Wolf Willow

  After the establishment of the joint astronomical station on the shore of the lake, the American party was forced by its inadequate budget to retire to St. Paul and fold up for the winter. It left to the British, on a shared-cost basis, the hewing of a thirty-foot swath through ninety miles of swamps, timber, and prairie to the Red River. The British crews, finding the work easier after the freeze-up, decided to go on with their astronomical and chaining work through the winter; the American party would not finish its share of that stretch until 1874.

  The experiences of the British party in 1872-73, and those of the American party a year later, differ only in degree, though it seems likely that no American officer ever served his country under more severe conditions or with more devotion and endurance than Lt. Greene of the Corps of Engineers when he completed the American surveying between Lake of the Woods and Red River. If he was not an explorer, he had all the discomforts, difficulties, and dangers of one; and the life of the British group was comparable. All of them, here at the ecological boundary between Woods and Plains, were in process of becoming plainsmen while having to retain many of the skills of the woods. With modifications, they were in the position that the Saulteaux, Cree, and métis had all found themselves in, and the machinery of their daily lives was a bizarre mixture of two cultures. They alternated between mules and dogteams, carts and sleds, skin lodges and brush shelters. Broken up into small parties for maximum efficiency, they were caught out in blizzards that neither horse nor dog would drive against, and fought their way in after days of exposure, half starved, half frozen, and undismayed. Along with the boundaries of their countries they surveyed the limits of endurance. Sometimes in the still cold their spirit thermometers dropped to forty-five, fifty, fifty-one below. In their icy camps they lay and heard the gunshot reports of willows bursting as the sap froze, and on those nights of windless cold they saw the Northern Lights in their greatest splendor, “vapour-like and yet perfectly transparent, so that even the small stars could be distinctly seen through the illuminated mist,” or spreading in bands and streamers so bright they lighted the sky like dawn. They learned how eyelashes could freeze together on a trail, and how a muffler moistened by breathing could freeze fast to a man’s beard and threaten to smother him. They learned to be wary about turning a tangent screw with the bare fingers, for the brass burned as if it had been white hot; if the hand that touched it was moist, the metal froze fast and could only be removed with the skin. Tenderfeet who made the mistake of drinking out of un-warmed metal cups in the morning left the skin of their lips on the rim. The eyes of all the surveyors were painful from the constant dangerous contact with the eyepieces of their instruments, whose lurking frost could seize an eyelid and hold it fast, “as experienced by Russian officers in Siberia.” After long exposure the eye would leak tears that froze instantly into beaded ice on the lashes, “and gave the face a comical look, somewhat like that in children’s pictures of Jack Frost.”

  It was not a game for children. They had cause for pride in their work when they brought the line out of the Woods and into the Red River valley. Now before them lay the Plains, through which they were to sight a beeline for eight hundred miles.

  April and part of May, during the spring breakup, were not surveying weather. The British commission spent six weeks under roofs at Red River planning for the season ahead, and they were already in the field when the American party reassembled on June 1, 1873, complete with an escort of one company of the 20th Infantry and two of the Seventh Cavalry under Major Reno. The cavalry would make lurid history three years later when the bankrupt Indian policy of the United States combined with official and unofficial corruption to bring Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and a thousand Sioux warriors boiling down on Custer’s center column on the Little Big Horn. Here, though considered indispensable, they would prove to have no fighting to do. If they had had, the arrangement was that they were to protect without distinction both the American and the British party, though in practice the British and Canadians, beneficiaries of a sounder Indian policy and a less pugnacious history, were undoubtedly less in need of protection than their comrades on the other side of the line.

  Working alternate stations, each commission divided into several parties, they closed the line from monument to monument. As far as the western border of Manitoba they would plant eight-foot hollow iron pillars four feet in the ground at mile intervals; in the empty country beyond all settlement their progress would at first be marked every three miles by a cairn of stones or a mound of earth. Ahead of them, thirty métis scouts commanded by an engineering officer reconnoitered the country for camp and supply-depot sites in the boundary zone. The measuring worm lengthened out, chaining itself toward buffalo country, toward the Blackfoot country, toward the lost hills where, only a few weeks before, the conflict of cultures had burst into brief and bloody war on Battle Creek.

  The climate of the Red River valley is cold, and spring comes slowly, but when it comes, when one warm day is followed by a single night without frost, the whole prairie is misted with sudden green. Out of the same abrupt loosening of winter come mosquitoes in fogs and clouds to drive men and animals wild. The tender skin around the eyes of horses and oxen gathers moving crusts of torment; a rider rubbing a hand across his mount’s face brings up a pulpy mass of crushed insects and blood. And horseflies, the savage things called bulldogs: a horse will flinch from the bite of one as if he has been nicked by a knife blade. His dung is full of bots. Even the strongest animals under these conditions are kept thin, and when one is too poor or overworked the constant attacks of the flies and mosquitoes may literally kill him.

  Chain by chain, stake by stake, mound by mound, they measured their true-west line, each party surveying as it went a belt five miles wide on its own side. The Red River valley’s fertile prairie was back of them, they mounted the ridge known as Pembina Mountain and were on the Second Prairie Steppe, one mighty grassland marked by the skulls and bones and unused wallows of the vanished buffalo, and by the mounded burrows of innumerable badgers. Crocuses gave way to wild roses, but the mosquitoes and flies did not disappear as the summer heat came on. They ceased their biting only for an hour or two during the blaze of noon, and that was precisely the time when work could not go on because “over the whole prairie surface the air was in constant agitation, and in looking through the telescope at a distant flagstaff it was seen to dance with persistent contortions, and no observations on terrestrial objects could be made from point to point with accuracy, except in the early morning or late in the evening.” They learned to like cloudy days; they blessed their luck when they were sighting across a valley, for only the lower thirty or forty feet of air did the heat dance.

  Seventy miles of plains brought them to Turtle Mountain, straddling the line. Here was relief from heat and glare, plenty of wood for fires and smudges, plenty of water more potable than the sloughs of the prairie. But Turtle Mountain also brought a sharp increase in difficulty of another kind. One group of British axemen and surveyors was all summer cutting a fifteen-foot way through twenty-four miles of Turtle Mountain to meet an American party which worked ten miles in from the other side. In the thirty-four miles of their mutual effort, before they met on opposite shores of a mile-wide lake, they had crossed sixty-five pieces of water, across many of which the line had to be surveyed by triangulation. Also they discovered what havoc a sudden hailstorm, with stones as big as bantam eggs, could create in camp and among the horses. More than once they hunted cover and watched the violent winds that brought these squalls level every tent in camp. Nevertheless, Turtle Mountian was a place they left with some regret, its advantages of wood, water, and shade more than balancing its disadvantages. They established a supply depot there and chained on to catch up with an American party that had set up a depot on the Souris or Mouse River, still farther west.

  Now plains again, interrupted by the winding floodplain of the Souris, with good camping and good grass, and past Les Roches Perce�
�s with their badlands erosional forms. For 138 miles the plains swept on without a major lift or break, until after many days the west showed a faint low line of blue. This, which faded almost out of sight as they approached and mounted it, was the Great Coteau of the Missouri, angling southeastward from the Thunder Hills, on the Saskatchewan, to a point east of the Great Bend of the Missouri in what is now North Dakota. This was another distinct step in their measuring-worm march. It brought them to the Third Prairie Steppe, the highest and driest part of the northern Plains, where the flow of streams was uncertain and often alkaline. For many miles west of the Coteau they encountered salt lakes, alkali sinks, creeks that trickled off feebly to one side or other and died in brackish sloughs. They suffered for decent water, and sickened on what they had, and chained on.

  Late in September, when the westernmost American party was quitting work at Astronomical Station No. 12, just west of the 106th meridian, 408 miles from Red River, and preparing to start for the Missouri and a steamboat ride to Bismarck and thence home, the British parties were still strung out across 400 miles, and they and their commissariat wagons were caught in various postures of unpreparedness by the first equinoctial snowstorms on September 23. They corralled their wagons into a horseshoe and lashed canvas sheets on the inside and huddled their tents into the frail shelter. For seven days and nights they could do little but stay in their blankets. Their horses, turned loose to graze in the lulls of the storm, came back and stood in the shelter of the wagons and did not eat for a week. That the first storm was almost always followed by several weeks of mild Indian Summer weather did not much console men who had anywhere up to 400 miles to ride, across prairies swept bare of forage by fires, and who had to watch helplessly while their horses turned to scare-crows before their eyes.

  A few days after the storm had ended, the most advanced British party was near a fly-by-night whiskey post called Turnay‘s, on the Frenchman River just below its crossing of the 49th parallel. There was still snow on the ground. They were looking for a métis village supposed to be on Wood (or Woody) Mountain. For that matter, they were looking for Wood Mountain, which rumor said lay somewhere near the line. Only the passing of a party of Sioux hunters heading south gave them the clue that let them find it: the Sioux said there was a hunters’ camp a long day’s journey north. Following the Sioux tracks backward across the snowy plain, the surveyors after 25 miles found the village at what is now Willow Bunch, hidden among the ravines of the high land, with good wood, water, and shelter. A few hours of bright sun let them take a shot with the sextant and determine that the village was actually 22 miles north of the line. Balmy weather made the “rude and desolate huts” of the hivernants look attractive enough so that the surveyors selected Willow Bunch as their supply depot for the work of the next season. That was on October 8, 1873. By the end of that month they had ridden, almost casually, all the 450 miles back to Red River and closed up for the year.

  The next May the advance commissary train of twenty wagons started west again, accompanied by a road-making and bridge-building party. At the same time a mounted reconnaissance party with Red River carts for its baggage pushed clear on out to Wood Mountain to build depot buildings; when they had those completed, they were to scour the country for a hundred miles to the west to spot water, fuel, and campsites. Two weeks behind the advance groups came the main body, 160 officers and men and 70 wagons, and so efficient had the road-builders been that the main party went 200 miles, clear to the Souris, without a difficulty or an interruption. There the river was in flood. They sank pole cribs loaded with rocks in its channel and in three days built a bridge. At the Great Coteau the astronomical and chaining parties broke off south to follow the boundary track to their stations; the wagons kept on the easier cart track toward Wood Mountain, where they arrived on June 22, thirty-two days out from Red River. At Willow Bunch they found that at least one element of the American frontier system was sound. The trader they had engaged in Fort Benton had already delivered across country sixty tons of oats, bringing them in a train of huge, broad-tired double wagons, each pair drawn by nine yoke of oxen and carrying a payload of eight tons of sacked grain. The British were quite capable of matching American plainsmen in fortitude and more than able to match them in discipline, but in enterprises of this sort Americans would out-perform anybody in the world.

  The survey crew had trouble crossing the deep gorge of the Frenchman, and found its water unpalatably salty, and on its plateau in early June they made the acquaintance of the crawling locusts whose swarms, growing wings, would shortly fly east to devastate for the second year in a row the crops of the Red River valley.

  And out on the scabby plains beyond the crossing of the Frenchman, out on the flats where exactly forty years later my father would hopefully hunt up the survey stakes marking his half section of land, they met the buffalo for the first time. They chased him and hunted him and blessed his beef and cursed his habit of filling every slough and waterhole with mud and excreta. Once their wagon train, headed for a depot 150 miles west of Wood Mountain, was all but run over by an enormous herd being driven by Sioux. The commissary’s métis scouts fired into the onrushing herd and split it, and they watched the terrified bison gallop past on both sides, and like apparitions the stripped brown Sioux on strong buffalo horses emerged from the dust and were gone.

  In Fort Benton men during those years were confidently saying that the buffalo were getting more numerous because of the killing off of the wolves, but a herd like that was already a thing of the past in all the five hundred miles of plains eastward, and after another seven years the buffalo would be gone from this last desolate prairie too—gone as if the earth had opened. The surveyors witnessed one of the reasons: encountering hunting camps of métis, they noted that every day each hunter would kill six or eight buffalo, from which his women would take the tongues and hump ribs and leave the rest, even the hides. Across this “arid cactus plain” between the Frenchman and the Milk the boundary line was pushed through the carrion stink of a way of life recklessly destroying itself.

  In seventeen days they surveyed 108 miles across the cactus flats where we would later homestead. They held their noses against the smell of carrion, they gagged when they drank the brackish water full of wigglers or nauseous with buffalo urine. With undiminished speed they moved on toward the Three Buttes, or Sweetgrass Hills, a natural divide like the Cypress Hills and Wood Mountain, but on the south side of the 49th parallel. A few miles from their depot camp they came upon the bodies of twenty Crow Indians, scalped, half mummified in the dry heat—one more manifestation, belated like the spendthrift camp of métis buffalo hunters, of an ecology still furiously vital on the very eve of its extinction. As a power, the Blackfoot in 1874 were almost as dead as this Crow war party they had killed, but they did not yet know it, and neither did their enemies. Neither did the surveyors. The escort in these dangerous longitudes included not only the customary two companies of cavalry but five companies of the 6th Infantry based upon Fort Buford, and Major Reno had issued orders that not even that substantial command was to be divided too much—a precaution that his superior would ignore, to the sorrow of many widows and orphans, on the Little Big Horn.

  Perhaps because of the big escort, perhaps because of their own lack of belligerence, the survey parties of both sides moved on without trouble from the Blackfoot. In the last week of August, 1874, they jointly located the last monument of the 1861 survey that had carried the boundary from the Pacific to the Rockies, and on a remote ridge above Waterton Lake they completed the line that now ran from sea to sea. Behind them, evidence of their personal contribution to international polity, stretched 388 cairns and pillars and forty astronomical stations. They could all go back to civilian jobs or to their normal army duties, leaving behind them that very open and penetrable fence; yet their work had drawn a line not merely between two countries, but between two periods of history. The final signatures of representatives of the two governments
would be affixed to the official documents in London on May 29 of the next year. By that time Crow and Gros Ventre and Sioux and Blackfoot and Assiniboin would already know that the “Medicine Line,” as they called it, was something potent in their lives.

  Frontiers are lines where one body of law stops and another body of law begins. Partly by reason of that difference of basic law, and from the moment the boundary is drawn, they also become lines of cultural division as real for many kinds of human activity as the ecological boundaries between woods and plains, plains and mountains, or mountains and deserts. Likewise they have their inevitable corollaries. They create their own varieties of lawbreakers, smugglers particularly, and they provide for the guilty and the hunted the institution of sanctuary.

  The coming of the precise international boundary in the neighborhood of such good hunting and trading ground as the Sweetgrass Hills, Cypress Hills, and Wood Mountain, made lawbreakers out of the whiskey traders who until that time had only been lawless. Along the western reaches of that lonely border, whose entire 800 miles were patrolled in the 1870’s and 1880’s by no more than two or three hundred men (some newspapers spoke of their being “massed” along the boundary), it remained easy to slip in and out. For whiskey or guns there was always a seller’s market, and the excitement of successful rum- or gun-running was comparable, probably, to the Indian excitement in horse-stealing. And so there began in the Cypress Hills area a tradition of border-jumping that was still very much alive during my years there. The unmarked trails past our homestead, mere wagon tracks across a sea of grass, witnessed during 1918 and 1919 a remarkable lot of traffic in Marmons and Hudson Super Sixes, tightly side-curtained and so heavily loaded that their rear springs rode clear down on the axles. They drove mainly at night or in foul weather. We could see their lights far out across the plain groping toward Montana over the wracking burnouts, and we met them sometimes in the rain, traveling when no one else would risk the gumbo. Their tracks were often eight inches deep in the sod, ground down by the small hard tires, the heavy loads, and the constant low gear, with periodic wallows patched with sagebrush where they had bogged down and dug out again. It is astonishing how some unrecognized professions can last. The history of that country practically began with whiskey runners, and whiskey runners were using the same trails nearly half a century later, only this time they were running whiskey from wet Canada into dry Montana, and their customers were not Indian and métis hunters but Montana businessmen, mechanics, politicians, and housewives. Any real inequality or disparity between the laws of Canada and those of the United States starts a flow of contraband in one direction or the other.