John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California and grew up near the Pacific coast where many of his earlier successful novels and stories are based. He later moved to New York and by 1960 had been living there for some time when wanderlust gripped him. He felt he had lost touch with the America and Americans whose lives he had written about in earlier times and wanted to reconnect with them. He had a truck converted to a camper and set out on a road trip with just his ‘blue’ standard poodle Charley for company.

He doesn’t have any great adventures and this is certainly not an odyssey of rediscovery, either of himself or others. It is just a simple account of his travels and the people he meets, written in the sharp spare style for which he is admired. Fifty years on it’s more social history than travelogue. The section that will stick in the mind, though, is near the end of the book when Steinbeck travels through the southern states. 1960 was the time when the protests over desegregation and civil rights were at their height as America struggled towards racial integration. Those old enough to remember will recall the way black children were ‘bussed’ into all-white schools (Martin Luther King led the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, and the March on Washington was in 1963). Steinbeck’s account of the vitriolic and obscene behaviour of a group of women in New Orleans known as the Cheerleaders, who mounted daily protests outside white schools being forced by the Federal government to take black children, is equal to any of his earlier powerful prose.

I was never very keen on history at school. All those kings and emperors, treaties and revolutions, popes and prime ministers had me at best confused and at worst bored. In later life I found out that history isn’t all like that. Sometimes it can tell you about the lives of the ordinary people, and their story can be very different from the history my teachers wanted me to learn. This book is history from the point of view of the small people, those who were taken in by the propaganda of the rich and powerful: specifically the people who were persuaded to settle the dry lands of the American west, focusing particularly on the story of Montana.

It’s also about a landscape – the wide, flat, dry landscape of Montana, dotted with illogical settlements created out of nothing on a whim and the stroke of a pen, now either abandoned and derelict or struggling on in a spirit of embattled and determined independence. Raban writes about the problem of representing this landscape, one so empty and big that capturing it with paintbrush or camera is almost impossible. It is a landscape that can drive people mad with feelings of isolation, where “He’s got loneliness” was a diagnosis of an illness not just a description of a mental state. I wonder if it’s a coincidence, or fanciful on my part, if I say that the book as a whole takes the same form. It roams over the entire landscape, doing its best to capture both the vastness and the detail, with few high points but many surprising and intriguing details.

Raban’s sources are firstly the people themselves, either in their own voices where they have left records or through the recollections of their descendants. His meticulous research has also brought back to light much contemporary written and photographic material: railway company booklets, agricultural machinery catalogues and so on. From these he weaves his story of how the settlers were duped into taking homesteads in Montana in the first place; how after a few years when the weather was unusually kind they found themselves struggling to scrape a living in a harsh dry environment, baking hot in the summer, bitterly cold in the winter. And how inevitably many of them went broke and moved on further west to try again, leaving behind a hard core of survivors who were prepared to struggle on against the odds.

If Montana has a reputation for being the home of redneck survivalist right-wing extremists Bad Land gives some insight into how and why these attitudes have developed. One can both sympathise with and despair over the young woman playing a full part in the mucky, bloody, brutal annual cattle-branding, who plans to go to agricultural college but rejects schools that are too ‘green’ and ‘liberal’ in favour of one “where there aren’t too many tree-huggers”.

So it’s an interesting book: not exciting but certainly not dull, repaying the time spent reading it and leaving the reader better informed than before about one particular corner of America and the culture that defines it.

The book describes the experiences of an exceptional English woman travelling alone in the Rocky Mountains in 1873. This was the time before Colorado became a State of the Union, and life was mostly hard and brutish. Isabella Bird happily endured hardships and deprivation that would daunt most modern travellers. The book is composed from the letters she sent to her sister in England.