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Overview
The Medicine Line: Life and Death on the North AmericanBorderland, is a complex and oftentimes dramatic mix of narrative storytelling and history in which ironies are explored, patterns of deed and response are uncovered, examined and evaluated...Beth Ladow is a compelling stylist who writes with warmth and insight, and she has given us a smart book, which will help us understand one another, and a good read. We need more books like this one. -- William Kittredge, Author of THE NATURE OF GENOROSITY(knopf,2000)
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781135296155 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
| Publication date: | 10/18/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Beth Ladow earned her M.A. in History at Harvard University and her Ph.D. at Brandeis and is now and independent scholar and writer. She is a commentator for National Public Radio in Boston and lives in Winchester, Massachusetts.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Drawing the Line
George VandeVen nodded toward the broad seascape of Montana prairie and gave his voice the inflection of someone dismissing a terrible rumor. "We didn't even know a line was there," he said. He was referring to the U.S.-Canada border, our destination that day driving north from the town of Chinook, and as we stepped from his Dodge Sierra pickup truck onto the homestead site where he was born in 1913, eighty-five years earlier, it was hard not to believe him.
North Americans tend to divide the American story from the Canadian along this boundary, as if it split the past as neatly as a meat cleaver. How many Americans know that in the summer of 1793 the British North American explorer Alexander Mackenzie made his own trip to the Pacific Ocean through present-day Canada, twelve years before Lewis and Clark famously paddled up the Missouri not fifty miles south of Chinook, carrying a copy of Mackenzie's Voyages in their boat, as well as copies of British explorer David Thompson's charts and British-made maps? How many Americans or Canadians know the saga of the building of parallel railroads, one American, one Canadian, some eighty years later less than a hundred miles apart across George VandeVen's childhood home? The West, we have come to believe, is an "American" story.
It was midmorning, soon after we had begun our four hours of jolting over dirt roads under an already furnace-hot sky, when VandeVen, a second Chinook octogenarian named Anne Schroeder, and my eleven-year-old daughter, Kate, and I made our firststop.We all clambered out of the truck except for Kate, who remained in the covered truck bed reading, patiently suffering her mother's historical field research. I could hardly blame her. The ground was a sparse mix of brown and green grasses a few inches high, clumps of silvery sage, and little prickly pears, connected by a dry and cracked tissue of gray earth. Cowless, telephone-pole-less, practically fenceless, to my eye it was an arbitrary port of call in a vast, undifferentiated ocean of space and distance. A place of forgetting, haunted by disappointment. But VandeVen was brimming with life. As we walked over the ground he gave shape to the place with memories. He introduced a human scale. Here, he said, was the site of the garbage dump, still riddled with shards of pottery and metal. Over there was the coulee where his pregnant mother had trekked down to get water, in what year? 1916? She had had to stop and rest on her way back up, burdened with the heavy bucket and with child. Here was the house. I followed George to a shallow pit about thirty feet by twenty feet where the sagebrush cropped up vigorously like the waves of a rough sea. He bent over into it and, like Crusoe finding his shipwreck, lifted one end of a slim twenty-five-foot pole, the roof beam to the underground house, called a dugout, where he was born and raised—the VandeVen place. "This will always be home," George said. It was, he insisted, a home indifferent to the international border twenty miles to the north.
The border, after all, had emerged more as a political construct than as a natural feature of the landscape. In April 1803, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France without knowing much about its northern edge. Thomas Jefferson, then president, pulled from memory or from somewhere in his Monticello study an unratified article, buried in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht between France and Britain, that proposed dividing New France from British North America. It specified a boundary at 49 degrees north latitude. On January 15, 1804, Jefferson wrote a memo to his diplomats in France and Spain suggesting this line as the northern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase, and the world's longest continuous straight international border was created.
To Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, whom Jefferson sent west to explore the Purchase in 1804, the Monticello memorandum was of little interest. Like Jefferson, they hoped to cross the 49th parallel along a Missouri River tributary, an American river extending north that might give the United States an excuse to claim more land. In May 1805, following the Missouri through a country they described as "desert and barren" and "astonishingly dry," the explorers would come close to Jefferson's boundary—just below its exact midpoint, in fact, between Minnesota and the Pacific Ocean, on the high plains of present-day Montana. Here they might have followed a smaller river north beyond the 49th parallel. Yet they did not. They had trouble finding firewood. They judged the soil "poor." While Jefferson believed it would take a thousand generations to settle the West, Clark judged as nil the prospects for populating this area along the Missouri. "I do not think it can ever be settled," he declared. As it turned out, both Clark and Jefferson were wrong. It took only five generations to settle the West, and the last generation came here, to one of the toughest arid prairie environments in the world, on a short stretch of the 49th parallel boundary between the United States and Canada that the last of the roaming Plains Indians would come to call "the medicine line."
Today, history divides on either side of the border, into the distant camps of the American Wild West and the orderly Canadian hinterland, peacefully separate national stories. Since 1867, we believe, when Britain withdrew its military outposts and Canada became a nation, the U.S.-Canada border has lapsed into an agreeable somnolence. Yet what is now the world's most peaceful border, its largest commercial sieve, was for more than a century the battleground of empires. The United States and British Canada, after all, were continental rivals. By the late nineteenth century, in the wake of the American Civil War, escalating native-white conflict, and the making of an independent Canada, the struggle for empire aroused familiar and often nationalistic visions. The forces of nature, however, were so strong, and the populations so mixed, that telling an American citizen from a Canadian became increasingly difficult. All were driven or drawn to this place, their last, best hope—the Indians for escape and refuge, the settlers for the open western lands that seemed nearly gone—and lived a common story of hardship, disappointment, failure and, in fewer cases than not, persistence.
The medicine line forms a small part of the U.S.-Canada boundary, scarcely more than a hundred miles long—a place that most people have never heard of. Stand today on the border, at the center of the 49th parallel boundary curve, facing the Rocky Mountains 200 miles to the west, and you will see why. To the left, the American half of medicine line country, lies Blaine County, Montana, and near its center, just south of the old VandeVen place, is the small town of Chinook, thirty miles south of the border on dirt and gravel roads. Beyond that lie the Bears Paw Mountains, known locally as the Bear Paws, and the Missouri River at the county's southern border. To the right is the Cypress District of Saskatchewan, including the Cypress Hills and the towns of Eastend and Maple Creek, thirty and sixty miles north of the border. Together, the two sides cover an area about the size of Vermont. Natural boundaries are absent. There is no river here, no precipice, no mountain divide, no indentation or canyon. The prairie stretches seamlessly outward, as if the wind were blowing it toward the Rockies. Straddling the border, feet between cacti and clumps of gray-green sage, one conjures other borders with imposing names—iron curtains, great walls, grand rivers, Pyrenees. Those are borders where history has physical shape, borders that define peoples and their enemies.
Not so here. No guard keeps watch, no narcotics agent stands at the ready. There is only a fence with four strands of barbed wire, and sometimes not even that. This boundary seems the creation of a minimalist. Traveling the long stretches of the Trans-Canada Highway, or along U.S. Highway 2 to Chinook, it is easy to see why so many visitors compare this country to the ocean. The Rocky Mountains are a tidal wave to a vast, tawny sea. A mailbox, a gravel driveway, and trees clumped around buildings or in the long row of a shelterbelt indicate a ranch. Occasional fences cast a wide berth, nets of barbed wire cordoning off crops and ungulates that show from the roadside like bright algae or schools of fish. The small towns are strung out in lonely archipelagos, each island posted with signs, like pier posts along a quay: motels, cafes, chambers of commerce. "Rudyard: Home of 596 nice people and one old sorehead!" A country of reluctant charm, it is seldom crossed, less often visited. Walking along what seems scarcely more than a home for prairie dogs, we can hardly imagine a place more uneventful. Its history, however, holds another prospect.
My first introduction to this borderland came through reading Wolf Willow, Wallace Stegner's memoir of growing up in medicine line country. Stegner, who went on to win the Pulitzer prize for literature, spent his boyhood here, from 1914 to 1920, in the town of Eastend in winter and on a homestead on the boundary line during the summers. A brilliant, powerful writer and an even more charismatic and influential human being, Stegner framed the questions of this borderland frontier throughout his life. Yet he did not answer them. What was Canadian—the line, limits, the law? What was American—the frontier, the limitless, the lawless? The border, he wrote, "ran directly through my childhood ... disturbing as a hair in butter"—somehow a divide in affiliations and loyalties, yet artificial, ignored, undistinguished. I was intrigued, charmed, and unsatisfied. Shouldn't the line by which we measure American and Canadian distinctiveness have stronger medicine than that?
My interest in medicine line country is also rooted in a childhood conundrum of what it means to be an American. My first awareness of the U.S.-Canada border as something significant came at an early age. It wasn't so much that we crossed it every July or August on forays from my family's summer home in Montana, when I would press my nose against the car window to see the treeless swath through the forest that some mysterious boundary keeper had made with herbicide to make the border visible. It was to be found in the expression of an uncle of mine, a worried man with a mole in the exact center of his forehead, who used to sit at the kitchen table in our cabin in Glacier Park, not forty miles from the Canadian border, declaring that the condition of the United States had at last sunk so low that he was pulling up stakes. "By God," he would say in his customary tone of world-weary resignation, "I'm goin' to Canada."
Like most Americans, I wasn't sure what the border, or the borderland, meant. I knew the fame of the 100th meridian, the line where the arid plains so dramatically begin that has determined so much of the story of America and the West. Only after I began to study history did I discover the medicine line. Here, I realized, was another line worth examining—one that could explain some deep part of the Canadian and American experience that our separate nationalistic television documentaries leave out. Following a long tradition that includes Stegner, I am a westerner come East, then returned West, in order that I might explain the West to myself.
When W. J. Twining brought his tired body and weather-beaten chronometer across the 49th parallel, he saw little sign of civilization. As chief astronomer for the United States surveying party in 1874, Twining was spending his third and last summer locating the U.S.-Canada boundary, and he had traveled much of the way on the upper Missouri River, through the Dakota and Montana Territories, in a boat that did not inspire confidence. "No one in search of the amenities need look on the deck of an up-river boat," Twining complained of his party's rig, the rattletrap Fontenelle, whose rough machinery and primitive design he found "constantly suggestive of unpleasant accidents." Its condition was so bad that Twining attributed the absence of boiler fires or explosions on the upper Missouri to the "special providences" rather than to "any skill on the part of the builders or owners." "Certainly no thought of anything so worthless as human life entered into their calculation," he concluded.
The scene awaiting the Fontenelle on July 24 as it pulled into Fort Benton in Montana Territory, the backwater burg where an upriver boat ended its journey, was no more an advertisement for civilized life than the boat itself. The eye could take it in "at one glance," as fur trader James Willard Schultz described it—the rectangular adobe fort with cannons mounted at the corners, a few log cabins and adobe huts, the scattered camps of traders and trappers, strings of canvas-covered freighter wagons, clustered Indian tepees, and the Overland Hotel, a log structure likely offering a dinner of "boiled buffalo boss ribs, bacon and beans, 'yeast powder' biscuit, coffee with sugar, molasses, and stewed dried apples."
On the banks of the river waited a motley collection of Creoles, whites, and Indians, what Schultz described as "the entire population," turned out in the full regalia of a fading fur-trade economy: trader elites in long-tailed blue broadcloth coats with brass buttons and black cravats, their long hair neatly combed; trade company clerks and carpenters in black fustian suits and beaded moccasins; French-speaking Creoles in hooded coats and sash-tied buckskin trousers; bull whackers, mule skinners, and independent traders and trappers, festooned with knives and six-shooters and wearing buckskin suits and kit fox hats; Indians in leather leggings and calico shirts carrying bows and arrows or rifles; women in calico dresses and fringed shawls. Desperate for tobacco and liquor, they thronged the banks of the upper Missouri, the center of a thriving north-south trade zone, waving flags and firing cannons to greet the latest steamboat to arrive in Montana Territory. It was a greeting of exuberant, risk-taking hope reminiscent of the Fontenelle itself, the kind of hope a man of precision and science could not be expected to warm to—the kind of hope that, over the next fifty years, Twining's survey would unleash upon this borderland to a degree that he could not possibly have imagined.
Twining himself was among the crowd that day. The boat's progress had been so slow he had unloaded the survey party's livestock somewhere past Bismarck, Dakota, and made his way upriver on land. He arrived at Fort Benton on July 12, twelve days ahead of the Fontenelle, only to discover that the overburdened steamer had off-loaded a good part of his provisions when it hit shallow waters at Cow Island, 120 miles downriver.
In 1874, the calculations of engineers or astronomers like Twining had created few amenities on the Northern Plains. The fur trade, which had brought with it the presence of steamboats, distilleries, and the occasional cannon, had long since waned from its height in the 1830s. The cosmopolitan if crude Montana gold rush of the 1860s was over. The infant whiskey trade into Canada and the imminent arrival of railroads had yet to boost the economy. As Twining and his colleagues set out to meet their Canadian counterparts along the border, there was no promise of civilization in the air, only flies and dust.
Outside Fort Benton, the land was still home to Sitting Bull and his counterparts, Crowfoot, Piapot, and Poundmaker. On the prairie, the surveyors crossed the paths of other groups. Sioux, Assiniboine, Blackfeet, and Piegan Indians "hovered about our trail," noted the American first lieutenant Greene—curious, doing the visitors no harm, keeping their distance. At closer range, the newcomers also found nature's tracings, the cautionary signs of drought in the parched earth. The weather was "intensely hot," reported Twining's colleague Captain Gregory; water was "very scarce," and what they found was scarcely potable. The ground was "dry, hard, and fissured," as if from a very dry season, according to the Canadian Boundary Commission geologist. It was a world of cracks and trails, wind and grass. The only plumb line these men could see was the enduring straight edge of the horizon, where the enormous sky met the land. They had come to remedy that situation, to visibly divide and subdivide the land, to realize what the confident U.S. commissioner called "the final fixing" of the boundary.
By North American standards, they were a long time coming. The U.S.-Canada boundary had been uncertain since the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, when Thomas Jefferson had seized on the 49th parallel as its fixed edge. After the War of 1812, a complicated conflict fought between Britain and America on the seas and along the western frontier that ended in 1814 with no clear victor, Jefferson's boundary was finally ratified in the Treaty of 1818. It designated the 49th parallel as the international boundary running from the northwesternmost point of the Lake of the Woods (which sits nearly centered along Minnesota's northern border), above the headwaters of the Mississippi and on west to the Rocky Mountains. Two parallel and rival ways west—American and British—established in 1783 when the newly independent United States made an uneasy peace with Britain and British Canada in the Treaty of Paris, were now demarcated across the plains.
In 1823, five years after the border was established in theory, a United States surveying expedition under Major Stephen H. Long pounded an oak post on the west bank of the Red River bearing the letters G.B. on its north side and U.S. on the south. The first of several efforts to mark the boundary, Major Long's oak post had all the authority of a loosely anchored buoy at sea. Some jokester twisted it halfway around to put G.B. on the south side and U.S. on the north, a mocking testimony to the confusion over the border's exact location and its significance.
West of the Rockies in Oregon Territory, where border passions ran high by the 1840s, the slogan "Fifty-four-forty or fight!" made every schoolchild sound like an expansionist eager to extend U.S. territory north to the 54th parallel. This lasted until the Treaty of 1846 extended the boundary between the United States and Britain westward from the Rocky Mountains along not the 54th but the 49th parallel to the Strait of Georgia, between Vancouver Island and the mainland, stretching it to 1,300 miles of continuous curve. Settler agitation eventually prompted a joint British and American commission to survey the Oregon boundary, which took from 1857 to 1861. Except for a bitter dispute over who owned the San Juan Islands, which Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany finally arbitrated in favor of the United States in 1872, the countries agreed on the survey in 1869.
Over half of the 49th parallel boundary remained to be explored, 737 miles of it across the northern prairie. Here the border was determined with all the drama of setting up a tennis net. No slogans. Only petty disputes. Explorers and engineers visited only intermittently, disagreeing about where to fix its points. Major Long's oak post rotted before anyone bothered to turn it back around. The demarcating of the line from Ontario's Lake of the Woods to the Rockies could wait.
That no one was in a hurry was understandable. Early reports from the borderland were less than enthusiastic. "It appears to be irremediably sterile and useless," wrote one skeptic. He, like others, was unfavorably impressed. "I sometimes wonder if the original geographer who left an immense blank in the middle of the map of America and labeled it 'Great American Desert' was so far wrong," wrote one observer. Indeed the entire area was notably lacking in an essential resource. "Water was scarce, and usually unpleasantly alkaline.... Sometimes ... so impregnated with buffalo-urine as to partake of its color, and to be altogether disgusting to the stomach." "The [boundary] line actually cuts no growth of trees, or even bushes of any size, for a distance of six hundred miles," observed W. J. Twining. Everything west of 102 degrees longitude through the Dakotas and present-day eastern Saskatchewan he judged "unreclaimable." Another lamented the "terrible country," so poor "nobody would want it." All disparaged the prospects of ever settling this prairie. It was deemed "permanently sterile and unfit for the abode of civilized men."
They knew, above all else, that it was a dry country. They also knew what that might mean for anyone trying to live here. Aridity and drought, the most important ecological factors in the West's history, are, short of a dust bowl, subtle phenomena. But even an urban dweller cannot miss the sensation for long. The wind whacks at the backs of his eyeballs, and the extremes of heat, cold, and broad open space reduce him to an isolated speck of boiled or frozen flesh until he begins to notice that the place, where people inexplicably expect to grow things, is dry. Standing near the border, it is hard to believe that one-sixth of all the fresh water on earth is in Canadian lakes, ponds, rivers, and streams. The central North American plains have been in a rain shadow ever since the Rocky Mountains thrust up to the west about sixty million years ago. Mean annual precipitation in medicine line country is thirteen inches, and as low as nine to eleven inches in the driest section, a veritable desert near the international boundary. The rainfall that comes is fickle. About half the time, six to seven inches fall in May, June, and July. Other years, these months average about one inch less, except during drought years, which come unpredictably.
Many early travelers avoided the area altogether. Lewis and Clark hung close to the Missouri River where it now borders Blaine County and burned two dead cottonwoods for their campfires, the only wood they could find. Adventurer William Butler and Canadian expedition geologist H. Y. Hind in the mid-nineteenth century veered north of the district. Captain Sullivan of John Palliser's British expedition traversed the area's western edge in 1859. He left from the Cypress Hills near present-day Eastend, where Palliser himself remained reading prayers and making pemmican with the main party, and traveled south to the boundary, but left no record of the journey. Nevertheless, Palliser apparently felt no compunction about giving his name to Palliser's Triangle, the name by which millions came to identify southwestern Saskatchewan as an extension of the Great American Desert. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Palliser's Triangle had all the allure the Bermuda Triangle would exert a hundred years later. Even explorers avoided it.
And so it went until the 1870s, when John Macoun came along. An imaginative Irish botanist who became something of a Canadian Audubon and whose name still appears in the titles of Ottawa nature clubs, he turned the reputation of the Great American Desert on its ear. Passing through the country in what was probably an unusually wet year, Macoun gave an exaggerated description of its fertility. Palliser's Triangle suddenly became the prairie booster's agricultural Eden. Macoun hailed the region's agricultural promise with such fervor and conviction that his employer, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), found in his report one more rationalization for moving its route from more settled country to the international borderland farther south, where the CPR could more easily compete with future American railroad lines. Americans, too, turned optimistic, pushing relentlessly into the last remaining uncultivated ground in the United States, glorifying every alkali flat as potential farmland.
Behind this change in view, of course, was political change. In 1865, the United States ended the Civil War, which had interrupted the nation's furious migration westward. In 1867, Canada became a dominion, gaining in a bloodless transfer of power from Great Britain significant political autonomy and the burden of defending itself from attack. And in March 1870, the two-hundred-year reign of the fur trade over the Canadian West ended when the Hudson's Bay Company ceded to the new Dominion of Canada, in an exchange of territory equivalent to the Louisiana Purchase, its lease on holdings called Rupert's Land. Rupert's Land was an enormous territory: virtually two-thirds of present-day Canada, including all or parts of western Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, southern Alberta, and the eastern Northwest Territories. Anticipating settlement, both Canada and the United States were eager to survey their dormant border.
It took two and a half years for the United States and Canada to agree on the terms of a boundary survey. But in September 1872, gear in hand, the Canadian and American survey teams met at last at Pembina, Dakota. The Canadians, familiar with the tools of empire building, brought along a field library of several hundred volumes, including two volumes on Waterloo, Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, the potentially useful The Art of Travel and At Home in the Wilderness, and a raft of novels, plays, and poetry. The Americans, who admitted "limited means," brought themselves and their "old and somewhat dilapidated" equipment.
After waiting out a severe snowstorm lasting nearly four days, the surveyors hit their first snag. The Treaty of 1818 had specified that the boundary line should pick up from where it left off, at the "most northwestern point of the Lake [of the Woods]," to intersect the 49th parallel "due north or south as the case may be." The trouble was, nobody knew where the northwesternmost point of Lake of the Woods was. After some searching, the surveyors finally found a marker—inaccurate, they agreed—under several feet of swamp water. They began hewing their way south, hip deep through cold, boggy flats and then across the ice of the lake, until they located the 49th parallel. The American party, plagued by inadequate funds, soon retired for the winter, relieved that "no animals were lost, and none of the men seriously frozen." The Canadian party, meanwhile, in the true style of empire, grittily fought its way through Siberian conditions from the lake to the Red River, through ninety miles of swamps and timber to the plains. By spring, eight hundred miles of prairie stretched before them, across which they were to trace the curving, abstract line of the parallel. The Americans rejoined the Canadians in June, along with two companies of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry and five companies of the Sixth Infantry under the somber Major Marcus Reno, who had not yet made his name ignominious at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The heavy escort, it turned out, saw no combat. It was assigned to protect both Canadian and American parties impartially, but there was no need: the Blackfoot and Sioux were neutral.
For two summers the surveyors labored in shadeless, fly-filled camps, drinking fetid water, measuring their way West like a crawling inchworm chain by chain, cairn by cairn, mound by mound, over cactuses and coulees and buffalo wallows, across the Coteau du Missouri, past the half-Cree, half-white Métis hunting buffalo and the occasional band of Sioux or Assiniboine or Blackfeet, past the Sweetgrass Hills, south of the Cypress Hills, and on to the Rockies. They worked efficiently, each commission divided into several parties surveying alternate stations, averaging three and a half days at each. The astronomical parties measured their angles sixty times from the stars Cephei, Polaris, and Ursae Minoris at each of forty-one stations, hoping their errors averaged about seven feet. Building crews followed, planting eight-foot-high pyramidical iron pillars made in Detroit each mile to the western border of Manitoba, sixty of them in all, and thereafter building five- to eight-foot-high stone cairns or earth mounds every three miles across the plains, 388 markers all told. By August 1874 they were finished. They had marked the border, and in doing so, they had passed through a stew of races and cultures that would soon feel the significance of their work.
An Ojibwa standing north of the 49th parallel on the bank of the North Saskatchewan River with a land speculator in 1875 sensed trouble. "Do you see the Great White-man coming?" he asked his acquaintance. "No," replied the disingenuous speculator. "I do," said the Ojibwa, pointing east. "And I hear the tramp of the multitude behind him. When he comes you can drop in behind him and take up all the land claims you want, but until then I caution you to put up no stakes in our country."
The Ojibwa man clearly understood something of how the white man advanced. Providing the inspiration were the visionaries, the eastern planners, politicians, and investors who rarely came west themselves: Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries, whose century-old agrarian ideals still shaped American aspirations; Canadian statesman John A. Macdonald, who applied those same agrarian ideals to the Canadian prairies; Canadian-born American railroad magnate James J. Hill; and Scots-Canadian businessman and financier George Stephen, to name a few. They sent out a host of field specialists and laborers to divide up the land—astronomers, engineers, geologists, tracklayers—who came and went after a few seasons' work, spending not so much as a week in one spot. After these men who planted stakes and made lines came the multitudes. First and foremost, the Ojibwa intuitively understood, the makers of the lines were in the real estate business.
The United States got into real estate early. Strapped by national debt at the end of the Revolutionary War, the new nation sought solvency through the sale of its western lands. To that end, Congress devised an impressively simple and coherent scheme for turning public lands into private ones. Made into law as the Land Ordinance of 1785, the system closely followed the New England model of land distribution, with some concessions to the more free-form system of the South. The process went like this: After Indians and states ceded their lands to the federal government, surveyors from each state were to divide it into giant squares six by six miles called townships. Townships were then divided into thirty-six sections of one square mile or 640 acres each, numbered from one to thirty-six. The first axes of this grid to be established were a true north-south meridian drawn from a point on the Ohio River due north of the southern boundary of Pennsylvania, and an east-west baseline beginning from the same point. The government sold the surveyed land by township or section at public auction, and after the auction at land offices for a set minimum price, earmarking sales from section 16 and later also section 36 of each township to provide an interest-bearing fund for public schools. The government could also grant land for various purposes—to fund canals, roads, and eventually railroads. A few provisions were notably absent: land set aside for religious worship (customary in New England), limits on the amount of land that could be purchased, and something called preemption, a southern practice that gave preferential rights to squatters.
This grid survey was the elegant brainchild of Thomas Jefferson. In the ongoing debate over Jefferson's brand of republicanism, we might expect to find in the survey, as we do, elements of both a republic of virtuous small landowners and a capitalist system of self-interested land use. From the beginning, of course, the scheme did not meet Jefferson's highest standard, which was to distribute public lands free of charge to the unemployed poor, in keeping with his notion that "small land holders are the most precious part of a state." Even he recognized that sale was necessary and speculators inevitable. Nevertheless, the system did seem to promise a prosperous republican society of democratic freeholders, firmly grounded in liberty because firmly grounded in land. Jefferson may have rephrased John Locke's dictum, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" when he borrowed it for the Declaration of Independence, but for the West, he rested his hopes squarely on property.
Aesthetically, Jefferson's system is elegant. Across more than two centuries and two million square miles of federal territory, its checkerboard pattern, still strikingly visible from the air today, has remained the framework for the sale and management of U.S. federal lands. In practice, the system proved difficult, an early prototype of the kind of mess often associated with a large federal program. Federal lands distribution became a taffy pull of political compromise and local illegal and extralegal modification. Between 1789 and 1834, Congress passed 375 land laws. Preemption, for example, a perennial point of contention between southerners and northerners, made its way back into law in a series of acts in the 1830s. In the 1860s, southern secession encouraged further complications. The North's extensive railroad grants and the Homestead and Agricultural College Acts produced years of debate between pro-business and pro-small-farmer factions, both of whom claimed to represent the interests of "the people." As for farmers, far from Jefferson's contented yeomen, they themselves proved to be speculators looking to profit from land sales.
The truth was, Jefferson's ideal remained just that. Railroad grants, large holdings, and alien ownership continued to concentrate land in the hands of developers and speculators as they always had, with the 1.4 million small farmers who received final patents on homesteads torturously bringing up the rear guard. Even after disagreement over western lands erupted into civil war, the basic framework for their distribution remained intact. In the manner of a leaky upriver boat filled not just with surveyors but with cut-throat competitors, the system lurched along in serviceable, if precarious, fashion and, like Mr. Twining's Fontenelle, seemed spared from disaster, if not by acts of providence then through the exercise of power and fraud.
In theory, Canadians are the last people who would want to emulate such a system. They have earned their reputation of caution, moderation, and polite good sense partly by eschewing brash and grandiose American schemes and ambitions. Americans' rainbow-chasing individualism, irreverence for tradition, and bumptious pride in throwing over the old country for a new, mythically significant nation have never struck Canadians as admirable qualities. With a kind of quiet modesty, Canada has viewed itself as a mosaic rather than a melting pot, a composed salad rather than a fermenting stew, long before the emotional racial and ethnic claims of identity politics became fashionable. A Canadian says "about" with its rounded "o" as if the Scots heritage of skepticism and practicality were part of his mother tongue.
Nonetheless, the rationality of the grid—the seeming freedom-within-limits of a checkerboard plan that might have sprung straight from the mind of Edmund Burke, an esteemed figure in Canadian political thought—may have appealed to the cautious Canadian sensibility. Early on, Canadians admired this grand design for settlement. "The [public lands] system of the United States appears to combine all the chief requisites of the greatest efficiency," gushed Lord Durham, high commissioner and governor-general of British North America. In 1838, Durham went on to list eight virtues of the U.S.-model land survey, including equal terms of distribution "amongst all classes and persons," a misconception that betrayed his ignorance of the matter. He concluded that the system was the best device for promoting immigration in the "history of the world."
By the 1860s, Lord Durham's admiration for the system belied an increasing feeling of national inferiority. "The non-occupation of the North West Territory is a blot upon our character for enterprise," lamented the editor of the Toronto Globe in 1862. "We settle down quietly within the petty limits of a province while a great empire is offered to our ambition." Compared to the American West, wrote a prominent Nova Scotian in 1866, the undeveloped state of the Northwest Territories was "a standing reproach to the British Government and a blot upon our civilization." It was as if British North Americans after midcentury were engaged in a kind of Rorschach test of their economic mettle. While Americans basked in the diffuse glow of Manifest Destiny, filling in their grid block by block, the western prairie remained a disconcerting black mark on Canada's account book, a symbol of failure. It was an old Canadian soliloquy. "On the American side, all is activity and bustle," wrote Lord Durham in 1839. "On the British side of the line ... all seems waste and desolate."
Durham's words proved provident. Some thirty years later, with the newfound bounty of Rupert's Land, Canada suddenly found itself in the real estate business, too. For the Canadian provinces reluctantly bound into a loose federation, this vast acreage provided the impetus to a new way of thinking about their country. Canadian nationalists, led by Conservative prime minister John A. Macdonald, argued for federal control over western lands, and envisioned in a transcontinental railroad and prairie settlement the very raison d'être for Canadian federation. A populated midland, they argued, would unify their newly transcontinental country. The Conservative political victory in 1867, and the party's dominance of Canadian politics until 1896, radically altered the nature of the federation itself, temporarily transforming the compact of equal provinces, each with control over its own lands, into a centrally controlled empire. The 1870 Manitoba Act declared that "all ungranted or waste lands" in Manitoba and the North-West Territories were to be "administered by the Government of Canada for the purposes of the Dominion." Suddenly the Dominion had to have "purpose" to give it legitimacy.
For the next sixty years, the Dominion had two mandates: build railroads and settle the land. Both out of admiration for and in defense against the United States, Canada succumbed to a fever for lines—surveys, railroads, telegraphs—that reached across the prairie and touched the Pacific. "Seldom has such a wealth of experience been appropriated with such abounding good will and admiration," wrote Chester Martin, a Nova Scotian who became Canada's foremost scholar on Dominion lands. "The sectional survey and the railway land grant system; the free-homestead system, school lands, 'swamp lands,' and pre-emption; above all the insistence upon federal control 'for the purposes of the Dominion,'" he marveled, "all these attest the American prototype."
In 1869, a surveyor named John Stoughton Dennis, with his reputation at stake, launched the Canadian grid westward. In the summer of that year, Dennis proposed a plan to survey the Dominion lands before they were even finalized into law. In July, he received an order from William McDougall, the Dominion's first minister of public works and soon to be lieutenant governor of the new territories, to employ the "American system" to "survey townships for immediate settlement." A lieutenant colonel in the Canadian army, Dennis was anxious to transcend his military career, where he had been recently found reckless and inefficient in a military court for allegedly deserting his men under fire. That, too, had been in a nationalist cause, defending Fort Erie against a raid of Fenians, Irish Americans bent on harassing anyone remotely British to gain an independent Ireland. Now, as a surveyor, Dennis was defending Canada again, this time from encroaching Americans who might attempt to take over the West if the Canadians didn't get there first. Following McDougall's order to devise a survey system to parcel out the vast territory into small farms, he was prudent, efficient, and almost entirely unoriginal. In August, he recommended the United States system practically to the letter, expanding the dimensions of its townships to slightly under nine miles square (increased from the United States' six), containing sixty-four eight-hundred-acre sections. Dennis also allowed 5 percent of the area for public highways, and planned for a principal meridian drawn due north from the 49th parallel at a point just west of Pembina, Manitoba.
With Dennis's proposal, the customary British North American styles of land survey—divided into rectangles in the Canadian West and into long, narrow holdings with river frontage along the St. Lawrence—were abandoned. On October 4, 1869, Ottawa authorities approved Dennis's scheme. It became law in the Dominion Lands Act of 1872, where it was shrunk down to United States proportions. "The Dominion lands shall be laid off in quadrilateral Townships," the act read, "containing thirty-six sections of one mile square in each"—the dimensions familiar in the United States—"together with road allowances of one chain and fifty links in width, between all townships and sections." Two sections were reserved for "purposes of education."
There were significant differences from the U.S. system nevertheless. The Hudson's Bay Company retained one-twentieth of surveyed lands—ultimately 6.5 million acres—apportioned by township. And unlike the U.S. Land Ordinance, the Dominion Lands Act limited land purchases to one 640-acre section (the standard limit in the United States was 160 acres), excepting special sales "deemed ... expedient" by the secretary of state, though it also included a provision for homestead rights on one quarter section or less. It was an apparently tidy plan. As it happened, Lieutenant Colonel Dennis launched his Dominion lands scheme in the single worst possible place—the Red River settlements of the Métis.
By this time, the Métis had become to the Canadian fur trade what slaves and indentured servants were to the southern tobacco economy: the essential link between resources—in this case furs and Indian labor—and white developers' profit. An ethnic group named for the French word for "mixed race," fathered by French or English fur traders and borne by the mostly Cree Indian women whose labor virtually enabled early-day traders to survive, the Métis were so indispensable that even the stiffly Protestant British, who initially resisted the French approval of intimacy with native women, eventually recognized their worth. "It would be most useful," wrote a colonial officer to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) London Committee, "to cultivate a small colony of very Useful Hands who would ultimately replace European-born servants."
These "very Useful Hands" passed between Indian and white worlds with ease, creating their own social and economic niches. Based along the Red River, between Winnipeg, Manitoba (then Fort Garry), and St. Paul, Minnesota, in the eighteenth century they occupied the cultural middle ground of the fur trade. In 1821, the Hudson's Bay Company gained a nearly fifty-year-long monopoly over Rupert's Land by absorbing the rival North-West Company, causing many Métis to lose their jobs as fur trade voyageurs. In response, they became indispensable as buffalo hunters and traders of pemmican, a kind of dried mash of meat, suet, and berries that was a fur trader's staple, and made forays onto the western plains. By 1869, reeling from a decade of bad crops and declining buffalo herds, and anxious over American and Canadian plans to survey and resettle their Red River lands, it was time, once again, to adapt. McDougall, whom Prime Minister John Macdonald described as a man of great ambition and almost no political sense, had sent the unlucky surveyor Dennis into a social powder keg.
The Red River Métis welcomed Dennis as they might have greeted a tailor taking measurements for burial shrouds, and indeed, his new system spelled death for their livelihood. The Métis were accustomed to the European system of deep, narrow riverfront lots, like those of the French habitants along the St. Lawrence, where each settler had a small river frontage and water rights, and grazing or "hay" privileges in a common area behind it. He measured the two miles from the river to his lot boundary by sighting along a horizontal line underneath the belly of his horse. Despised by native tribes with no such notions of ownership, the Métis landowner was a hybrid. During the 1880s, the Métis finally yielded to the hundreds of young men of the Dominion Lands Survey and the United States Geological Survey, who came toting sixty-foot measuring chains, though remaining skeptical of this American-style surveyor talking of a ridiculous-sounding grid that took no account of water rights. Dennis announced to the Métis that he had no intention of interfering with their lands, assuring them in the local newspaper that whatever system he proposed, it would apply only to "lands not heretofore granted or to those unsettled at the present time." The Métis, however, viewed this as the sop that it eventually proved to be.
Not surprisingly, young Louis Riel, son of the deceased Métis resistance leader Jean-Louis Riel and a man who had vowed to "try to walk in my father's footsteps," soon found himself walking on surveyors' chains. On October 11, 1869, a surveyor named A. C. Webb and his party reached the Red River lots near St. Vital and trespassed across the land of André Nault, Louis Riel's cousin. Though the surveyors were careful to build no mounds or markers on Métis land, the Métis nevertheless considered their very presence an intrusion. When the crew ignored Nault's protests against them, Nault sent his son for help.
Riel appeared at Nault's late in the afternoon backed by a group of Métis neighbors and asked the surveyors to leave. A young man just shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, Riel, who had fair skin, a stocky build, and a large, imposing head under a mass of curly hair, was not yet the great eccentric Métis hero he would become. But when Webb refused to leave, Riel planted his moccasined foot on the stretched-out survey chain and, so the story goes, the neighbors lined up silently behind him. "You go no farther," he said calmly in English. The surveyors packed up and left. By spring 1870, their retreat was total. Dennis, for his own protection, had returned to Ottawa disguised as an Indian woman, presumably the least threatening, most easily overlooked social type he could think of. His system of dominion lands was baptized in racial strife that had no precise American equivalent.
The Métis, for their part, resisted Canadian annexation briefly, then gained a legislated peace in the Manitoba Act of May 1870. They received a grant of 1.4 million acres in Manitoba selected by the lieutenant governor for "the children of the half-breed heads of families," and in 1874 an addition of a half a million dollars in scrip to heads of families. It was a "lavish" gift to an "improvident" people, grumbled Dominion lands historian Chester Martin. In practice, however, as one member of parliament noted, it was a relatively cheap means of conquering and pacifying the natives, to be honored in the breach. Riel and his followers ultimately failed to gain the secure and influential community they desired. The territory they gained was a mere two thousand square miles of the present-day province, an area the size of Prince Edward Island that would fit like a postage stamp in the corner of the enormous public domain. Mapped against the vast Canadian territories, it had, in the words of one legislator, a "ludicrous look" that "put one in mind of some of the incidents in Gulliver's Travels." "These impulsiv [Métis] have got spoilt" by their uprising, cautioned Prime Minister Macdonald, "and must be kept down by a strong hand until they are swamped by the influx of settlers." Evidence remains spotty about the degree to which wily land speculators and unsympathetic officials swindled, manipulated, and forced the Métis out of their land, and to what degree the Métis voluntarily sold it, typically at reduced value. By whatever means, the Manitoba Métis community of about 10,000 people would be dissolved by the 1880s. Like the Sioux in their struggle against the U.S. military, the Métis had provided only a temporary setback to the western survey.
After the Manitoba Act neutralized the Métis, Dennis and his fellow surveyors returned to their task with renewed vigor. In the summer of 1871, carrying their new U.S.-style survey manual and sixty-foot-long Gunter's chains onto the plains, the surveyors began once again to divide 200 million acres of land into 1.25 million homestead-sized quarter sections. By 1877 the so-called Special Survey, whose task was to lay out the base lines and meridians, had reached the fourth meridian, now the Alberta-Saskatchewan boundary. By 1881, the year of Sitting Bull's surrender, the framework for the grid was completed, and by 1883, surveyors were subdividing the townships in medicine line country, near present-day Maple Creek, burning in their campfires old buffalo bones drenched in coal oil and wood carted from the nearby Cypress Hills.
Meanwhile, United States surveyors moved slowly and haphazardly toward the Northern Plains. They, too, had a vast territory—over three million square miles—to divide into small squares. To accomplish this, several surveyors general, who numbered sixteen in 1877, contracted out to private individuals the tasks of running lines, establishing corners, and preparing maps and plats. The result was widespread fraud and wretched inadequacy in the work actually accomplished. In addition, several federally sponsored surveys exploring the geography, geology, and commercial potential of western lands competed for funds and status. In 1879, Congress in frustration finally united the various state and federal surveys under one bureaucratic agency, the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Under the leadership of Clarence King, for whom staking out homestead plots was of little interest, the USGS concentrated its efforts on developing the mining industry. When John Wesley Powell, a Civil War veteran and visionary scientist, became the director of the USGS in 1881, the survey pressed to map the nation's topography. Not only were small farms low on Powell's list of priorities, but he argued against them, saying they were economically unsuitable for arid lands. Powell, in fact, proposed a more communally owned and run system of settlement, but found little audience for it. Congress extended the Homestead Act to the unsurveyed public domain in 1880, as if finally apologizing for the survey's perennial lagging behind advancing settlers. While Canadian surveyors raced ahead to beat settlers to western lands, the United States government pronounced the race moot. That the two sides of the border mirrored each other during their rapid transformation was neither a fluke nor the inevitable working of physical geography. Canadian developers seemed determined to do for their prairie whatever the United States could do for its own, only better.
The one thing Canada lacked was a national myth, a story of its underlying purpose, an enterprise that for nineteenth-century Americans was something of a public pastime. The person who described that American narrative best was Wisconsin-born historian Frederick Jackson Turner. In 1893, at the celebrated Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Turner read to a group of historians a quiet address called "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" whose ideas and phrases about the West were to become so influential and familiar that they would become hackneyed. As Americans moved westward, wrote Turner, "the frontier [was] the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization," and the "line of most effective and rapid Americanization." Wilderness not only "fused" Europeans "into a mixed race" of Americans, the very act of entering the wilderness and then, in stages, progressing out of it, forged American character. Turner placed the frontier at the heart of America's essential story at once grandly progressive and poignantly sad: a nation born on a frontier it was destined to overcome, finding its greatness in a wilderness it was destined to destroy. As an explanation of United States history, Turner's frontier thesis has been a favorite dead horse to beat on since the 1950s. Whatever its merits, American historians have convincingly repudiated Turner's frontier as ethnocentric, misguidedly rural, naively cheerful, and hopelessly imprecise. If for a time it was a good parable about holy civic nationalism, it is deeply flawed as an explanation for it.
Turner is also responsible for the fact that in the American West, the word "frontier" does not mean "border," its traditional European meaning. There, by the fourteenth century, "frontier" had evolved from a front line of troops facing an enemy to a zone of military defense. By the seventeenth century; it meant the external territorial outlines of a self-conscious nation. By the nineteenth century, the old Europe of dynastic wars and interests had become a continental contest of newly aggressive, antagonistic nationalisms. After the French Revolution, European statesmen tried to associate a "natural" territorial boundary with national identity. Girondins and Robespierre alike invoked natural frontiers as symbols of a French people bound by the invisible principle of liberty, the source of a national myth.
Turner went them one better. "Frontier" in the United States would become a term to describe the westward-moving, national conquest of the continent. "The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier," he explained, "a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the expansionist United States, "frontier" would signify the advancement of civilization into a wilderness, the New World environmental condition for American egalitarian democracy and individualism.
It was an ingenious substitution. Old World terms yielded to words reflecting New World conditions. Fixed zones became moving zones; borders became "zones of settlement"; places became a process; republican patriotism became Manifest Destiny. The New World frontier became the prop of American nationalism, a component of the civil religion. Borders fled to the margins of the national narrative.
By contrast, Canadians have tended to identify with Europe, mainly with the British Empire. They have explained their westward movement as a heroic story of development, a story shared with the United States, but they have a more cautious nationalist imagination. Expansion and development has not meant liberation from Old World laws and flaws. Their ideological inheritance, as historian John Conway has pointed out, is rooted in the English conservatism of Edmund Burke, who wrote that "the restraints on men's liberties are to be counted among their rights."
Despite themselves, westering Canadians did, to some degree, act like Canadians. They may have adopted the U.S. survey system wholesale, but in a more sparsely populated country with a westward movement that was positively arthritic by comparison, its operation took on the more orderly, authoritarian character on which Canadians prided themselves. The free-for-all style of the American system stiffened under Canadian application. Preemption, for example, the long-favored American practice of recognizing the rights of squatters even after the government survey had arrived, had no Canadian equivalent. In 1908, Canadians applied the term preemption to an entirely different law—the right of the homesteader with a quarter section to buy an adjoining quarter section at a fixed price of three dollars per acre. Canadian land historian Chester Martin likes to makes much of such differences, in order to set off Canadian westward expansion as the more precisely orchestrated affair that it was. Here was a kind of "preemption," he noted with delight, that "would scarcely have been recognizable" to its American champions in the 1830s.
In the 1880s, however, such differences were subtle. On both sides of the boundary, the "multitudes" had begun to arrive, while Canadian Métis and natives were ultimately no better off than American native peoples. Even the surveyors, complain as they might, noted signs of a rapid shift in local life. By 1879 the Canadian Chippewa were no longer warning settlers off their land. Thev were plowing the earth with skill so impressive that one surveyor judged them "equal to what I have seen at some of the ploughing matches in Ontario." Another surveyor was shocked to find himself walking across a peneplain of bones, all that remained of a band of three hundred Assiniboine destroyed by the Old World scourge of smallpox a few vears earlier. Still another penned a tellingly clinical description of the land's resources: "There were a great many fine springs. One in Township 21, Range 12 would fill a 12-inch pipe." Here was not so much a natural site as a commodity to be measured for a new set of industrial fixtures. Landmarks situated previously only in human memory now became official locations, a matter of coordinates plotted against the stars.
The rapid and radical change that would characterize the Northern Plains for the next four decades had begun. Only the "half-breed road" of the Métis heading west from the Red River country seemed a "connecting-link with civilized life," wrote the incommoded Twining from the borderland in 1874. Twining endured the irregularities of the belching Fontenelle because he believed that surveyors ran ahead of civilization. Otto Klotz, a Dominion lands surveyor, put a finer point on it. "Oh—the handwriting is on the wall," he exclaimed in anticipation. "Where there is a railroad our work is done." Steamboats were the preamble, surveys were the dotted line, and the signature of civilization was the railroad. Klotz knew it would come soon. But, charting the uncharted, he was also drawn to the surveyor's oddly ambiguous relationship to the settled life. "We are like the Indian," he wrote in 1883, after heading out one morning onto the drainboard flat prairie west of Winnipeg to impose order on an unbounded land. "We ever flee from civilization."
Table of Contents
Preface: The Invisible Border Prologue: Through the Looking Glass 1. Drawing the Line 2. The Melting Pot of Hell 3. When the Line Had Medicine 4.The Mountie, the Maiden, and the General 5. If You Build It, Will They Come? 6. Which Side Are You On? 7. A living or a Way of Life? 8.What Are We Fighting For? 9. The Cosmopolitan Throng 10. Nature's Incivilities 11.We Can Play Baseball on the Other Side Epilogue: Wallace Stegner and the North American West Appendix Acknowledgements Notes and Sources IndexWhat People are Saying About This
Medicine Line is a book to savor. Beth LaDow writes with wit, compassion, grace, and spirit. Attending closely to a segment of the U.S./Canadian border, LaDow tells sharp and memorable stories which will enrich both Western U.S. history and the whole enterprise of comparative and trans-national history. In matters of ethnic diversity and cultural difference, this book offers something close to perfect pitch.
—University of Colorado, author of The Legacy of Conquest and Something in the Soil
Beth LaDow is an uncommonly talented writer-witty, imaginative, and
full of warmth and sympathy for her subjects. In this deeply researched
but always vividly told story, the Montana-Saskatchewan border becomes a
revealing heartland of the North American experience. Settlers, American
and Canadian, struggle with the power of nature, winning a few inches here, losing a few there. This is a writer to watch and a book to cherish.
—
Hall Distinguished Professor of American History, University of Kansas, author of A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell
People and events cannot be divided by a line on the ground or drawn on
a map. Beth LaDow combines both historical and personal perspectives
here to tell the compelling story of what happened on both sides of “the
medicine line,” the Indians’ conception of the border between the United
States and Canada. Her book is a fine contribution to history and an
engaging narrative as well.
—author of The Lance and
The Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull