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Doug Hellinger, a fourth-generation farmer on the high plains of northern Montana, drives his sprayer truck around his grandmother’s abandoned barn, a symbol of the state’s agricultural past. Today, with only enough soil moisture to raise one wheat crop every other year, Hellinger sprays herbicide to keep the weeds down in his fallow fields. In the early 1900s the area was promoted as an agricultural paradise, where settlers could get 320 acres nearly free under the federal Homestead Act. Such boomerism, along with above-average rainfall, drew eighty-two thousand homesteaders from the eastern US and Europe to the state. But when dry conditions returned in 1917—and stayed for the next eight years—half the farmers in the state lost their farms, and seventy thousand of those new Montanans moved on.

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Doug Hellinger, a fourth-generation farmer on the high plains of northern Montana, drives his sprayer truck around his grandmother’s abandoned barn, a symbol of the state’s agricultural past. Today, with only enough soil moisture to raise one wheat crop every other year, Hellinger sprays herbicide to keep the weeds down in his fallow fields. In the early 1900s the area was promoted as an agricultural paradise, where settlers could get 320 acres nearly free under the federal Homestead Act. Such boomerism, along with above-average rainfall, drew eighty-two thousand homesteaders from the eastern US and Europe to the state. But when dry conditions returned in 1917—and stayed for the next eight years—half the farmers in the state lost their farms, and seventy thousand of those new Montanans moved on.

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