Taken for granted in the drama of the flight lurked a significant truth. The border mattered. It divided not the just the United States and Canada, but the homelands of Indian peoples. Over the rest of the century, the U.S. Army and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police made the border more and more impassable for native peoples, considered citizens of neither country but wards of one or the other. They harassed them and stopped them on journeys that had once been routine.35
