includes index

Acknowledgments -- Prologue: Through the looking glass -- Drawing the line -- "Melting pot of hell" -- Sanctuary -- If you build it, will they come?" -- Which side are you on? -- Living or a way of life? -- What are we fighting for? -- Cosmopolitan throng -- "We can play baseball on the other side" -- Nature's "incivilities" -- Epilogue: Wallace Stegner and the North American West -- Notes -- Index.

Along the border between Montana and Saskatchewan lies one hundred miles of hard and desolate terrain, a remote place where Native and new American nations came together in a contest for land, wealth, and survival. Following explorers Lewis and Clark and Alexander Mackenzie, both Americans and Canadians launched the process of empire along the 49th parallel, disrupting the lives of Native peoples who began to traverse this imaginary line in search of refuge. In this evocative and beautifully rendered portrait, Beth LaDow recreates the unstable world along this harsh frontier, capturing the complex history of a borderland known as "the medicine line" to the Indians who lived there. When Sitting Bull crossed the boundary for the last time in 1881, weary of pursuit by the U.S. cavalry and the constant threat of starvation, the region opened up to railroad men and settlers, determined to make a living. But the unforgiving landscape would resist repeated attempts to subdue it, from the schemes of powerful railroad magnate James J. Hill, to the exploits of Canadian Mountie James Walsh, to the misguided dreams of ranchers and homesteaders, whose difficult existence is best captured in Wallace Stegner's plaintive accounts of a boyhood spent in this stark place. Drawing on little-known diaries, letters, and memories, as well as interviews with the descendants of settlers and native peoples, The Medicine Line reveals how national interests were transformed by the powerful alchemy of mingling peoples and the place they shared. With a historian's insight and a storyteller's gift, LaDow questions some of our deepest assumptions about a nationalist frontier past and finds in this least-known place a new historical and emotional heart-land of the North American West. A colorful history of the most desolate terrain in America, one hundred miles between Canada & Montana, where three nations fought over land, wealth, & ultimately survival.