Here Jonathan Raban applies his literary erudition to boomtown building in the American West. He was working on "Bad Land" (published in 1996), an exploration of the early twentieth-century homesteading experience in eastern Montana, where American optimism and railroad promotions combined to create communities that were destined to wither in arid reality. One of them was Ismay, Montana, which was briefly notorious for informally renaming itself "Joe, Montana," in 1993, and more recently made the news for returning its federal COVID stimulus funding. The mayor of the community of approximately 17 people explained that as the town has no municipal water supply, no paved roads, and no sewer system, it had no real use for the proffered first installment of $4,853.35.
Raban also wondered about the south King County town of Auburn, which has not dwindled like Ismay, though neither has it become the "loveliest village of the plain." He was correct that it gets its name from the Goldsmith poem. That was after the original name, Slaughter, in commemoration of a Lt. William A. Slaughter who was killed in the "Indian War" of 1856, was determined to be a curb on growth.Dear Murray,
This is a scribbled postscript to a party here on August 3rd, ...
In the meantime I have a thought/query. I've lately been nagged by the question of just how well-known in the West was Oliver Goldsmith's poem "The Deserted Village", with its idealised picture of rural life. I remember the first time I drove past Auburn, and wondered idly if its name might be an allusion to the poem ("Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain..."), and the memory was cranked up the other day, when I was Ismay, MT (and the scene of Percy Wollaston's memoir) and read the first issue of The Ismay, published in 1908, which had a booster-poem on its front page whose last four lines go as follows:
...Long may she thrive while countless homes do stand
on such abundant and fertile land.
While natives listen at eve's alluring strains,
Blest little Ismay, youngest city of the plains!
Well, the author of that one clearly has a memory of Goldsmith somewhere in his or her head, as several earlier lines confirm.
It makes good sense to me that when the railroad companies and the government got into the business of village-making between abut 1880 and 1914, Goldsmith's poem would have made a nice piece of propaganda. In his version of things, landlordism, the spread of the great estates and the enclosure acts were destroying the pastoral life of rural England.
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth
accumulates and men decay.
But in democratic America (or so I imagine the gist of the propaganda), one could turn the clock back and reconstruct the kind of rural idyll that had largely died in undemocratic England in the eighteenth century. Sweet Auburn redivivus! Blest little Ismay! If one has Goldsmith on one hand and Percy Wollaston in the other, quite an interesting chime is struck, I think, between the two. If there's something to this, then some of the mental energy and picture-building that went into the homesteading movement came from an odd, very American version of rural nostalgia.
The irony is, of course, that no lovely villages have ever been more rapidly deserted than those of the Badlands and western plains. Goldsmith would have been appalled by the rise of the ranch over the homestead and by the way in which the homestead acts were exploited by the timber, mining, and railroad corporations, who managed to make the activities of the English landlords look like very small beer indeed.
The rich man's joys increase, the poor's decay...
There are several Auburns scattered over the U.S.; some, like the one in New York, may well predate the Goldsmith poem. But I do wonder whether the Auburns of WA, California and Nebraska, for instance, consciously set out to recreate the loveliest village of the plain.
Where then, ah where, shall poverty reside,
to 'scape the pressure of contiguous pride?
...asks Goldsmith; and, some 100 years later, courtesy of the railroad companies, comes the answer--why, western Washington, or eastern Montana...
Now you'll tell me that Auburn was named after one Hiram Aloysius Auburn, otherwise known as the Green River Timber King. But I'd love to believe that it got its name from someone thinking of "The Deserted Village" -- and thinking that a village in the far West might enjoy the innocence long lost by its counterparts in England.
Crabbe's response to Goldsmith ("The Village") is much the better poem; and funny, too, with his castigation of the stupidity and brutishness of rural life. I love his description of the villages as "sedately torpid and devoutly dumb". If only the homesteaders had read Crabbe instead, an enormous amount of human misery might have been spared.
No need to respond to this--and certainly not in writing. But next time we speak, will you burst my balloon on the naming of Auburn, or leave it intact?
My feet are in agony. I'm wearing in a pair of new snakeboots in preparation for my second visit to Ismay, where three weeks ago I spent most of my time walking through the buffalo grass like a heron on hot bricks. There were rattlesnakes galore. But I am totally bewitched by that extraordinary landscape -- maybe because it is nearly as alien and solitary as the ocean. Poor old Wollastons (and all their neighbors).
My best,
Jonathan
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