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....
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