Wolf Willow

  But one thing must be said and triply underlined: the solution which Canada almost immediately found for such eruptions of violence in its North-West Territories was better than any the Americans had found in all the generations of their frontier history. When the exaggerated and lurid story of the Cypress Hills fight, getting dirtier as it went, like a summer whirlwind, reached Ottawa, it stirred up a fury of public feeling against Americans at large and against whiskey traders in particular. Already before the Canadian Parliament was a bill by which it was proposed to create a police force charged with maintaining—or rather, establishing—law and order on the western Plains. The Cypress Hills Massacre made it certain that the bill would pass and the force be created. But before it reached the Cypress Hills there would be another development that even before the arrival of official law would bring the outlines of law and history to the border country.

  7

  The Medicine Line

  ... that a line drawn from the most northwestern point of the Lake of the Woods, along the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude, or, if the said point shall not be in the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude, then that a line drawn from the said point due north or south as the case may be, until the said line shall intersect the said parallel of north latitude, and from the point of such intersection due west along and with the said parallel, shall be the line of demarcation between the territories of the United States, and those of His Britannic Majesty, and that the said line shall form the northern boundary of the said territories of the United States, and the southern boundary of the territories of His Britannic Majesty, from the Lake of the Woods to the Stony Mountains.

  Article 2, Convention of London,

  Oct. 20, 1818

  The 49th parallel ran directly through my childhood, dividing me in two. In winter, in the town on the Whitemud, we were almost totally Canadian. The textbooks we used in school were published in Toronto and made by Canadians or Englishmen; the geography we studied was focused on the Empire and the Dominion, though like our history it never came far enough west, and was about as useless to us as the occasional Canadian poem that was inserted patriotically into our curriculum. Somehow those poems seemed to run to warnings of disaster and fear of the dark and cold in snowy eastern woods. My mind is still inclined at inopportune moments to quote me Tom Moore’s “Canadian Boat Song” (Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast/ The rapids are near and the daylight’s past) or tell me, out of Charles Dawson Shanley,Speed on, speed on, good Master!

  The camp lies far away;

  We must cross the haunted valley

  Before the close of day.

  The songs we sang were “Tipperary” and “We’ll Never Let the Old Flag Fall” and “The Maple Leaf Forever” and “God Save the King”; the flag we saluted was the Union Jack, the heroes we most revered belonged to the Canadian regiment called the Princess Pats, the clothes and the Christmas gifts we bought by mail came from the T. Eaton mail-order house. The businesses whose names we knew and whose products we saw advertised were Ltd., not Inc., the games we played were ice hockey and rounders, the movie serials that drew us to the Pastime Theater on Tuesdays and Saturdays were likely to retail the deeds of Mounted Policemen amid the Yukon snows. Our holidays, apart from Thanksgiving and Christmas, which were international, were Dominion Day, Victoria Day, the King’s birthday. Even the clothes we wore had a provincial flavor, and I never knew till I moved to Montana and was taught by the laughter of Montana kids that turtle-necked sweaters and shoepacs were not standard winter costume everywhere.

  But if winter and town made Canadians of us, summer and the homestead restored us to something nearly, if not quite, American. We could not be remarkably impressed with the physical differences between Canada and the United States, for our lives slopped over the international boundary every summer day. Our plowshares bit into Montana sod every time we made the turn at the south end of the field. We collected stones from our fields and stoneboated them down into Montana to dump them. I trapped Saskatchewan and Montana flickertails indiscriminately, and spread strychnine-soaked wheat without prejudice over two nations.

  The people we neighbored with were all in Montana, half our disk of earth and half our bowl of sky acknowledged another flag than ours, the circle of darkness after the prairie night came down was half American, and the few lights that assured us we were not alone were all across the Line. The mountains whose peaks drew my wistful eyes on July days were the Bearpaws, down below the Milk River. For all my eyes could tell me, no Line existed, for the obelisk of black iron that marked our south-eastern comer was only a somewhat larger version of the survey stakes (the Montana ones had blue tops, the Canadian not) that divided our world into uniform squares. It never occurred to us to walk along the border from obelisk to obelisk—an act that might have given us a notion of the boundary as an endless, very open fence, with posts a mile apart. And if we had walked along it, we would have found only more plains, more burnouts, more gopher holes, more cactus, more stinkweed and primroses, more hawk shadows slipping over the scabby flats, more shallow coulees down which the drainage from the Old-Man-on-His-Back hills crept into Montana toward the Milk. The nearest custom house was clear over in Alberta, and all the summers we spent on the farm we never saw an officer, Canadian or American. We bought supplies in Harlem or Chinook and got our mail at Hydro, all in Montana. In the fall we hauled our wheat, if we had made any, freely and I suppose illegally across to the Milk River towns and sold it where it was handiest to sell it. Even yet, between Willow Creek and Treelon, a degree and a half of longitude, there is not a single settlement or a custom station.

  We ignored the international boundary in ways and to degrees that would have been impossible if it had not been a line almost completely artificial. And yet our summer world was a different world from the Canadian world of town. The magazines to which we now subscribed were American magazines, the newspapers we read were published in Havre, Great Falls, even Minneapolis. The funny paper characters to whom I devoted charmed afternoons were Happy Hooligan, the Katzenjammer Kids, Hairbreadth Harry, Alphonse and Gaston—all made in the U.S.A. Our summer holidays were the Fourth of July and Labor Day, and the pièce de résistance of a holiday get-together was a ballgame. In summer, when we bought anything by mail, we bought it not from T. Eaton but from the lavish and cosmopolitan catalogs of Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. We learned in summer to call a McLaughlin a Buick.

  Undistinguishable and ignored as it was, artificially as it split a country that was topographically and climatically one, the international boundary marked a divide in our affiliations, expectations, loyalties. Like the pond at the east end of the Cypress Hills, we could flow into either watershed, or into both simultaneously, but we never confused the two. Winter and summer were at odds in us. We were Americans without the education and indoctrination that would have made us confident of our identity, we were Canadians in everything but our sentimental and patriotic commitment. Whatever was being done to us by our exposure to Canadian attitudes, traditions, and prejudices—an exposure intensified by the strains and shortages of the war in which Canada was a belligerent through four of my six years there—we never thought of ourselves as anything but American. Since we could not explain why the United States was “too cowardly to get into the fight” against Germany, and since we were secretly afraid it was, we sometimes came to blows with the uncomplicatedly Canadian boys. It used to agonize me, wondering whether or not the Canadians really did defeat the Americans at the Battle of Lundy’s Lane during the War of 1812. It did not seem possible or likely, and yet there it was in the history book. Perhaps I reached the beginning of wisdom, of a sort, when I discovered that Lundy’s Lane, which loomed like Waterloo or Tours in the Canadian textbooks and in my anxious imagination, was dismissed as a frontier skirmish by histories written in the United States. The importance of that battle depended entirely on which side of the frontier you viewed it from.

  That was the way the 4
9th parallel, though outwardly ignored, divided us. It exerted uncomprehended pressures upon affiliation and belief, custom and costume. It offered us subtle choices even in language (we stooked our wheat; across the Line they shocked it), and it lay among our loyalties as disturbing as a hair in butter. Considering how much I saw of it and how many kinds of influence it brought to bear on me, it might have done me good to learn something of how it came there. I never did until much later, and when I began to look it up I discovered that practically nobody else knew how it had come there either. While I lived on it, I accepted it as I accepted Orion in the winter sky. I did not know that this line of iron posts was one outward evidence of the coming of history to the unhistoried Plains, one of the strings by which dead men and the unguessed past directed our lives. In actual fact, the boundary which Joseph Kinsey Howard has called artificial and ridiculous was more potent in the lives of people like us than the natural divide of the Cypress Hills had ever been upon the tribes it held apart. For the 49th parallel was an agreement, a rule, a limitation, a fiction perhaps but a legal one, acknowledged by both sides; and the coming of law, even such limited law as this, was the beginning of civilization in what had been a lawless wilderness. Civilization is built on a tripod of geography, history, and law, and it is made up largely of limitations.

  John Evans’ angry wolfers, following the tracks of their stolen ponies northward, undoubtedly knew that they were carrying their gun-law in Canada, but the fact would not have troubled them. For one thing, Canada was still only a name, hardly a force; it had as yet made hardly a move to carry its authority into the North-West Territories. For another, there was enough Fenian sentiment and enough Manifest Destinarianism around Fort Benton to persuade most of its citizens that the northern Plains were a natural and inevitable extension of the United States. For a third, the boundary was less a boundary than a zone. There was no telling where the precise line lay: wolfers and traders did not carry astronomical instruments. Even such prominent landmarks as Wood Mountain and the Sweetgrass Hills might lie in either nation, and though the Convention of London in 1818 had established the 49th parallel as the boundary from the Lake of the Woods to the Rockies, and the Oregon Treaty of 1846 had extended that line to the Pacific, neither the Indians who stole the horses nor the wolfers who pursued them recognized any dividing line short of the Cypress Hills—a line which had nothing to do with international agreements, but had been established by tradition, topography, and a balance of tribal force.

  But even while the wolfers were riding northward across the unsurveyed boundary zone, the first line of the geometry of law was starting west from the Red River settlements. By October, 1873, it would be at Wood Mountain; by the end of the following summer it would reach to the crest of the Rockies, to connect with the line that had been run that far eastward from the Pacific in 1861. Only a little more than a year after John Evans’ men poured their murderous fire into Little Soldier’s charging Assiniboin, the cairn-marked line of the border would be drawn accusingly across their track, making very clear the international implications of their raid. The series of trials and extraditions by which Canada would attempt for two years to convict and punish the raiders would so publicize the boundary that thereafter no one could cross it, for any purpose, in ignorance.

  Surveyors are not heroic figures. They come later than the explorers, they douse with system what was once the incandescent excitement of danger and the unknown. They conquer nothing but ignorance, and if they are surveying a boundary they are so compelled by astronomical and geodetic compulsions that they might as well run on rails. Among the instruments of their profession there is none that lifts the imagination and achieves grace or weight as a symbol. The mythic light in which we have bathed our frontier times, when decision was for the individual will and a man tested himself against wild weathers, wild beasts, or wild men, and so knew himself a man—that light does not shine on the surveyor as it shines on trapper, trader, scout, cowboy, or Indian fighter. Surveyors do not even acquire the more pedestrian glamour of the farming pioneer, though they make him possible, and though their work is basic not merely to his conquering of the frontier, but to some of the mistakes he has made in trying to break it.

  Among the chronicles of long Canadian marches, it is the march of Col. Garnet Wolseley from Toronto to Fort Garry in 1870, and that of the Mounted Police from Fort Dufferin to Fort Macleod in 1874, that have become folklore. But when the used-up Mounted Police stopped, 590 miles out of Dufferin, to repair equipment and shoe horses and oxen and to rest men and animals in a burned-over dreary plain within sight of the Cypress Hills, the surveyors were there ahead of them, having made, with practically no fanfare, practically the same march. It was from the survey depot at Willow Bunch, on Wood Mountain, that Assistant Commissioner Macleod begged surplus oats and provisions for his tired command. By that time the surveyors were close to completing a journey that might have been called epic if it had not been so well planned, so successful, and so utilitarian.

  They may as well all be nameless: there were no heroes among them. And they do not need to be separated by nationality, for it was of the essence of their work that it was international, cooperative, mutual. But they need credit and remembrance for a job finished swiftly and efficiently—a job of immense importance. And though they have never struck anybody as glamorous enough to be written up in western story, a young man in search of excitement in 1872 could have done worse than enlist with them.

  Until the transfer of sovereignty over Rupert’s Land to the Dominion government there had been little need for defining the boundary established in 1818. The scare which Louis Riel threw into both Canada and Great Britain in 1869-70 hastened the inevitable. The actual transfer took place in November, 1869, while the Riel situation was waiting for the spring weather that would let Wolseley’s expedition start west to settle it. But the suppression of the Red River métis could not by itself solve much, for there was nearly a thousand miles of unmarked and unwatched border where trouble could erupt. The Dominion government, no matter what local difficulties might arise, was clearly committed to a swift survey to fix the bounds of its jurisdiction and deter the raids and excursions, unofficial and semi-official, from the United States. The initiating cause for the survey might have been almost anything; in fact, it was a hasty American claim that the Hudson’s Bay post at Pembina, on Red River, was actually on American soil.

  It took two years and a half, political action being what it is, for agreement to be reached between the United States and Great Britain on the terms of a boundary survey. An American Boundary Commission was authorized, with a customarily inadequate appropriation, by an act of March 19, 1872. The British commission, composed of a commissioner and five officers and forty-four men of the Royal Engineers, augmented by a Canadian party made up of a geologist, surgeon, veterinarian, and a group of surveyors, was organized in June. By September the British outfit had made its way to Duluth and thence across Minnesota by rail to St. Paul. On September 18 they met at Pembina an American party made up of the commissioner, four officers from the Corps of Engineers, a body of civilian surveyors, and Company K of the 20th Infantry as escort. There their first act was to determine just where the 49th parallel did cross the Red River. The disputed Hudson’s Bay post was demonstrated to be a few hundred feet north of the line, but the Canadian custom house was south of it. When the American and British surveyors came up with a discrepancy of thirty-two feet in locating the line, the Joint Commission set a precedent in international relations by amicably halving it.

  Not all problems could be solved by dichotomy. After being baptized by an equinoctial snowstorm immediately on arrival, they had a month of fine Indian Summer weather in which to survey the line through the almost impossible terrain from the northwest corner of Lake of the Woods, where the 1826 survey had ended, to the 49th parallel. There they encountered difficulties both political and topographical. The earlier negotiators, confused by an imprecise map, had allow
ed the border to drift a long way north of the 49th parallel, and it was clear now that to run a straight line south to that parallel would leave an isolated peninsula of American territory deep in Canada. Captain D. R. Cameron of the Royal Artillery, the British Commissioner, had orders not to recognize the northwest angle monument left by the 1826 survey, since the British hoped to eliminate the angle by further negotiation, but he did consent to having a sight line cut from it due south, in order to expedite the rest of the work. But the terrain almost rendered their political agreeableness an empty gesture, for they found that any land which was not soggy with water was under water, and they had a bad time even locating the monument that Cameron’s orders forbade him to accept. Finally they did find it—a post surrounded by a crib of logs—several feet under water in a swamp, and started hewing their southward line. Indian axemen labored in water above their knees, surveyors floundered across bogs whose mossy surface gave way to let them down to their waists in cold slime, supplies came in on men’s backs, the camps were dreary quagmires. Sixteen miles of that, continuous swamp heavily grown with birch and tamarack, before they cut off the disputed American peninsula; then ten miles across the open lake, where they located the 49th parallel on the ice. From that comer they turned west, marking the first station on solid ground just at the west shore of Lake of the Woods. Again the instruments could not agree as readily as the commissioners; an overlap of twenty-nine feet in the observations was halved. As for direction, once they turned the corner on the ice they would not need to deviate again: straight west would serve them all the way. They were almost at the eastern edge of the Plains; across that oceanic land a boundary line could run as straight as an equator or a tropic, serene, almost abstract.