Arc of the Medicine Line: Mapping the World's Longest Undefended Border across the Western Plains
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Today the borderland between Canada and the United States is a wide, empty sweep of wheat fields and pasture, measured by a grid of gravel roads that sees little traffic and few people who do not make their lives there. It has been much this way for more than a century now, but there was a moment when the great silence shrouding this place was broken, and that moment changed it forever. Arc of the Medicine Line is a compelling narrative of that moment—the completion of the official border between the United States and Canada in 1874. In late July of 1874, the Sweetgrass Hills sheltered the greatest accumulation of scientists, teamsters, scouts, cooks, and soldiers to be seen in this part of the world before the coming of the railways. The men of the boundary commissions—American, British, and Canadian—established an astronomical station and the last of their supply depots as they prepared to draw the Medicine Line across the final hundred of the nearly nine hundred miles between Manitoba’s Lake of the Woods and the Continental Divide. In the brief weeks the surveyors and soldiers spent in Milk River country, they witnessed, and played a singular part in, the beginning of the end for the open West. That hot, dry summer of 1874 marked the outside world’s final assault on this last frontier. Montana Quarterly "Rees presents the story of the [mapping] expedition in detail. . . . [He] handles his subject well and provides enough story background that the history never grinds. The boundary, the border, was called the Medicine Line by the Sioux who later, led by Sitting Bull, fled the U.S. Cavalry after their victory at Little Big Horn to find safety above the line where pursuit magically stopped. Latitude 49 degrees north had 'strong medicine.'"
Map xNotes on the Text xiiiIntroduction 1Prologue: September 18, 1872 5Autumn 1872 15The Northwest Angle 41Winter Work 1872-73 63Spring 1873 96Summer 1873 118Autumn 1873 164Winter 1873-74 201Spring 1874 228Summer 1874 244Late Summer 1874 271Autumn 1874 297The end of the Line 318The Medicine Line 341Epilogue 359Notes on Sources 369Endnotes 373Index 385Acknowledgements 392
