Bad Land: An American Romance.

By 1909, when the U.S. Congress passed the Enlarged Homestead Act, doubling the size of federal land grant parcels to 320 acres, America's pioneering phase lay mostly behind her. Lewis and Clark were mythic figures a century old; decades had passed since the Central and the Union Pacific linked up in Utah; Little Bighorn was a fading memory; towns and cities of all sizes dotted the West. Yet some places on the map still had to be filled in, like the semi-arid plains of western South Dakota and eastern Montana.

The Milwaukee Road rail line had just been completed through these bad-lands; settlements were needed. An odd mix of expansionist zeal and Jeffersonian political anxiety had driven nineteenth-century homesteading - "Land without population is a wilderness," proclaimed rail magnate James J. Hill, "and population without land is a mob" - and now it proved good for one last burst of action. Congress was duly lobbied, railroad agents spread pamphlets far and near; and once more the dreamers came, from the cities of the East and Midwest, from the nations of Europe, packing emigrant trains headed for places they themselves were still to create.

The hopes they came with, the lives they staked out, and the failures they endured - this is the stuff of Bad Land: An American Romance, Jonathan Raban's superb new study of the prairie rail towns of eastern Montana. Raban, an English writer transplanted to the American West, pays a debt of tribute to those immigrants who preceded him, in harder times and under infinitely harsher conditions. Unjaded by the moral costs of westward ho-ism, indeed haunted by its sorrowful grandeur, Raban reconstructs the lives of people who "came over, went broke, quit their homes, and moved on elsewhere": a story "so American," he notes, "that some Americans would not recognize it as a story."

An Englishman raised in a world of green gardens and tidy villages turns out to make an ideal chronicler of life on the desolate Montana plains. Raban's motivating impulse is awe, at the immensity both of the landscape and of the American dreaming that sent people out into it, flushed with faith in this country's "miraculous power of individual redemption." Bad Land sets out to scrutinize the myth-making behind the miracle. A chapter titled "Fictions" surveys emblematic texts: paeans to growth such as James J. Hill's Highways of Progress; popular romances, with names like The Simple Life or A Girl of the Limberlost, exalting the virtues of rural life; primary-school readers with their sober lessons on the virtues of frugality. Raban traces the immense influence upon Montanans of Hardy W. Campbell's 1902 Soil Culture Manual, which counseled aggressive topsoil plowing to promote "capillary action" in the semiarid plains, promising wheat yields of 40 bushels an acre and up. Subtitled "The Camel for the Sahara Desert," Campbell's "dry-farming" manual sold millions, taking a place alongside the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress in the trio of sacred settler texts. Meanwhile, railroad pamphlets in a dozen languages spread the good news through Europe - complete with illustrations of farmers plowing up furrows of golden coins. All in all, Raban sums up, prospective homesteaders were given "no more real idea of Montana than they had of the dark side of the moon. But they were devout believers and imaginers."

Drawn from memoirs, interviews, and county historical records, the many personal stories told in Bad Land shine with humor and the glint of big risks being run. Raban also looks at artists - other devout imaginers confronting the badlands' forbidding perspectives. He offers a beguiling portrait of settler photographer Evelyn Cameron, in whose pictures houses appear "shaken out over the prairie like dice," and of the celebrated Hudson River School panoramist Albert Bierstadt and his struggles to sketch the seasicky monotony of the plains. The more they defeated his conventional romanticism, Raban argues, the more they induced in Bierstadt "the 'sensation of agreeable horror' that Burke defined as the essence of the sublime in nature." Adroitly Raban uses the responses of artists to highlight the picture of bleak prospects facing the homesteaders. Bierstadt is a painter "humbled by featureless space." Thomas Hart Benton admires the "brute magnitude" of the plains, where "the universe is stripped to dirt and air, to wind, dust, clouds, and the white sun," and "human effort is seen...in all its painful futility." Robert Louis Stevenson puts it most bluntly: "What livelihood," he muses, "can repay a creature for a life spent in this huge sameness?"

Not much of one, it turned out. The homesteaders' dreams were built on a narrow margin: prospering or perishing turned on the difference between twenty inches of rain a year and fifteen; and they got fifteen. Instead of the bounteous harvests promised by Campbell's crank theories, settlers faced a swiftly depleted topsoil and the prospect of a slow, hungering decline. In the summer of 1917 came plagues and pests, and drought not far behind. Ruin became inevitable. It was known as "starving out" - you stayed until there was nothing, and then you left.

Bad Land is crammed with facts worth knowing: that Rocky Mountain juniper grows to be 2000 years old; that fencing one's property was a far bigger project for the homesteader than building a house; that rural communities rigged primitive telephones to those fences known as "talkaphones,", calling each other along the barbed wire long before the advent of dedicated lines. Raban is that rare writer equally enthusiastic about people, things, and ideas. His voice is urbane, and though he exploits shamelessly the special dispensation we grant the British to use obscure words ("nonage," "finical," "spatchcock," to name a few), he manages to get away with it, thanks in part to a charming self-deprecation.

Despite its companionable charm, however, this is serious, even profound writing, which gathers fateful drama as the settlers' high hopes and the plains' inhospitableness move toward their in-eluctable collision. "You have to wonder what the government was up to," muses a descendant decades later, "the way they shipped people out here to just about the poorest damn land in the whole United States." And while irony is reserved for those who lured settlers with false promises, the transaction Raban cares most about lies not between man and man, but between man and nature. Nature's cruelty hangs menacingly over Bad Land. In the face of this abiding drama, with its wearying punishments and surprise redemptions, Raban's prose achieves at times a Conradian power.

Bad Land sends us out with an ideal traveler - an eager dilettante with a nose for a good story, an admiring attentiveness to other people's knowledge, and a ready sense of wonder. Raban finds ruins of the past everywhere. Abandoned farms outnumber survivors, and Bad Land opens with the author stopping to visit one. In the wrecked living room, mice nest in the sofa; a foldaway ironing board stands open. On the floor is a musty rubble of papers and books, including a copy of Campbell's Soil Culture Manual, and beneath it a notebook with the family budget - small expenditures which mount over time to a debt of $5688.90, the sum circled in a distraught hand.

It is an eerie, haunted moment, this look into how things fell apart. Raban says this story is so familiar to us Americans that we barely recognize it, but he's wrong about that. The truth is, it's a story we resist. Our national epic has been one of expansion and success, while the story of Montana - this chapter of it, at any rate - is one of contraction and failure. Raban tracks some of the former homesteaders and their children farther west, to Oregon and California, where many ended up working in manufacturing or defense. Interviewed decades later about their years on the plains, they seem hardly able to believe it was their own lives; they are disconnected, as from a period of psychic trauma.

The allure of abandoned places holds particular resonance for Americans, encapsulating both the promise of moving on and the dread of rootlessness, of disappearing without a trace. With thoughtful irony, Raban subtitles his book "An American Romance," by which I take it he means the romance of ruins, romanticism's melancholy tribute to the triumph of nature over human aspiration. Our national project has democratized ruin along with success, inviting Everyman to play in his own small way at Ozymandias, littering our landscape like no other country's with discarded hopes. Part travelogue, part social history, part meditation on the transience of human striving, Jonathan Raban's elegy for the homesteader era takes us on a poignant American journey, giving glimpses of a hardscrabble dream whose numbers finally just didn't add up.

Rand Richards Cooper's most recent book is Big As Life (Dial Press).