Wallace Stegner wrote about Medicine Line country.
Wallace Stegner wrote about Medicine Line country. He grew up thirty miles north of the Montana border in a small Saskatchewan town called Eastend. Like many northland settlers, Stegner’s father was a roamer. The author spent time in an orphanage when he was four, then lived in an abandoned dining car near the Canadian Pacific Railroad in Saskatchewan. The family moved to a shack on the border in the summer, where they farmed wheat. In a memoir of his childhood, Wolf Willow, Stegner wrote about the evolution of small towns in the region: “The first settlement in the Cypress Hills country was a village of métis winterers, the second was a short-lived Hudson’s Bay Company post on Chimney Coulee, the third was the Mounted Police headquarters at Fort Walsh, the fourth was a Mountie outpost erected on the site of the burned Hudson’s Bay Company buildings to keep an eye on Sitting Bull and other Indians who congregated in that country in alarming numbers after the big troubles of the 1870’s.”
