Mavericks on the Border: The Early Southwest in Historical Fiction and Film, and: The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland (review)

Mavericks on the Border and The Medicine Line, two highly readable books, both explore connections between borders and identities in order to challenge nationally constrained histories of the West. While Beth LaDow examines the relatively peaceful and seldom discussed boundary between central Canada and the United States, J. Douglas Canfield examines the more contested Southwestern borderlands. The most significant difference between the two books, however, is not their geographical subject but their method: LaDow uses historical research to investigate identity formation for residents along the border, and Canfield studies representations of his region in twentieth-century literature and film.

LaDow's subject in The Medicine Line is the Montana-Saskatchewan borderlands, an area that was transformed by schemes of rival nations and railroad entrepreneurs in the 1870s and 1880s when land speculators and government boosters promoted its settlement. Her evidence—an impressive and sometimes overwhelming combination of census data, municipal and legal records, newspapers, diaries, memoirs, and interviews—suggests that the residents on both sides of the border who arrived between 1890 and 1920 as a result of these nationalist efforts found the particularities of landscape and displacement more influential than the political border in forming their local identities. LaDow suggests that because populations arriving on both sides of the border were so ethnically and nationally mixed, and because the experience of settling the arid prairie environment was so arduous, identity in this borderland was contingent not on national affiliations but on "its own shifting geography of cooperation, conflict, association and independence" (161). Through close comparison, LaDow challenges the myths of an American "Wild West" and an orderly Canadian hinterland, revealing the inadequacy of dividing this region's tightly interconnected processes of settlement into two separate national stories.

LaDow is sensitive to the complexities and contradictions of her thesis, attending also to moments when the border emerged for residents as an important factor in social, economic, or political life, including conflicts over differences in federal Indian removal and water management policies, bootlegging opportunities during prohibition, and the outbreak of World War I. For LaDow, the most interesting of these exceptions is the role the border played in the lives of Nez Percé, Sioux, and Canadian Métis, who even while resenting the artificial line drawn through their lands, occasionally made use of it as an instrument of camouflage and refuge from the pursuit of Canadian Mounties and the U.S. Army assigned to put an end to the Plains Indians' ways of life. A strength of LaDow's cross-border study is her inclusion throughout of tribal perspectives. She takes as her title the "medicine line," a phrase used by the Sioux to refer to the border, emphasizing that while the line sometimes exerts a magical influence or mysterious power over the region, for residents during these years it more often faded into something to ignore or overcome.

Canfield, also interested in the power of borders, argues in Mavericks on the Border that twentieth-century writers and filmmakers have been drawn to the early Southwest (a period he defines as 1822 to 1917) as a setting for the staging of what he calls "existential crossings." In these crossings, protagonists face questions of identity and morality in a universe unmoored from stable essences, becoming "mavericks" who reject cultural definitions in favor of a frightening quest for self-making. Some of these quests darkly fail to deliver redemption and freedom, like those in Faulkner's Go Down Moses, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and Mariano Azuela's Los de abajo. Others—like those in Laura Esquivel's Como aqua para chocolate, Jane Candia Coleman'...