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

Amazon.com Price:  $28.13 (as of 19/04/2019 04:51 PST- Details)

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Description

Today the borderland between Canada and the USA is a wide, empty sweep of wheat fields and pasture, measured by a grid of gravel roads that sees little traffic and few individuals who are not making their lives there. It has been much this way for more than a century now, but there was once a moment when the great silence shrouding this place was once broken, and that moment changed it perpetually. Arc of the Medicine Line is a compelling narrative of that moment—the completion of the official border between the USA and Canada in 1874.
 
In late July of 1874, the Sweetgrass Hills sheltered the greatest accumulation of scientists, teamsters, scouts, cooks, and soldiers to be seen in this a part of the world before the coming of the railways. The men of the boundary commissions—American, British, and Canadian—established an astronomical station and the last of their supply depots as they prepared to attract the Medicine Line across the final hundred of the nearly nine hundred miles between Manitoba’s Lake of the Woods and the Continental Divide. In the brief weeks the surveyors and soldiers spent in Milk River country, they witnessed, and played a singular part in, the beginning of the end for the open West. That hot, dry summer of 1874 marked the outdoor world’s final assault in this last frontier.

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