| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 32.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 32.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland. By Beth LaDow. (New York: Routledge, 2001. xviii + 272 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $35.00, Canada; $25.00.)

It is curious that the history of the Medicine Line, that stretch of border country between the United States and Canada, known in northern Montana as the Highline, has been so overlooked when it is such a romantic history in many ways--rebellion, betrayals, lost causes, lost hopes--all the stuff of legend. Beth LaDow, inspired in part by Wallace Stegner's account in Wolf Willow (New York, 1962) of his boyhood in southern Saskatchewan, sets out to investigate the stories of the Medicine Line and to sort out the popular myths from the likely reality. 1

"Here," she writes, "was another line worth examining–one that could explain some deep part of the Canadian and American experience that our separate nationalistic television documentaries leave out" (p. 5). What became of Sitting Bull after the Sioux victory at the Little Big Horn? Were the Royal Canadian Mounted Police really the lone heroes portrayed in paintings like Charles M. Russell's When the Law Dulls the Edge of Change? Were the Montana wolvers and whiskey runners really the lawless renegades they were made out to be in the Canadian press? What really were--and are--the suspicions and tensions on both sides of the longest undefended international border in the world? And how do we measure Canadian and American distinctiveness? . . .

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