As he did in one of my favorite travel books Passage to Juneau, Raban combines historical narrative, natural history, and personal observation in a seamless way to paint a vivid picture of a place and how it came to be the way it is. In Bad Land, the place is the plains of eastern Montana. In the early part of the 20th century, the railroads and the US government encouraged Montana homesteading, establishing towns every dozen miles or so along the railway and granting land that was essentially free. However, the romantic picture of honest toil converting the arid plains into a new Eden met with the reality of dry summers and harsh winters. Raban shows how the homesteading experience has colored the mindset of the western United States, much as the legend of the cowboy has. My only complaint is that Raban explicitly repeats his theme too many times — perhaps the chapters originally appeared as separate articles?
This book is a good companion to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. It provides a ground-level illustration of the difficulties that John Wesley Powell warned about.
No comments:
Post a Comment