BIG HARD SKY

By John Skow

It takes starry optimism to see the settling of the eastern Montana drylands primarily as a romance rather than, say, a swindle or a blunder. And starry optimism is what settling this magnificent emptiness required in the first place, as Jonathan Raban relates in his beautifully told historical meditation, Bad Land: An American Romance (Pantheon; 336 pages; $25).

Long and dusty experience has shown that several thousand acres is the minimum necessary to make farming pay in this semiarid region. But when homesteading began here just after the turn of the century, 320 acres was thought to be a bountiful sufficiency. Or so the railroads' seductive brochures enthusiastically proclaimed. To ambitious city dwellers in Boston and Albany, and London and Cracow, it all made glorious sense. The 320 acres of government land were there for the taking, free to anyone enterprising enough to pay a $22 filing fee and build fences. Hard work would turn a clerk into a landowning patriarch.

And for a few years of modestly sufficient rain and no crop-battering hail, prosperity seemed possible. But the winter of 1916-17 was arctic, and the next summer saw only 5 in. of rain. Crops and credit dried up, farmsteads failed. Even today a curious visitor has no trouble finding the husks of homesteaders' abandoned houses, some with clothes still in closets and perhaps a hopeless account book yellowing on a kitchen floor.

Raban, an English travel writer resettled in the U.S., is a good and shrewd observer. He sees the origins of today's political attitudes--the Westerners' reflexive contempt for environmentalism and genial hatred of the Federal Government--in the homesteaders' ordeal by hailstorm and bankruptcy. But what makes Bad Land exceptional, on a level with William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways and PrairyErth, is a pervasive sense of yearning. The author is powerfully drawn to this hard country, this broad and nearly featureless landscape, and the reader does not doubt that had Raban been born in 1880, he would have found himself in Montana by 1908, driving fence posts with aching city shoulders and checking the sky hopefully for rain.

--By John Skow