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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 [First Page] [-11], (1) Lines: 0 to 1 ——— 7.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-11], (1) Foreword John Herd Thompson No international boundary could have less physiographic reality than the forty-ninth parallel of latitude that divides the U.S. West from its Canadian counterpart. The boundary’s inception was entirely political. In 1818, British and American diplomats who had never seen the fortyninth parallel arbitrarily chose it to separate U.S. from British territory from Lake of the Woods to the Rockies. In 1846, another group of AngloAmerican diplomats extended the line west from the mountains to the Pacific. No natural feature marks this 1,300-mile political frontier; on the contrary, identical landforms extend north and south across it. If this seems obvious on the northern plains, it is equally obvious west of the Continental Divide: the rugged terrain of British Columbia is impossible to tell apart from that of Montana, Idaho, or Washington, and the desert that crosses the parallel with Okanagan River continues south from British Columbia all the way to Sonora, Mexico. So identical is the landscape on either side that historians who reprint photographs of boundary surveyors at work must take care not to reverse the negatives. In the half century after the surveyors marked the forty-ninth parallel with eight-foot iron mileposts, however, British-Canadian nationalists rapidly invested the boundary with ideological meaning. An evolving western myth became a fundamental building block of an emerging national identity in Canada, as it did in the United States. Each myth proclaimed each country’s uniqueness and justified the conquest and dispossession of the Native peoples who lived in each West. But although the historical process that created the two Wests had been interconnected and essentially similar, Canadians and Americans told strikingly different stories about their Wests. The American narrative—so familiar that it xii | Foreword 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 [-12], (2) Lines: ——— 0.0pt ——— Normal PgEnds: [-12], (2) requires no explication here—took little notice of the boundary and the Canadian West. The Canadian western myth, on the other hand, cast the United States as the villain in the black Stetson. In contemporary literary language, the U.S. West played binary opposite “other,” the lawless “wild” West against which Canadian editorials, textbooks, cartoons, and novels contrasted Canada’s supposedly peaceful version. In the Canadian narrative, Americans went west aggressively to fulfill their Manifest Destiny; Canadians did so defensively out of a manifest duty to protect the Native peoples north of the forty-ninth parallel from the cruel fate that Americans imposed south of it. The American West represented the apogee of autarchic individualism; the Canadian West apotheosized the orderly transplantation of community and government institutions. Vigilante justice misruled the American West; in Canada, the incorruptible North-West Mounted Police meted out the Queen’s law evenhandedly to all. Ironically, an American scholar best encapsulated this notion of two fundamentally dichotomous Wests: Wallace Stegner (1909–93), who spent 1914 to 1920 growing up in southwestern Saskatchewan. “The forty-ninth parallel ran directly through my childhood, dividing me in two,” Stegner remembered in Wolf Willow. Stegner claimed (without evidence other than eloquent assertion) that Native peoples had called the parallel “the medicine line.” Because of the contrasting coats of the U.S. Army and the Mounted Police, writes Stegner, “one of the most visible aspects of the international boundary was that it was a color line: blue below, red above, blue for treachery and unkept promises, red for protection and the straight tongue.” Stegner did not present this as unvarnished “truth”; in his next sentence, he admitted, “this is not quite the way a scrupulous historian would report it.” 1 But Stegner’s caveat notwithstanding, the boundary remained an intellectual barrier that all too few scholars saw any reason to traverse. Instead, most historians abbreviated their inquiries within their nation-states, to create what a young scholar has recently called “the narratives of exceptionalism that often characterize the histories of the Canadian and U.S. Wests.”2 Canadians made the boundary an intellectual barrier...

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