The medicine line : life and death on a North American borderland /

LaDow's brief volume is an excellent example of writing the big story while focusing on a small place over a brief period of time. Events unfold along a stretch of the Montana-Saskatchewan border running perhaps a hundred miles east from the Alberta line, although whether measuring and identifying political entities is a concern of lasting importance is one of the book's themes. Several of the chapters--on surveying the line, building two parallel transcontinental railroads, the tribulations of wresting a livelihood from the place--can stand alone on their own merits. This is first and foremost a tale of human intrusion into a strange and different place. The pace of settlement and origin of would-be settlers in the last two decades of the 19th century, and the triumph over human institutions--and over international borders of the 1918 influenza epidemic and concurrent drought--allow the author to (unintentionally) suggest two alternate titles: "a spectacular flood of strangers" and "nature is still in charge." Writing is mercifully free of postmodernist jargon, although one or two lapses into the false present tense are jarring. Wallace Stegner's presence looms large. General and undergraduate collections. R. B. Way University of Toledo

LaDow, an independent scholar and sometime commentator for National Public Radio, looks again at the territory Jonathan Raban explored in Bad Land (1996), but for LaDow, this land along the scarcely marked border between Montana and Saskatchewan invites comparative analysis. Settlers came west to these arid acres both north and south of the border; the same territory seemed for a time to offer Native Americans a place of their own. The northern plains are Wallace Stegner country--as he wrote in Wolf Willow, he spent a half dozen years here in his youth, straddling the border--and LaDow weaves his recollections into her narrative. Ranchers and farmers, railroad tycoons and Native leaders such as Sitting Bull came together in this Great American Desert. "All were driven," LaDow suggests, "or drawn to this place, their last, best hope--the Indians for escape and refuge, the settlers for the open western lands that seemed nearly gone--and lived a common story of hardship, disappointment, failure and, in fewer cases than not, persistence." An involving contribution to western history. --Mary Carroll

Crossing the U.S.-Canadian border today is a simple, uncomplicated process. But as LaDow shows in this earnest and lively account of the frontier during the 19th and early 20th centuries, crossing the border was not always so trivial. LaDow, a historian and commentator for National Public Radio, focuses on a 100-mile stretch between Montana and Saskatchewan, called the "medicine line" by Native American tribes because of its seemingly magical potential to correct wrongs and reverse fortunes. For example, after the Battle of Little Big Horn, LaDow writes, Sioux chief Sitting Bull and many followers fled across the line into Canada, securing the personal freedom and political asylum they lacked in the United States. Nevertheless, because the buffalo were as scarce in Canada as they were to the south, Sitting Bull and his starving tribespeople eventually had no choice but to cross the border again and surrender to U.S. troops. During Prohibition, bootleggers (including the father of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Wallace Stegner) loaded barrels of Canadian whiskey into model Ts and drove them across the border to thirsty American cities. In the 1880s, tycoon James Hill pushed the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway across the prairie into British Columbia; just a decade later, he crossed the border to build the competing Great Northern Railway just 100 miles south in Montana. LaDow leaves no aspect of life along the medicine line unexamined, addressing everything from folklore and literature to economics and political leadership. Sometimes this leads to an overload of distracting details; on the whole, however, this a well-written and thoroughly researched history uncovers the forgotten dramas that once played out along what is today the most peaceful border on the planet. Illus. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A portion of the Montana-Saskatchewan prairie border known as the "medicine line" has been described as "terrible," "sterile," and "unfit for civilized men." LaDow looks beyond these physical shortcomings to investigate its history and reveal the growing pains of two nations. The battle for supremacy between natives and whites on both sides of the line predominates her story of this once-contested land, and native icons such as Sitting Bull and Louis Riel are considered in detail. The rivalries among the United States, Canada, and the Native Americans who lived there are examined as two competing railways are built, redirecting the North American economy from north-south to east-west. And while the British-inspired RCMP patrol the Canadian communities, the American outlaws take pride in challenging authority. Despite the countries' differences, LaDow always comes back to the similarities that transcend this boundary. All settlers share a "speculative spirit," enduring the loneliness, drought, and broken dreams that plague them, while recognizing the cultural interests that bring them together. This scholarly and philosophical study is recommended for large public libraries. Isabel Coates, Boston Consulting Group, Ont. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A comprehensive look at the volatile history of the border territory separating Montana and Canada. NPR commentator LaDow’s debut explores in both chronological and human terms the shifting fortunes of this arid prairie region, beginning with the age of Manifest Destiny and the waning of the Indian Wars. She sees Sitting Bull’s 1881 surrender, following his victory over Custer and several years of refuge in Canada, as a metaphor for the transformations enacted by this harsh, vast land on the many ethnic and religious groups who settled there. LaDow explores in great detail the slow development over the 19th century of increasingly rowdy, centralized communities like Medicine Hat, Saskatchewan, and Chinook, Montana, paying attention to the human costs of competitiveness and bigotry and offering good depictions of many significant figures, such as incompetent Mounted Policeman Frank Dickens (son of Charles) and Louis Riel, leader of a rebellion by Canada’s Métis people. Throughout, the author is sensitive to the traumas endured by various native tribes, who saw their old ways of existence die along the Medicine Line. Her narrative has many powerful moments, as when we glimpse the ghost communities that dotted the landscape in the early 20th century after speculator James Hill’s artificially created “land rush” foundered due to repeated droughts and other natural catastrophes that caused the practitioners of “dry farming” to flee their homesteads in droves. Wallace Stegner, who was interviewed for this project, termed the Medicine Line region of his childhood “the capital of an unremembered past.” LaDow ably captures that past, limning the scope of the many changes and cultural conflicts that penetrated this stark region, even though her prose is often turgid and her points repetitive. Despite its flaws, the book tells a story of considerable importance to Medicine Liners, their far-flung descendants, and students of the bitter culture clashes endemic during the era of western expansion.