Arc of the Medicine Line: Mapping the World’s Longest Undefended Border across the Western Plains (review)

Tony Rees is an excellent storyteller and this story is worth telling. Arc of the Medicine Line is the first detailed narrative of the 1872–4 survey of the Canada-U.S. border between the Lake of the Woods and the Rocky Mountains. In less than three years the British and American survey teams mapped and marked more than eight hundred miles of the forty-ninth parallel from the Lake of the Woods to the Continental Divide, produced detailed topographical maps of about nine thousand square miles, and placed 388 boundary markers including iron pillars, stone cairns, and earth mounds (344). The book provides enough technical information for a lay reader to understand and appreciate the full range of scientific work the teams conducted, which went far beyond the survey itself to include the flora and fauna. But the real focus is on the British, Canadian, and American men who made up the two commissions.

The story is grounded in extensive primary research – the reports, journal, diaries, and letters written by men from both teams. The highlight is certainly the personal correspondence, where the men told their wives and family members exactly what they thought of each other, their jobs, the food, the weather, the land they were passing through, and the Native peoples they met along the way. The book is organized chronologically so that a reader can follow each step of the journey. The map at the front of the book is excellent, and the photos are familiar but reproduced to a very high standard.

Scholarly readers will have two concerns with the book. The first is that there is very little secondary research in the book, and what is there is a bit dated. There is no mention of recent scholarship about the Canada-U.S. border or the outstanding recent scholarship about the Native peoples of the borderlands like the Cree, Sioux, Metis, and Blackfoot. There is little historiographical context for the narrative, and perhaps this was Rees’s goal, because context has a way of bogging down a good story.

The lack of historical context will be the other concern many readers will have, and this is particularly problematic in Rees’s treatment of First Nations peoples. By emphasizing the ‘moment’ the survey started and framing it with Aboriginal deaths, Rees leaves one with the impression that this survey marked the end of the Aboriginal chapter of the history of the West and the start of the chapter about heroic white men conquering the land. The introduction and the final chapter hinge upon the Cypress Hills Massacre of 1873, the flight of the Sioux northward after Little Bighorn in 1876, and the flight of the Nez Perce in 1877; the final chapter also throws in the 1885 Northwest Rebellion to explain where the Metis went. This gives the unfortunate impression that the book is sounding the death knell for groups who are still alive and well today, because that makes a more dramatic backdrop for the central cast of white characters. Native peoples do appear throughout the book, but as backdrop – convenient but lazy workers, or necessary but inscrutable informants, or invisible moccasin-providers, or threatening opponents. This problem is perhaps unavoidable, given the emphasis on primary sources written exclusively by white men, and the lack of secondary sources that could have given other perspectives.

The story of the 1872–4 boundary survey, the men involved, and the staggering amount of work they completed has been waiting a long time for its own full treatment. This book is invaluable for any of us who work on the history of the Canada-U.S border across the West, and will be appreciated by anyone eager to know more about the border itself.