Arc of the Medicine Line: Mapping the World's Longest Undefended Border across the Western Plains »

Tony Rees is the author of Hope’s Last Home: Travels in Milk River Country and Polo: The Galloping Game.

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     x
Notes on the Text     xiii
Introduction     1
Prologue: September 18, 1872     5
Autumn 1872     15
The Northwest Angle     41
Winter Work 1872-73     63
Spring 1873     96
Summer 1873     118
Autumn 1873     164
Winter 1873-74     201
Spring 1874     228
Summer 1874     244
Late Summer 1874     271
Autumn 1874     297
The end of the Line     318
The Medicine Line     341
Epilogue     359
Notes on Sources     369
Endnotes     373
Index     385
Acknowledgements     392