Today the borderland between Canada and the United States is a wide, empty sweep of wheat fields and pasture, measured by a grid of gravel roads that sees little traffic and few people who do not make their lives there. It has been much this way for more than a century now, but there was a moment when the great silence shrouding this place was broken, and that moment changed it forever. Arc of the Medicine Line is a compelling narrative of that moment—the completion of the official border between the United States 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 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 draw 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 outside world’s final assault on this last frontier.

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

History

Rees, Tony

Americas

University Of Nebraska Press

Now part of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Montana, Milk River country is an austere land that has been at the center of the boom-and-bust extremes that gave final shape to the Prairie West. It was here that the buffalo, prairie wolf and plains grizzly waited out their final days. It was here that Sitting Bull, Little Soldier and Chief Joseph drew the final curtain on the horse cultures of the plains nations, here that ranchers found their last free range and here that the dreams of the last homesteaders dried up and blew away. Hope's Last Home is an intimate journey into the fascinating history of a final frontier.

Hope's Last Home: Travels in Milk River Country

Johnson Gorman Book Pub

Based on extensive research, Tony Rees vividly explores the history of polo on the field and the role of its players and patrons in the development of the Canadian West. This book defines the place of Western Canadian polo in the international world of sport and focuses on Alberta and British Columbia.

Polo: The Galloping Game : An Illustrated History of Polo in the Canadian West

Sports & Outdoors

Individual Sports

Western Heritage Centre Society

A Singular Triumph - Jesus Crucified and Risen

Religion & Spirituality

Austin Macauley

Arc of the Medicine Line: Mapping the World's Longest Undefended Border Across the Western Plains

Douglas&McIntyre

The border between Canada and the United States was laid out in many stages over more than a century, but the biggest part of the job was the long, (mostly) straight line across the prairies. On September 18, 1872, a full five years after confederation, two large teams of army surveyors - one from each country - met at the Red River on the Manitoba-Minnesota border. They were there to fix, for the first time, the precise location of the 49th Parallel between the swampy shores of the Lake of the Woods and the summit of the continental divide in the Rockies. 
Over the next two years, the members of the International Boundary Commission went about the business of surveying, mapping and placing markers across nearly 900 miles of unforgiving territory. Through the work of its brilliant naturalists, the Commission created the first accurate descriptions of what was still largely terra incognita. In drawing the Medicine Line across the High Plains, the Boundary Commission defined the final shape of a new nation and ended, once and for all, the old American dream of Manifest Destiny.

Douglas & McIntyre, Ltd

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Books by Rees, Tony