The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland

The myth of the West in Canada and the U.S.A. issues largely from a country almost unknown to most North Americans: the wide plains that spill over the forty-ninth parallel between Montana and Saskatchewan. Beth LaDow, who lives in Massachusetts and Montana, has now given us The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland, a well-written account of that land. The “Medicine Line” was the international border; by the late 1870s Native people had come to understand it as “exposure, pursuit and captivity” on the American side and sanctuary on the Canadian side. Sanctuary for a time, anyway, as history has shown us. This book is history-writing at its most readable. The publisher (Routledge) has neglected to include an index to the photographs.