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

Frits Pannekoek is an associate professor of heritage studies, director
of information resources at the University of Calgary, and the author of
A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel Resistance of
1869–70.

Tony Rees, former archivist of the Glenbow Museum and Archives, has written “the” exhaustive account of the surveying and mapping of the world’s longest undefended border, which runs between the United States and Canada across the great western plains. It is largely a chronological account. Each chapter is a season starting with Chapter 2, “Autumn 1872,” and ending with chapter 11, “Autumn 1874.” There are two following chapters of summary and some analysis. It is clear that these years were critical years of transition for Western Canada and the Western United States.

What the joint boundary commission symbolized, although they may not have known it at the time, was the end of the great western commons in which resources belonged to everyone. By drawing the line and identifying national ownership of resources, land, and people it was marking an end to the freedom and the north-south natural arrangements that once were North America. It was now to become a region in which the ownership of land and resources was to be individually or nationally not communally controlled. It was a region that was going to be governed from Washington and Toronto.

Rees does an excellent job of describing those involved in the boundary commission from both nations. What will interest Canadians most is how important the boundary commission was in nurturing some of the greatest of Canadian scientists and some of the new nation’s great institutions, like the Geological Survey of Canada. What will sadden readers however is the rather old-fashioned approach to analysis. The use of written sources is exemplary, however there is no effort to talk to the Aboriginal peoples along the Medicine line to determine the oral tradition surrounding the boundary commission. The 70s were the years that saw the Cypress Hills Massacre, the creation of the North West Mounted Police, and the end of the centuries-old life of the peoples of the plains. Amidst the analysis of the pettiness of the personalities, the profound cataclysm facing the people of the West seems to have been lost.