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Bad Land: An American Romance

Bad Land: An American Romance

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Dreams Turn To Dust.
Review: "Badlands" is a captivating account of the great con perpetrated by the USA government and big business, working in cahoots, primarily against emigrants from Britain and Europe who were deceived by the prospect held out to them of a new life in eastern Montana as homesteaders farming free, fertile land. The reality was that the new railways running through the dry prairies of eastern Montana depended on passengers and freight for survival and this required the land to be populated and worked. The stark truth was that the promised land was dry and dusty, with little rainfall - totally unsuitable as farming land. Unbeknown to the emigrants, they would end up owning "all the dust, rock and parched grass you could see, and more." Thousands of attractive, glossy brochures were distributed far and wide across the USA and Europe promoting the golden dream of riches and prosperity as being there for the taking, just waiting to be snapped up. James J. Hill, the notorious railway magnate, lauded the homesteader scheme as "opening the vaults of a treasury and bidding each man help himself." People were so taken in by the prospect of riches in the new world dangled before them in glossy "golden" presentations and pictures that they were prepared to uproot their lives and their families and risk their lot on "a landscape in a book." They had no conception of what they were letting themselves in for.

Raban is at his best re-creating the great adventure west to eastern Montana, his imagery of that vast, forbidding terrain capturing the landscape in all its moods. He recaptures the arrival of the emigrants by train, taking us into their lives as they try to live out their dream, building their homesteads, fencing their land, borrowing to fund the buying of stock, seed and gasoline tractors and struggling to farm their barren land. Raban brings to life the difficult years that followed the early optimism, reliving how the homesteaders - against the odds of the raking northwind, the cold of Montana "like a boot in the face", the dust, the dry land, the drought years, the dying cattle, the swarms of grasshoppers ("For every hopper killed it seemed like an entire family came to the funeral") - battled in vain to build a fragile, ordered world only to see it crumble rapidly around them within the space of a decade or so. Defeated, most homesteaders quit in the period 1917-1928 and headed further west. It was like coming out of a bad dream. Their bible, "Campbell's soil culture manual", the bestselling guide to husbanding dry land had proved to be a piece of absolute twaddle but too late, did the truth finally dawn that it was the "half-baked theory of a pseudo-scientific crank."

By the 90's, when Raban visited eastern Montana, the homesteads were reverting back to nature: odd fenceposts, rusty harrows and derelict houses the only visible remnants of the homesteaders' hopes and dreams. "Bad Land" could, and should have been, a pure, undiluted five star classic account of the homesteader's tragic experience and for the most part it is but it occasionally, irritatingly, strays into unnecessary technical detail and lengthy digressions on, for example, "Campbell's Soil Culture Manual", Photography, and Ismay's attempt to re-invent itself under the new name of "Joe" (Montana), rather than remaining firmly yoked to the central theme of the homesteader's tragic experience - the last part of the book is a further illustration of this kind of distraction. Still recommended though!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent
Review: As someone who is interested in the history and development of rural areas as well as a devoted lover of rural life, Johnathan Rabin's "Bad Lands" provides a unique historical and cultural look at Montana. Rabin starts off with the extension of the homestead act in 1909 which lured thousands of immigrants out west. Tracing the colorful histories of many of these families that settled Montana, Rabin makes the characters in his study come alive through personal and historical ancedotes.

As a writer, Rabin is excellent. Taking a refreshingly non-political stance which is much different from some of his contemporaries (i.e., Terry Tempest Williams), Rabin has a knack for colorful description which is the hallmark of every good nature writer. His lament of the homesteaders, particulary in the "dirty thirties," is subtle and nuanced.

The end of the book, which looks at present day Montana culture, speaks volumes to the sociological and cultural trends which the homesteaders founded. The inherent conservatism and pragmatism of rural culture is shown in its own words. Rabin, being a truly objective writer, lets the interviewees speak for themselves and their land.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: a geography lesson
Review: Bad Land, I felt, deserves its accolades, both as a fine book, and a tremendous descriptive book of the area of Eastern Montana. It is a book for geography students and teachers, but also generally worth reading. It is a story of immigrants in; immigrants out; some short of the tough land, and others having better things to do than build fences, and endure droughts and unspeakable winters. Only some unique persons' cup of tea, this area, and so in keeping with one of Raban's themes, the effect of geography on character. The author enhances his superior writing and adequate, if incomplete, research with his own presence in the area over a period of, apparently, two years. In the way of minor kibitzing, I could have done without the sacrasm about Joe Montana Day, and I also felt the book weakened a bit in the final third, particularly when the author dropped the ball on the story line of the families. I would have liked to know specifically (instead of generally) why the Wollastens left. This book is recommended good reading.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A stark yet romantic vision of America...haunting
Review: Bad Land: An American Romance, by Jonathan Raban, is at once informative and poetic, starkly beautiful and bleak, sympathetic yet harsh, heartbreaking yet enjoyable, historic yet immediately relevant, personal yet broadly relevant, regional yet universal, factual yet romantic (even surrealistic). In sum, this book is a masterpiece, and richly deserving of its many awards. If you want to understand the landscape and life of the American west (particularly the Montana/Dakotas area), you should read this book. In fact, if you want to gain a better understanding not just of the west, but of AMERICA (particularly rural America, but also many of the prevailing myths and values which have permeated or at least influenced ALL of America) itself, you should read this book.

Bad Land first and foremost is a book about land. Specifically, BAD land, in many ways. Harsh, unforgiving, stark, cold, lonely, dry. Never enough rain. Or too much at once. An at-best marginal ("semi-arid") land for farming that greedy people (mainly the railroads) used to lure naïve (or desperate, or bored, or restless, or ambitious, or crazy, or idealistic) immigrants to with printed glossy brochures, distributed all over the United States and Europe, translated into German, Russian, Italian, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish,etc., and filled with romantic pictures of "free, rich farmland" with such "attractive details, that readers would commit their families and their life savings, sight unseen." And come they did, by the thousands, homesteaders ("honyockers") lured also by the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 (passed "after a great deal of lobbying by the railroad companies"), out to make their fortune in what was touted as practically a land flowing with milk and honey. Of course, since this was patently not true, the vast majority of "honyockers" failed, and Raban is a master of describing people's romantic dreams, efforts, and - for most -their ultimate, heartbreaking failure.

But even more than a history, this book is a meditation on humans and their attempt to subdue (or at least coexist with) an uncaring, unforgiving, fickle nature. In a way, this book isn't even really about the American west per se; rather, it is about man - sometimes noble, sometimes greedy, sometimes clever, sometimes stupid, sometimes a loner or misfit, etc. And it is about hopes, dreams, individual lives, ghost towns, ghosts, aesthetics (largely of the vast prairie landscape, dirt, shadows, sunsets, and barbed-wire fences), fantasy, reality, myth-making, faith (blind and otherwise), technology, water, soil, and weather (among many other things). Incredible that Jonathan Raban is able to capture so much in one 358-page book; this was obviously a labor of love, one that Raban immersed himself in, and which you will find yourself immersed in as well!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Rabin's thesis either oversimplifies the truth, or is false!
Review: Economic historian of this region, Professor Mary W. M. Hargreaves, is either ignored or just not consulted by Raban. Consequently, his thesis that this settlement area was a false hope for many is false, or else a shameless oversimplification. Hargreaves two meticulously researched volumes, <Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1900-1925> (1957), and its followup covering the years 1920-1900, (1993), shows that farming in the region of eastern Montana and the western Dakotas' was, in fact, a success story! The settlement and development of western agricultural resources was followed by depopulation of this "Badlands" region not because of any inherent difficulty with farming in the hostile environment, as Raban wishes to believe, but because of the Great Depression and the general decline in cash grain prices following the introduction of internal combustion powered tractor and ongoing increase of productivity in agriculture. Only already successful farmers could afford the capital investment increasingly modernized farming required in the increasingly competitive economic environment. Many farms remain profitable in this dry Big Sky country today-- a testament to Raban's wrongheaded, feckless, narrow-minded, from-across-the-pond, limey, eco-shiek pandering thesis. The author gets the direction of causation exactly backward:the natural environment did not cause the region's decline, since agriculture went into declining share of GNP and national employment prior to this region's settlement; increasing mechanization following WWI simply shrank the profit margins for farming generally, resulting in depopulation in ALL agricultural regions, not just the northern Great Plains. -- Orson Olson

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An interesting journey into settlement history of the West.
Review: Excellent set-up of the story. The Open Door, Fictions, Pictures, Fences, Plain-Sailing, Heavy Weather. A great way to present the process by which these people were lead to settle then abandon. Very creative writing!! An enjoyable learning experience!!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Worth reading if you know the area
Review: I enjoyed reading this book as I have hunted in the area for 30 years and have often stumbled across the decaying homesteads. I always wondered about the stories behind those graveyards of dreams and Raban has finally told the story. Parts of the story are very well told. I cannot get the image of the mother crying and praying for rain out of my mind. For this I am very grateful and I have purchased and recommended this book for many friends. The reason that I give it only a 3 rating is that there are loose ends regarding the families, some errors on the family histories, and a highly distracting leftist arrogance that runs through the writing. This is consistent with Raban making the evil railroads the great satan of the whole story and it also pops up in totally irrelevant ways. Residents of Ismay have told me that they refused to buy the book because they found Raban to be such a pretentious jerk. That may explain why he did not really finish the book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Bad Land, an American Romance
Review: I want to than Jonathan Raban for this gift. I am 4th generation Eastern Montana and this is the most accurate portrait of this area I have read. As an outsider, he thought to describe things I had taken for granted as normal. It was fascinating to understand from an outsider, what this culture is like and what sort of reaction a visitor would have. His curiosity and openness are a delight, his humor dry. His descriptions of the country and culture that are my own were close and truthful. I benefited much from this reading in that I have come to understand more of what defines the culture I was raised in, and the awsome differences between that culture and the rest of the US. The book is of great value to anyone who knows the area of Eastern Montana that Raban describes. It is more important to the rest of the population. We live in a Nation that is quickly becoming without local identity. There are few cultures that have survived these changes. There is a need for us to know that there is an alternative to the materialistic shallowness and sameness of urban America. There is no GAP on the HiLine.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Raban is no Wallace Stegner
Review: I was disappointed in the author's failure to capture the spirit of the settlers who sacrificed so much in their attempt to settle eastern Montana. He told their stories from a distance, and was quick to place blame. I kept speculating as to how Wallace Stegner might have told these poingnant stories. Stegner's roots and his love of the American west would have made him a much better voice for these 20th century pioneers.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A thought provoking, well written book
Review: I wholeheartedly agree with many of the other reviewers who question Raban's opinions and social commentary. Several times Raban made me want to puke with his stereotypical portrayals of modern day Montanans and his generalizations about their politics (read: ignorance). However, without his commentary, this would have been just another history book full of dates, places and events. It is not. Rather, it is a well written narrative that focuses on individual stories of the homesteaders, and tries to draw some larger conclusions from their experiences. And in the process, Raban injects a great deal of commentary that compels laughter, reflection, and profound disagreement. In other words, it does what a good book should. So, disagree with Raban's opinions, but recognize that he has written a very good book.


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