Jonathan Raban: Bad Land: An American Romance

I am grateful to all the Wollastons for letting me borrow the story of their family’s settlement in the West. There were enough similarities between their family and mine — especially the many generations of Anglican clergymen in both — for me to see in their westward migration an alternative, surrogate history of what might have happened had my own great-grandfather upped sticks in England and headed for a new life in Minnesota. I was piqued by my recent discovery that the Wollastons and the Rabans both surface, at about the same time, in the sixteenth century, in the parish registers of the same English village — Penn in Staffordshire. So maybe … But I fear that the landowning Wollastons of Upper Penn were not on visiting terms with the yeoman-farmer Rabans of Lower Penn.

For other family stories of homesteading in eastern Montana, I have gone, again and again, to the magnificent, 690-page local history, Wheels Across Montana’s Prairie , assembled in the 1970s by the Prairie County Historical Society, and now, sadly, out of print and hard to come by. The book is a model of “community history”—a treasury of firsthand accounts of the great homesteading experiment, which will grow more valuable as the world of 1910-25 recedes from living memory. Mildred Memories on the O’Fallon , compiled and published by Mary Haughian, Terry, Montana, in 1979, follows the same pattern as Wheels , and usefully supplements it.

Of the several hundred other books consulted, in passing, while I was writing, one requires particular acknowledgment: Photographing Montana 1894–1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron by Donna M. Lucey, New York, 1991. It is thanks to Donna Lucey that Cameron’s work and papers were rescued (from the basement of the Terry house of Cameron’s friend and legatee, Janet Williams) and established as the Cameron Archive in the Montana Historical Society, Helena. Everyone who sees a Cameron photograph, or writes about Cameron, is deeply in Lucey’s debt. Were it not for Lucey’s work, Cameron would be unknown as a photographer. Lucey’s archival work, together with her fine book, has given Cameron a national reputation. In my own book, I have tried, as far as possible, to limit myself to quotation of material excluded from Photographing Montana , but I have been aware of working always in Lucey’s shadow. She will, I am afraid, find some of my judgments and interpretations to be heretic; I am extremely grateful to her nonetheless.

I could not have found the railroad pamphlets, those works of romantic fiction which drew the settlers west, without the prompt and considerable help of Marianne Farr, of the Mansfield Library, University of Montana at Missoula; Dorothea Simonson, of the Montana Historical Society; and Richard Engeman, of the University of Washington Libraries.

In Montana and North Dakota, a large number of people took time out to talk with me, often in the middle of a busy farming or ranching season. Some are named in the text. Many others are not. I owe special thanks to Wynona Breen, Clyde (Bud) Brown, Merle Clark, Lynn and Doris Householder, to whose ranches I kept on returning like a bad penny, with more questions and nascent ideas.

The long-suffering staff of the Seattle Public Library worked for me — as they work for every other library user — as a resourceful team of unpaid research assistants. Every few days, I would call them with more or less bizarre requests — agricultural wages, state by state, in 1917? Who were the chief lobbyists for the insertion of the world “God” into the Pledge of Allegiance? What was the name of Grant Wood’s New York dentist? — and, usually within the hour, the answer, often several pages long, would un-spool from my fax machine. Liz Stroup, the city librarian, runs a library which is extraordinarily hospitable to writers. Much of the reading for the book was done in the cherry-and-mahogany seclusion of the C. K. Poe Fratt Writers’ Room, a haven for authors on the run from the pram in the hall, as Cyril Connolly succinctly labeled the noises and demands of family life. Every public library should have a C. K. Poe Fratt Writers’ Room; that the Seattle library has one is yet another cause to give thanks for the literate amenities of this unfashionably bookish city.

Several friends were kind enough to read the manuscript, in bits and pieces, and to offer their encouragement, quibbles and editorial advice: David Shields, Michael Dibdin, K. K. Beck, Lorna Sage, Michael Upchurch, and, especially, Paul Theroux, whose interests in the book, and willingness to respond to each new fragment, kept me writing — as they have done, on and off, over what is now a quarter century of friendship.

I have the luck to be married to Jean Lenihan, a close and subtle reader, and a constant critic; and we have the luck to be parents of Julia, whose scribbles render my notebooks partially illegible, and who daily reminds me that writing is an indulgence that must stop the moment she comes home from her preschool.

J.R.

Seattle, May 1996