In Bad Land, Jonathan Raban takes the reader on an enthralling journey into the least-populated and least-charted region in the United States – the Badlands of southeastern Montana – and finds there the heart and soul of the country. Bringing to life the extraordinary landscape of the prairie and the homesteaders whose dreams foundered there, and reaching forward from the start of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, Bad Land uncovers the dangerous legacy of American innocence gone sour.