HOMESTEADING.

By Percy Wollaston. Lyons & Burford. 131 pp. $20

Jonathan Raban’s lyrical 1996 book Bad Land recounts the settlement of eastern Montana early in this century. A heretofore unpublished memoir by a settler, Homesteading was one of Raban’s primary sources. Wollaston was six years old in 1910 when his family left a rented farm in South Dakota to take title to a 320-acre homestead near Ismay, Montana. They built a house, planted crops, and survived the winter —"I don’t think there is anything that can make cold seem more penetrating or dismal than that creak of wagon tires in cold snow." After a few years, though, Ismay fell into a slump. The livery barn closed, the lumber yard burned, and a tornado leveled the town hall, "leaving the piano sitting forlornly in its place with the sheet music still on the rack." Wollaston moved west in 1924, planning on college but ending up a firefighter; his parents abandoned the farm two years later.

Bad Land portrays the homesteaders as tragic figures—bamboozled by railroad tycoons who needed more residents in order to make new rail lines profitable, gulled by a balmy theory that rainfall increases as population grows, exploited by shiftless bankers and too-easy credit. Homesteading, by contrast, depicts plucky survivors. "The next meal might be potatoes and water gravy but you didn’t hear anything about hardship unless somebody burned out or broke a leg," Wollaston writes. He tells of a drifter who came across a Norwegian farmer’s homestead. The farmer was away, so, as was customary, the visitor fixed himself a meal. After dinner he sat down, had a smoke, then took the shotgun down from the farmer’s wall and blew his head off. Raban, in his foreword to Homesteading, intones that this "horribly memorable suicide" overhangs the entire memoir. But to Wollaston, it’s a blithe yarn building to a punchline. Once the body is removed, the farmer frantically scrubs down the cabin, then prepares to retire for the night—and, in the farmer’s words, "there was one of his dommed eyes, right in the very middle of my bed."

Where Raban sees villainy and victimization, Wollaston sees self-reliance and goodheartedness. Whatever the explanation for the two authors’ divergent viewpoints—the rosy glow of Wollaston’s childhood memories, the generational outlook of someone who came of age in the 1920s (as opposed to Raban’s 1960s)—the chipper, anecdotal Homesteading is a worthy complement and counterpoint to Bad Land. "We are all of us pioneers in our time," Wollaston writes, "wearing the clothes that are most suitable or available, making the best of the present situation and learning to cope with new conditions."

Along with Wollaston’s recollections, Homesteading offers a handful of family photographs. More numerous and evocative photos can be found in the biography of another prominent figure in Bad Land, Donna M. Lucey’s Photographing Montana, 1894–1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron, back in print from Knopf.

—Stephen Bates