled the grass down to the roots. The roots died in the drought. By the winter of 1919, great patches of the prairie were as bald, gray and sterile as cinder block. The spring thaw of 1920 released a stench of rotting meat. The sun whitened the skulls of prize steers.

It was in the Book. Jeremiah 44, verse 22.

Because of the abominations which ye have committed; therefore is your land a desolation, and an astonishment, and a curse.

Of Ned’s neighbors, W. J. Faus was the first to go, and his departure left an ominous hole in the Whitney Creek community. Trim and brilliantined, often sporting a wing collar and tie, Faus, a store clerk from Montevideo, Minnesota, had filed on a quarter-section in 1908, then doubled his holding the next year, after the passing of the revised Homestead Act. Bill and Anna Faus’s farm had been a landmark on the open prairie when Ned Wollaston arrived, and the Fauses, who were disinclined to let a year pass without adding a new baby to their family, were leading lights on the school board, and could be counted on to show at community club picnics in the summer and dances and card parties in winter.

By May 1917, the Fauses had eight children — four boys, four girls, all hungry, all between infancy and seventh grade. In his full Sunday livery, boots and hair bravely gleaming, Bill Faus auctioned off his tools and stock and moved to Ismay, where he worked as a clerk in the Earlingbert department store. Later, he opened a store of his own, Faus Groceries, in Terry. The eager, lean young man who had been Faus the farmer evolved into the comfortable, aldermanic figure of Faus the grocer. His store was large and cool. Aproned and in specs, he ran the business from a dark-paneled, glassed-in booth at the back of the store, from where he commanded his squad of juvenile assistants. Meeting old neighbors as customers, he’d preen himself on his good luck. He had escaped by the skin of his teeth: had he stayed on the farm just four weeks longer, the auction wouldn’t have raised a thin dime.

Like Faus, many of the early-leavers went back to doing whatever they had done before coming out to Montana — reclaiming the identities that they had left behind back East or in Europe. Emil Ebeling had been a barber, in the Jutland port of Aarhus, when he fell to browsing through the literature that he placed on the table for his waiting clients, and came down with America fever. He and his wife bought tickets on an emigrant ship, bound for New York from Bremerhaven, and made their way by train to Prairie County. In 1914, ’15, ’16, they spun a bare living from their half-section claim. They became citizens, and flew Old Glory from a staff in the yard. By 1918, they were penniless and exhausted. They hated their land and its loneliness. The harder they worked on it, the barer it grew. In 1919, the spring wheat failed to germinate. The dry seeds baked and disintegrated in fields of hot dust.

There was a vacant storefront in Terry. Ebeling rented it, and returned to being a barber. Hair and beards would go on growing when nothing else would sprout. In the minus-40° winter of 1919, back in town, back in the warmth, stropping a familiar razor, Ebeling thought of himself as having woken at last from an interminable nightmare. The barbershop, sweet-scented with pomade, talc and shampoo, was comfortingly real in a way that the claim had never been, and the Ebelings would remember their homesteading adventure as a dangerous excursion in unreality.

Emanuel Falkenstern — one of many German-speaking refugees from villages in Belorussia and Bessarabia — had been a blacksmith before he tried his luck as an American farmer. A strong churchman with a famous singing voice, he and his family of eight children (the prairie swarmed with the young children of these optimistic emigrants) lived on a homestead near Duck Creek, hoping against hope for a break in the weather. When the break came, wheat and cattle prices collapsed, and the Falkensterns went as hungry in 1922 as they had gone in 1919. The family moved to Terry, where Emanuel set up shop as a blacksmith again. His implement-repair business blossomed. In the 1940s, he was president of the Terry Chamber of Commerce and a town councillor; a stiff-suited, square-jawed man of clubs and substance.

In the early twenties, the ruined farmer could find another job without much difficulty. Ten years of homesteading had turned every one-time clerk or schoolteacher into a competent handyman. He was an ex-officio builder roofer, carpenter, well digger and mechanic: he could manage a dairy, dig a ditch, coax a dead engine into life. Having come out west on the gilt-edged promise that he would be the independent proprietor of his own estate, he now found that his experience had made him employable on the manual-labor market. He had to bite on the memory of those exuberant letters home — the fine house, the lordly view across the prairie, the spacious skies and amber waves of grain — and knuckle down to a new life as a janitor, auto repairman, truck driver, engineer, railroad employee.

But he had $29.50 a week, every week, in crisp new bills, to salve his wounded pride. There was food on the family table and enough money for a trip to the movie house to see Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand, followed by dinner at Louie’s Chinese Restaurant. When he looked at the land he had left, he shuddered for the people who were still out there, stubbornly planting grain that nobody wanted to buy. Figures put out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture give one some idea of what was happening at this time on even the best, irrigated farms in Montana, where the average weekly wage for a paid hand fell from $26.25 in 1920 to $15.25 in 1922. (In 1922, office workers, in businesses like insurance and real estate, earned an average of a little over $40 a week.)

Most homesteaders had come from towns and cities. Now they put the country behind them and returned to the comforts of the street, to the gossip over washing lines in backyards, the neighborly buzz of strangers close at hand. Children playing, distant gramophone music, the clink of the early morning milk on the step, were heard as long-lost friends. In the isolated homesteads, people hadn’t quite dared to admit to themselves how very much they missed the ordinary human traffic of city life. Now, as it came back to them, they gave themselves to it with a gratitude that took them by surprise. They felt, suddenly, home again.

Even the tiniest cities did well out of the returning homesteaders. The population of Ismay grew sharply, peaking at 420 people in 1925. Those who couldn’t squash into Ismay or Mildred went to Terry, or Miles City, or made the 200-mile leap westward to Billings, where, on a busy weekday, among the tall, cow-classical buildings of downtown, you might think you were in Chicago or Kansas City. By the standards of the empty West, Billings, with 16,000 people, was a grand metropolis.

Most of these people would move, and move again — always heading farther west, until they reached the Pacific coast. By 1972, when Wynona Breen and her colleagues at the Prairie County Historical Society caught up with them, they were in California, Oregon and Washington. Writing back to Montana, from a distance of fifty years and a thousand miles and more, they remembered their homesteading days as a vivid but surreal interlude, a caesura in their lives, like a major war. The collective memory that rises from Wheels Across Montana’s Prairie is of a warlike camaraderie — good neighbors, dances and card parties in the schoolhouse, the Ismay bootleggers, Christmas on the prairie, with a wagon trundling toward a lighted house across a crust of snow. But these cheerful scenes are framed by desolation — the terrible cold, the dust, the dying cattle, the grasshoppers. As the memoirs stack up, the grasshoppers take on a kind of grotesque, mythical life of their own. In the reader’s mind, at least, they grow steadily bigger, more numerous and more vengeful. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men.

The circumstances in which these letters were penned are at least as interesting as the lives they recall. In the comfortable bungalow suburbs of San Diego, Los Angeles, Seattle, people long retired from steady jobs in dull industries turned off the TV and settled down to write. From Lodi, near Sacramento, California, John Necker began: “On April 27th, 1910, I left my Village of Whittenberg, Russia, in Bessarabia to go to America for two years …” From Deer Park, Washington, Barbara Finkbeiner wrote: “… Our first house was a sod house with a roof of cherry trees and mud …” From Los Angeles, Marian Duncan wrote: “… We had a one-room shack for the first few years and it was very meagerly furnished …” Many correspondents preferred to write about themselves in the historic third person — as if the “I” of the 1970s had completely lost touch with the eager young “he” or “she” who stepped off the train at Ismay in 1910. Some people are plainly stupefied by the past, as it swims back to them in memory, and describe their own homestead much as a dutiful child might write about A Day in the Life of an Ancient Greek. It was all too long ago and far away to be a credible reality.

Rummaging through a drawer of oddments and papers, people sometimes turned up a colored booklet, its pages yellowed now, its cover illustration old-fashioned enough to pass as a possibly valuable antique. The scholar-plowman and his gold, and the name MONTANA in red capitals across the top, rattled the skeletons in the attic. It was a picture of the gullible, greedy innocence of youth. It was like the letters that come in the mail, telling you that you have just won a free Ford Escort or a vacation for two in glorious Honolulu. And you fell for it — this cruel hoax, this shoddy, obvious piece of scam artistry. It altered your life forever.

By 1922 the landscape had already begun to turn into the landscape that I came upon in the 1990s. For every working homestead, there was a deserted house, fast going down the road to ruin. Frames bulged, windows shed their glass, roofs sagged under the weight of a winter’s worth of uncleared snow. Sagebrush and grass had started to recolonize the plowed fields. Fence posts lay scattered, trailing loose ends of rusting wire.

Children played in the derelict buildings, where every creak of the warped timber was a ghost. The most excitingly haunted houses were the ones with stairs: kids from single-story homesteads loved the dark stairwells for the opportunities they afforded for spying on and frightening people. They sprawled on the moldy sofas, and entertained royally with chipped crockery and forks with broken tines.

The departed homesteaders continued to haunt the landscape in one important way, mapping it with their names. The fragile, brief civilization they had created on the prairie now began to fade off the land, but their half-section rectangles remained as “The Faus Place,” “The Ebeling Place,” long after the Fauses and Ebelings had gone. So the broad reaches of lumpy grass and shale kept their human shape. The prairie was no longer the empty space that it had been in 1909; every last bit of it was a local habitation with a name. More than sixty years after Ned Wollaston left his claim to the mice and the birds, the southern half of Section 2 in Township 9 was still known as “The Williston Place.”

The abandoned claims fell into tax delinquency, and drifted back into the hands of the government that had talked them up as priceless gifts a dozen years before. The possessions of their former owners turned into a community treasury, to be freely raided by the surviving homesteaders. If you wanted some arcane spare part for your ailing Culti-Packer, Wind-Stacker, Self-Oiling Windmill, or Malleable Frog, you had only to walk over the prairie armed with a hacksaw and wrench. Unpaid-for tractors were driven away in the night before the repo men could get to them, and the Worsell place grew to look like the premises of a thriving scrap-metal merchant. Worsell himself, morose, alone again, as much a fixture in the landscape as the mushroom-topped butte on his property, had earned the kind of amused affection that people eventually give to a long-standing monstrosity like a gothic railway station. People now called him Tom, and rather enjoyed doing business with him as he spat and snuffled over his junk pile. Ned Wollaston nicknamed him The Golden Dustman.

The local architecture was prone to go hiking when left unattended. Familiar landmarks vanished, then popped up again, a mile or two distant from their proper stations. It was a common sight to see a house or a barn moving slowly but distinctly along the skyline, making it appear, disquietingly, that the whole prairie was somehow skidding sideways in this radical reorganization of the landscape.

For stayers, there were windfall blessings to be gained from their neighbors’ failure on the land. Henry and Alice Zehm, who married in 1920, had set up house in a single room on the ridge to the north of the Wollaston place. Bob, their first child, was born in 1921; Wynona, their second, in 1923. “My dad used to say that every time my mother was expecting, he’d have to haul another homestead over here to make room for the next baby,” Wynona Breen told me. The Zehm place grew, extension by extension, into the house I visited in 1994. Under a skin of modern paint and cladding, it was a school and several homesteads, all of different heights and styles of construction, cobbled together, cell on cell, like a honeycomb.

I came to see that most of the ranch houses were like this. One could read them from left to right — each roof snugged under the eaves of the next roof along, the window frames a little out of line, the too-wide stretches of wall where doorways had once been. I liked their improvised, ad hoc, higgledly-piggledy look: it was a genuine style of vernacular architecture — and it was copied by more self-conscious and allusive architects. A few streets away from where I live on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle, there is a half-million-dollar house, designed by two students of Frank Lloyd Wright. Full of odd junctures and disproportionate wall spaces, enclosing a warren of rooms leading unexpectedly to other rooms, it was billed as a “prairie farmhouse.” It’s an amusing piece of work, but callow in its translation of the indigent makeshifts of the homesteaders into pretty design features. The examples of the real thing, in eastern Montana, are grimly articulate: they tell one that it took the homes of a dozen families who had failed to make the modest house of one family who managed, barely, to succeed. They are houses in which the walls of every spare bedroom are stained with somebody’s despair.

What now happened to the land was in Malthus, too. With the decline in population came a cheering rise in the quality of subsistence. Plowed fields, lying fallow, at last began to recover from the depredations of the amateur farmers, and the grass on the bald pastures slowly greened and thickened. Survivors like the Wollastons, the Dockens, the Zehms and the Householders trailed their cows from deserted homestead to deserted homestead, giving their own land a chance to rest and recuperate.

Shooing the last of his animals through the wire gate, past the plow, sunk to its axle in the weeds, past the wrecked house and the old copper which now served as a watering trough, Ned can’t have felt easy at what he was doing. He’d sat down to dinner in that room, three families jammed tight around the table, had clowned for the children, whose laughter was now mocked in the cries of the killdeer plovers. In a dozen years, the land had changed from the terrain of unblemished hope and possibility to hope’s own boneyard. Even on the wettest, greenest day on the prairie, it was hard to feel much of a lift in one’s spirits, when every abandoned farm implement, every gaping window, reminded one of how precariously one remained here, by the doubtful power of suction, in defiance of the natural gravity of the place. Ebeling, Falkenstern, Faus, Finkbeiner … Where they had gone, was Wollaston bound, eventually, to follow?

On a day in high summer, with threshing machines moving through the wheat fields, Mike Wollaston and I found his grandfather’s tall, red-painted horse barn. It was still being used to stable horses. It had gone west — to a ranch 3½ miles from the “Williston place.” Its current owner was full of admiration for Ned’s craftsmanship: the old barn had stood up to whirlwinds and blizzards as no other building on his land had done.

“I’m proud of him,” Mike said.

The three of us gazed at the octogenarian survivor. It showed its wrinkles. Its puce paint had faded to an ashen rose, and its original planking was patched and tarred like a fish boat that has been on the rocks more than once.

“It’s rough out there on the Williston place,” said Dale Brown, the rancher. His father had homesteaded here, where the benchland was smoothly dimpled, and there were standing ponds around the course of the Little Whitney Creek. “We graze cattle there, but you couldn’t farm it.”

“They farmed it.”

“You have to wonder what the government was up to,” Dale Brown said: “The way they shipped people out here, to just about the poorest damned land in the whole United States.”

After 1919, there was no more innocent optimism left in the pot. This land was not going to be transformed into the rolling green of Leicestershire by a miracle of hot new agricultural science. Campbell’s faith — if it was that — in the magical properties of capillary attraction had been exposed as the half-baked theory of a pseudoscientific crank. There now appeared to be a sinister significance in the fact that Campbell’s book had been promoted, and his experimental farm funded, by the railroad corporations, and some people began to see themselves as victims of a conspiracy. Government and big business had worked hand in glove to stiff the homesteaders. They had spun a merry tale of the New Eden, and put it across with the insidious techniques of twentieth-century mass advertising. It had been a classic con man’s pitch.

Those who needed to identify a Rasputin-like architect of their misfortunes found a convenient target in the bald, dwarfish, rabbit-toothed, fat-lipped figure of James J. Hill and his shadowy son, Louis. The Hills’ Great Northern line had seduced thousands of homesteaders to Montana. James J.’s book, Highways of Progress, had boasted of how the homesteading scheme was “like opening the vaults of a treasury and bidding each man help himself.” The scale of Hill’s wheeling and dealing, along with his arresting personal ugliness, made him the perfect candidate for the role of arch villain when the time came for hunting down villains. Hill’s biographer, Stewart Holbrook, claimed that a children’s rhyme made the rounds of Montana school yards along the line of the Great Northern:

Twixt Hell and Hill there’s just one letter:

Were Hill in Hell we’d feel much better.

Perhaps. Those kids must have been coached, for the rhyme sounds like the kind of strained invention more likely to have been printed in a local newspaper than chanted spontaneously at playtime; but it does hint at the idea that there was conscious and deliberate wickedness behind the calamities that had befallen the prairie farms, a Prince of Darkness pulling the strings.

“There was bitterness here,” Lynn Householder said. “People had been told a big story, and it was a lie — it was all wind.”

Only people who quit could afford the luxury of bitterness and scapegoating. Those who clung on to their precious 320 acres had to make a harder reckoning. In every sense of the phrase, the railroads had taken them for a ride, and they knew it; but it was important for them to shoulder as much of the blame on themselves as they possibly could. They remembered the misleading pictures in the brochures as their own inflated dreams of country life. They had been stupid in their great expectations. Vanity had led them to read far too much into the fanciful line drawings and glossy descriptions. Humbled now, and wiser, they reproached themselves more than Hill, or Earling, or the federal government. The Wollastons believed that they had failed to look after the soil as they should have done. Percy remembered how each spring the creeks seemed strangely muddier than in the previous year, with more cattle bogged-down in the ooze.

The connection between eroded fields and silted waterholes still didn’t seem to have registered much with anybody. The old ranchers had warned against plowing up the range, but their advice was long forgotten.

They’d plowed the land recklessly and to exhaustion.

They hadn’t put back into the soil what they had taken out. They had spent money like water, against an airily imagined future — a future full of water.

All these things could be put right. The more you blamed yourself, the more chance there was of keeping the farm alive. The homesteaders now understood, at last, how dry the land really was, and how it needed to be gentled back to health. They resolved to save for the bad years, not splurge on the good ones. From now on, they would use the plow lightly, let the soil lie fallow, and feed it with nutrients. This land might not be much, but it was theirs; and its weakliness made them cherish it the more. They had abused it. Now they would atone for that abuse. The homesteaders who survived into the 1920s found that their attachment to the land had grown beyond reason, as love does.

In this, the Wollastons, the Dockens, the Zehms, the Householders were quite unlike most western emigrants. The West is a realm of chronic impermanence, where the camp, not the village, has been the typical settlement. Cattle ranchers, conducting their business on the hoof, on 1,300-mile drives from Texas to Montana and the Dakotas, set the tone for the loggers, miners and railroad construction gangs who followed them. People got what they needed from the land, and moved on, like grazing cows. Communities were quickly formed and quickly dismantled. The transition from a boom town to a ghost town took only days to make. The word cabin, meaning a temporary shelter or a compartment in a moving vessel, accurately described the characteristic western home. Later on, the Airstream trailer, on or off a cinder-block foundation, would provide the West with a style of domestic architecture that nicely matched its prevailing social history.

Solitaries, sociopaths, compulsive travelers, boys who had failed to grow up found their way inevitably west, where they could pass for normal citizens. Fear of long-term attachment, to any thing or any body, was not a disability out here, where the peculiar economy of the region depended on a labor force of willing rolling stones.

Many of the early homesteaders filed on claims, then, as soon as they could raise a loan on their land, they left town on the next train west. The families who abandoned their farms between 1917 and 1922 were following the custom of the country: when the forest is logged or the seam mined to the point of diminishing returns, you move on to a new job. When, eventually, you reach the coast, you go trolling for salmon in Alaska.

The loyal remnant, who stayed on after 1922, were going against the western grain, which is why their subsequent failure cut so deep. Unlike a lot of their neighbors in the early days, they weren’t footloose rainbow chasers. They were homebodies. They had come for keeps, and saw themselves as married, for richer and poorer, to their plots of dust and scoriacious rock.

In 1909 and 1910, they had found an empty space. They’d made a place of it. Today, the open prairie is cobwebbed with paths that go from house to house, except that the houses themselves went west long ago; and each path is the line of an old friendship, a dependency, a working partnership. Imprinted with these ghostly social usages, the land, which looks so bare when one first sees it, ignorantly, from a car window, continues to have a peopled shape, a residual body of meaning of a kind that mere space cannot yield. Walking from the Conlon place to the Wollaston place, across the way to the Dockens, and down to old Worsell’s, I could still feel the intense, adhesive attraction of self to soil.

The rutted track, nearly hidden now under the dry grass and goldenweed, led back farther than I thought. Halfway down it, I had a shiver of déjà vu. Last time I was here, it wasn’t here, it was in the old country, walking on the fringes of a long-depopulated hamlet in County Cork. There, everyone had Gone to America — the tombstone epitaph on so many Irish villages. Eastern Montana, with its ruins and fading paths, had come to resemble all the sad places in Europe from which people had set out for eastern Montana.

The honeymoon over, people worked at the land as one works at a marriage. Some, like Tom Worsell, lacked the imagination to leave. They stayed until they starved, or were resettled under the New Deal. Some, like the Wollastons, simply could not bear to break faith with their own youthful high hopes. All their ambitions for themselves were rooted in this ground. Coming back from a disappointing trip to Leon Clark’s store in Mildred (the prices that Clark paid for eggs, butter, honey were going the same way as the prices for wheat and beef), Ned Wollaston, in the family Ford, would turn right into the drive and see the farm in bulky silhouette against the western sun. He and Dora had invested their lives in its creation. It was their lives. To quit the farm would break his heart.

Some, like the Zehms, saw no reason to leave: they were here, in the appointed place, at the appointed time, at the end of the rainbow of the Lord’s will. Some, like the Householders, saw that their own last chance lay in their neighbors’ failure. As more and more homesteads reverted to government ownership, it was possible to lease them at a peppercorn rent, or buy them through the Spokane Land Bank. Adding to one’s holding, half-section by half-section, some rented, some mortgaged, one could build an irregular patchwork of land that was big enough to support a family.

Back in 1908, when Congress debated the Enlarged Homestead bill, representative William A. Reeder of Kansas had struck a note of dour realism: “I say that the settler cannot make a living on 640 acres of [semiarid land], nor on 1,280 acres. There is the trouble. If he could make a living on 320 acres, it would be all right, but there is where people are deceived. They cannot make a living on 640 acres, in most cases.” At the time, Congressman Reeder was denounced as a Jonah and a pawn of the big ranchers. As it now turned out, he had been speaking the flat truth.

During the 1920s, a new number surfaced. If, by hook or crook, you could lay your hands on six sections of land—3,840 acres — you could make a living here. It would be enough to support a herd of 150 cattle, without running into the consequences of overgrazing, and give you, perhaps, 300 acres of arable soil — say, 3,000 bushels of wheat in a fair year. You’d never be rich, but you wouldn’t starve out.

This gigantic acreage now became the goal of people who, just a few years before, had believed that a half-section was a fine estate. They’d come to the land and tried to shape it according to their imported ideas of science, progress, community, landscape. Now the land began to shape them. Its message to the people was blunt: live here, and you will live barely and in isolation. It shook itself free of the litter of surplus buildings, the fence posts and barbed wire with which the Lilliputian homesteaders had tried to pin it down.

The land would wear just so much architecture and society, and no more. In the Platonic republic of the United States, the land of limitless imagining, where ideas were no sooner conceived than they became concrete entities, nature was not supposed to dictate the terms on which mankind could live with it. Of course, nature often struck petulantly back at man, with earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and fires; but this inflexible drawing of lines and limits was alien to the American temper. The prairie was not amenable to problem solving; it wasn’t going to be fixed by new farming methods, or turned green by applied electromagnetism. It was what it was, which was not at all what people had conceived it to be.

Swallows nested now in the wrecked houses of the theorists and high-hopers, and in the abandoned cabins of the rolling stones. Those who were left were marked out by their willingness to submit to the land’s terms: religious zealots, fatalistic European peasants, and people like Ned Wollaston; soil addicts, farmers by incurable vocation, for whom the dry and treeless country had become their natural habitat.

In 1913, the Yellowstone Trail, with its logo of a yellow band and a black arrow over the slogan “See America First,” had been driven through Ismay, where tourists were told to get local advice about the condition of the gumbo road ahead. Motoring in the teens was still a privileged adventure, like small-boat navigation, and the capped-and-goggled summer visitors, waving road maps, were exotic pioneers. By the twenties, everyone was doing it. Industrial wages were climbing fast, as farm wages declined, and the Yellowstone Trail became a fashion parade of late-model automobiles by Studebaker, Dodge, Packard, Oldsmobile, Chevrolet, Nash, Buick, Hudson, Essex, Overland and the rest. From Minneapolis, Chicago and points east, urban sightseers, with Kodaks, came west in search of local color.

The Real West, empty, stark and dry, began just past the 100th meridian, where the trail crossed the Missouri. From here on, the tourist was in an America more imaginary than real, and the view from the road was of an enormous, 3-D drive-in movie, with Indians hidden behind every bluff and covered wagons around every corner. Some editing was necessary: one had to cancel from one’s vision the tractors, the modern houses, the surviving fences. But most of what one saw fitted well enough into the movie. Here, a crumbling sod house; there, a log cabin. The man on horseback, in cowboy hat and cowboy boots, was worth braking for: 1/25th of a second at f8, and he was a memory, headed straight for the album.

Tourism thrives on picturesque poverty, and the homesteaders, with their quaint costumes and rodeo skills, were photographed in much the same spirit as “the natives” of Africa. They were poor, they evoked the colorful, romantic American past; by the standards of the eastern cities where the tourists lived, their lives were appealingly primitive. So the family in the Nash open tourer gazed at Ned Wollaston, in his threadbare working clothes, reining in his horse, and saw a figure from the golden yesteryears of the Wild West.

There was a bitter irony in this. Just ten years before, the homesteaders had been able to think of themselves as being in the vanguard of Progressive Era America. Farm prices were on the up and up, bank loans were to be had for the asking, and the independent homesteader, with his agricultural science, new machinery and rising income, was someone to be envied by the city wage slave. Not any more. Since the end of the First World War, the wage slaves had prospered while farmers sank deeper into debt. Rural America, especially in the western states, had come to look like an enormous park, where toothless and photogenic “old-timers” were roadside attractions, like the coyotes, black bears, antelopes and elks. The farmers were part of the wildlife, providing a splash of human interest in the great western spectacle.

Grant Wood’s American Gothic, painted in 1930, nicely registers the decline of the American farmer, from the kingpin of Jeffersonian democracy, to quaint yokel. For his picture, Wood got his sister, Nan, and his New York dentist, Dr. B. H. McKeeby, to dress up in thrift-store costumes and make with the pitchfork. Although Wood was raised in Iowa, American Gothic is a prankish Manhattan view of life down on the farm, where simple country folk read bibles and chew on straws.

Also in 1930, Rexford Tugwell, the Columbia University economist who later became Undersecretary of Agriculture in Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, wrote a memorably grim description of the typical American farm:

A farm is an area of vicious, ill-tempered soil with a not very good house, inadequate barns, makeshift machinery, happenstance stock, tired, overworked men and women — and all the pests and bucolic plagues that nature has evolved … a place where ugly, brooding monotony that haunts by day and night, unseats the mind.

Where Tugwell and Wood agree is on how marginalized, how remote from the American mainstream, the farmer had become during the course of the 1920s. The tourist on the Yellowstone Trail, snapping a homesteader on horseback, saw through the prism of the viewfinder a living fragment of western history. Ned Wollaston in his work clothes belonged, with the buffalo hunter, the wolf trapper, the Hollywood cowboy, in the category of nostalgic Americana.

But Ned and his neighbors didn’t yet know that they were history. Politicians, dead and alive, editorial writers, railroad executives, tractor manufacturers continued to assure them that they were the people on whom the future of the country depended, and that their farms, run on gasoline and electricity, were — or, at least, could be, should be — on the cutting edge of the modern industrial world.

Failing to understand that they were yesterday’s men, the homesteaders grinned obligingly for the tourists’ cameras, and went on with the business of trying to feed America, and feed themselves, in a dry year.

Bowling over the gumbo roads at a breakneck 30 m.p.h. in his father’s Ford, Percy Wollaston was courting. He had inherited the narrow Wollaston face and long Wollaston nose. Purse-lipped, and with deep-set eyes, he looked like a young curate — handsome, but prim. His clerical features gave him an air of seriousness that was out of kilter with his floppy check motoring cap and scarlet bow tie.

Percy had graduated from Mildred High School in 1924. For his four years there, he had “batched” with Mark Buckley of Cabin Creek, with whom he shared a room at the Corma Hotel. At the Buckley ranch, Percy had met the Norwegian-American Amundson girls, Julia and Myrtle, who lived on a homestead adjoining the Buckleys’.

They were known as “The Amundson Girls,” like a dance troupe or a cabaret act, across many miles of prairie. They had a school on their land, where they taught modern poetry of the sort not found in textbooks. Every July 4, they made a bonfire on a mushroom-topped pillar of rock to the west of their place. The flames could be seen from three counties. The Amundson picnics, with a jazz band and dancing in the small hours, were famous; events that were dreaded by straitlaced parents of teenage daughters. The Amundson girls were reckoned to be bluestockings, and “fast.”

Long after they left the prairie, the Amundson girls would be remembered, and their exploits used as texts for heavy sermons. Wynona Breen, born in 1923, and far too young to have ever been part of the Amundson set, told me how her father used to lecture her on the importance of dressing for warmth rather than fashion — which had not been the Amundson way. The Amundson girls, said Henry Zehm, went rabbit shooting in winter, scantily clad. Julia Amundson had been taken home in a cart, suffering from severe frostbite in both legs. “Had she been properly dressed,” said Wynona, quoting her father, “such a thing would never have happened.”

Myrtle Amundson, two years younger than Percy, was dauntingly clever and well read. He needed all his wits about him to hold his ground with her. She, hungering for something finer than the homestead world of steers, hogs, bushels, warmed to Percy’s earnestness, and found a home away from home in the Wollaston place, with its shelves of books and the family appetite for conversation. She listened to Ned, and talked to Percy. Percy and Myrtle quickly became an item.

It was thirty-four miles by road between the two homesteads. A rainstorm, or a moderate snowfall, would cut off all communication between them. Percy built Myrtle a mahogany-boxed crystal set, so that they could both listen, on headphones, to the same dance music, coming in faintly over a brushfire of interference.

Together, they talked fretfully of how their future, if they had a future, lay out West. The Wollaston homestead might yet, just, support Ned and Dora, but the section and a half of land would not stretch to feeding a grown-up son, let alone a budding family. Myrtle could teach in school, but … They decided that Percy would take the train to the coast. In Portland, or Seattle, where jobs grew on trees, he could pay his way through college. Then …

Portland! Seattle! The thousand-mile distance made the cities as intangible as heat mirages, and made any future there seem shockingly unreal. They might as well have been talking about setting up house in Paris — and not Paris, Montana. But the barren prairie forced people of Percy and Myrtle’s generation into thinking, as most of their parents had once done, in unimaginable distances. From Mildred to the west coast was nothing like as far as from Bergen, Norway, to Mildred, but it was far enough to turn every plan into a fantasy and cast a long and dubious shadow on every promise. To bank on a new life on the green coast beyond the Rockies and the Cascades seemed only a little less risky than making the great, untested leap from Europe to America. It was to commit oneself, as one’s parents had done, to a landscape in a book, a copywriters’ fiction of fertile soil and easy pickings.

It was a horrible decision to have to make, and it was undone and remade many times over. When Percy eventually climbed aboard the westbound train at Mildred station, seen off by Myrtle, Ned and Dora, the scene on the platform was an uncanny replay of the old European story: the emigrant with his bags, putting on his best face for the occasion, the anxious family, waving to a receding handkerchief, and to a future as insubstantial as the rolls of steam that lay where the vanished train had stood.

Percy had a ticket to Seattle. As in so many emigrant stories, the unexpected intervened, and when the train eventually pulled into Union Station, Percy was not among the disembarking passengers. He never reached the coast, never went to college. In a lot less than a thousand miles, all of his and Myrtle’s plans unraveled.

Rain suddenly chose to come back to the prairie in 1926. In the summer of that year, wheat stood thickly in the fields and fat cattle grazed on pastures of green clover. The splendor of the 1926 harvest was enough to obliterate the memory of the bad years, and when the mild winter was followed by copious spring rains, eastern Montana was again promoted as the new Eden. More machinery appeared on the driveways of the remaining homesteads, and a fresh intake of fledgling farmers showed up, eager to take over the ruins and succeed where the Fauses, Ebelings and Falkensterns had gone down the road to destitution.

Ned was fifty-four, Dora sixty-two. They were grizzled, tired, lonely, and undeceived by this show of kindly weather. It was painful to watch the new people move in, as guileless in their turn as the homesteaders of 1910. Yet Ned’s visceral attachment to his land was as strong as ever. He could not in fairness subject Dora to another evil winter, and he hardly had the stomach for it himself. But he could not sell. When he talked of moving, strangers called at the house and tried to make offers. The offers rankled in his soul. $8,000 for his valley, his home, his fields, his hives on the hill, for the best years of his and Dora’s life? He had to keep the farm — for Percy’s sake, or so he told himself. From the moment he had set foot on the claim, walking up the swale to the cottonwood tree above the spring, Ned had seen the homestead as the estate which he would pass on to his son. Now his son was gone, it seemed doubly important to Ned that Percy could someday come back to these acres. Elsewhere in the West, there were great irrigation schemes, bringing water from the rivers to remote areas of arid land. In time, the Yellowstone might be dammed, and Prairie County latticed with ditches and canals. Then the farm would pay. It would be criminally shortsighted of him to let it go now.

Yet he had to move Dora to a gentler climate.

He agreed to rent the farm on a year-by-year basis to a young couple named Shumaker. Biting the bullet, he sold them his stock, horses and implements. He would keep the bees. Three wagonloads of books and furniture went to Mildred, to be loaded on a boxcar. Then Ned packed the Ford until it resembled a toppling haystack of assorted household goods, and in March 1927 he and Dora drove sadly west in their son’s wake.

In 1929, the rain stopped coming. In 1930 the price of wheat dropped to 23¢ a bushel. At the Mildred stockyards, the government was paying $12 a cow and $8 a calf to shoot and bury the starving cattle. Somewhere under the ruins of Mildred now is a mass grave of wasted Hereford skeletons.

Russian thistles had been a major nuisance to the early settlers, springing up between the wheat stalks and polluting the grain crop. In 1930, people harvested Russian thistles, for winter feed for their livestock. It was the only harvest worth talking about that summer.

In the basement of the house at Great Falls, below the hydroelectric dam on the Missouri, where Percy and Myrtle Wollaston raised their children in the 1940s and ’50s, there was a pile of junk from the homestead. Mike Wollaston used to play down there, finding treasures. He unearthed from the pile a tarnished silver cup, prettily engraved. It showed a sow suckling her far-row, and had been awarded to Ned Wollaston for the best sow and litter at an agricultural fair in Terry. Mike, aged eight or nine, polished it and carried it upstairs, where it found a place on a knickknack shelf. For years, the cup was a fixture there, part of the reliable pattern of home.

One day in his late adolescence, Mike returned to the house on a visit, and was aware of a break in the pattern: the cup was gone.

“What happened to the cup?”

Percy, always a reticent man, blushed. “I threw it in the river.” Then, in an embarrassed growl, he said: “I didn’t want to be reminded.”

Like a turning trout, the silver cup flashed and winked under the surface of the Missouri. The intolerable memories it held sank at last into the river’s muddy darkness. Only after Myrtle’s death from cancer in 1972 would Percy steel himself to retrieve them.