Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains, and: Hard Grass: Life on the Crazy Woman Bison Ranch (review)

“What item are you never caught without?” someone asked Ruth McLaughlin. “Guilt,” she answered, speaking for generations of ranch kids (outreach.ewu.edu/getlit/2581.xml). Growing up on an eastern Montana wheat and cattle farm in the 1950s, McLaughlin experienced what we’d call extreme financial and emotional poverty. Her hard-working, sober, industrious parents were, says McLaughlin, “adequate to each day’s chores but without ambition,” able to feed and clothe their children but not to give them affection (68). Factors they did not control ruled their lives. Their impossible job, McLaughlin says, was to prove that small farms could support a family. As Mary Clearman Blew has written elsewhere, agriculture in arid western regions has been failing economically since the 1930s.

Still, McLaughlin says, “good years or bad they scrimped, as if denial gave them pleasure” (58). Her father “delivered news, even good news, in a stoic way; his refusal to take pleasure was a strategy to ward off disappointment” (40). McLaughlin’s memory for the details of that life, and her utter honesty, may revive painful memories for those raised in an austerity that seemed to gratify parents who had lived through the Dirty Thirties. How many of us still change out of our “good” clothes when we get home from town or work “to preserve them” (111)?

Perhaps she has also uncovered a reason why “outsiders” own so many western ranches. Some ranchers drove their children away; others insisted they get an education so they wouldn’t have to work as hard as their parents. Either method eventually delivered the land to different owners, including some large-scale operators who exploit instead of nurture.

Writers lauding the survival qualities of plains pioneers wrote mostly of physical hardship, but McLaughlin notes that while her ancestors “did not complain … [and] did not give in to fear and worry,” they also did not admit “affection and joy” (68). Isolated from their urban classmates, country kids may not have realized how different our families were. Only years later did McLaughlin understand how the lives of her sisters, one born with cerebral palsy, the other with Down syndrome, might have been improved. “Secrets,” she says, “we kept them inside, following the pattern of parents and grandparents” (80).

The effects remain. “All these years later,” she writes, “I can’t shrug off feeling poor. I rinse out plastic bags … as if poverty is encoded in my DNA” (174). Her chapter titles are as tight-lipped as any rancher: “Hunger,” “Bully,” “Normal,” “Journey.” McLaughlin says her grandfather, like other pioneers, envisioned a prosperous future, “But history erased him” (146). She has given us an account no one else has written: the tangled effects of our grandparents’ pioneering spirits on later generations of plains residents. Her daughter still feels guilty about buying good clothes, and her son “has lived so austerely on his scholarship that he may graduate with money in the bank” (174). Given the nation’s current economic troubles, perhaps some of these inherited traits will become assets.

Mary Zeiss Stange and her husband, who ranch with bison in eastern Montana, are the modern successors to those farming pioneers, trying again to live with the land’s requirements. Hard Grass, writes Stange, is “an extended inquiry into what it means to be ‘ranch’” (xiii).

Acknowledging her outsider’s perspective, Stange reflects that having sunk roots in the land, “against her better judgment,” she wants to present an honest portrait of what living on that land can do (xiii). She notes her own idiosyncrasies, and those of her neighbors, with the dry humor characteristic of longtime plains residents. “I know of no other part of the country where ‘ethnic,’ meaning ‘not from around here’ … is a category...