Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border

by Porter Fox

CORNFIELDS GREW BETWEEN STANDS of cottonwood trees, and harvesters cruised down the double-yellow line spewing golden dust on the way north.

I drove past Saint Cloud, Brainerd, and the actual headwaters of the Mississippi in Itasca State Park.

Transporting settlers and military across Lake of the Woods to the Canadian prairies was big business at one time as Canada tried to keep up with western expansion in America. The first steamer began operating there in 1872. The Shamrock had accommodations for twenty-five first-class passengers and fifty in steerage. The three-day trip across Lake of the Woods cost twelve dollars, including room and board. Ferry service expanded in the late 1800s along with mining, lumbering, and fishing. Side-wheelers, stern-wheelers, and propeller boats roamed the waters—ranging from 30-foot lumber freighters to the 150-foot Kenora steamer, which had twenty-two state rooms and one hundred passengers.

North Dakota is one of the only states in the country that casts its highways in concrete so they never fall apart.

In September of 2016, ETP announced that despite the protests, its pipeline was almost complete and DAPL would be operational by the end of 2016. The final section would tunnel under a dammed section of the Missouri called Lake Oahe, near Standing Rock. Things there did not look good. The Sioux Nation had a long history of standing up to corporations and the US government. They were the only Indian nation to have defeated the US Army in a war—and to have received everything they asked for in peace negotiations. The government had been taking from them ever since. It sold off millions of acres of their land and violated multiple treaties. Mining corporations had recently started digging for uranium and dumping radioactive waste on Sioux land. In September of 2016, the protest camp, set on the Cannonball River, prepared for what many saw as a last stand against a century and a half of oppression.

Like the Ojibwe, the Sioux consider the Road of the Spirits—their name for the Path of Souls—a portal to the afterlife. The seven stars of the Big Dipper lift souls onto the road, making 7 a sacred number. The number 4 is also sacred, and the two numbers form the tribes’ numerical systems. Political and cultural divisions are made in sevens. The Sioux nation is divided into seven tribes. Each tribe is divided into seven bands. Bands changed their names so often in the 1700s that explorers ten years apart documented what they thought were completely different groups. The number 4 is associated with nature, people, and place. There are four divisions of time: day, night, moon phase, and year. There are four kinds of animals on land: creatures that crawl, fly, walk on four legs, and walk on two. There are four celestial entities: sun, moon, sky, and stars.

Like the Ojibwe, the Sioux consider the Road of the Spirits—their name for the Path of Souls—a portal to the afterlife. The seven stars of the Big Dipper lift souls onto the road, making 7 a sacred number. The number 4 is also sacred, and the two numbers form the tribes’ numerical systems. Political and cultural divisions are made in sevens. The Sioux nation is divided into seven tribes. Each tribe is divided into seven bands. Bands changed their names so often in the 1700s that explorers ten years apart documented what they thought were completely different groups. The number 4 is associated with nature, people, and place. There are four divisions of time: day, night, moon phase, and year. There are four kinds of animals on land: creatures that crawl, fly, walk on four legs, and walk on two. There are four celestial entities: sun, moon, sky, and stars.

Sioux society is matriarchal, where a man moves into a woman’s home after marriage, and the woman is considered the head of the household. They were shocked at the way white men scolded and hit their women and children.

THE JUNE 1850 US CENSUS calculated twenty-three million residents in America, a 36 percent increase from ten years before.

Red Cloud, a thirty-year-old Oglala Lakota and the tribe’s head warrior, led his band in formation to a field outside of Fort Laramie in late summer. Red Cloud was six feet tall and towered over other braves. He had a wide forehead and hooked nose and adorned himself with eagle feathers and ribbons. At important meetings, he slicked his hair back with bear grease and braided in the wing bone of an eagle. Red Cloud was the son of a drunk and a fierce warrior who had fought his way to power. He did not drink and did not accept gifts from whites. Legendary acts of bravery and cunning had made him a supernatural figure to many. He was a shaman who practiced the sun dance—a four-day purification ceremony in which dozens of pieces of flesh are ripped from a warrior’s body. His followers said he could talk to animals, fly, and be in two places at once. They said he was also capable of casting spells and interpreting omens.

“Someone’s delivering two hundred pounds of buffalo meat here on Saturday,” Joye said. “This place is going to be nuts.”

“There are prophesies that talk about how the First Nations people will rise up and become so enlightened they will enlighten the world,”

“There are prophesies that talk about how the First Nations people will rise up and become so enlightened they will enlighten the world,” she said. “This is indigenous rising. We have been the most oppressed, suppressed, people in the world. Indigenous populations, specifically here in America. We were so decimated, but we have been growing and educating ourselves. The common goal is water. Water is sacred. Without water there is nothing. There is an alternative for everything oil makes. There is no alternative for water. And yet they want to commodify it and poison it.”

There is no alternative for water.

One of the kids’ favorite activities is swimming with the horses.

One of the kids’ favorite activities is swimming with the horses. Helena had brought their favorite horse to Standing Rock, a dappled gray named Silver. She called him “dirty white boy.” At home, the kids hang on to his mane as he walks into the ruddy water of Lake Traverse. Then he swims in wide circles with the children dragging behind. When his front hooves touch the beach again, he lurches forward, and the kids scream and cling to his neck as he drags them out of the water.

It was a perfect system, all of the parts moving in synchronicity.

There were no excavators, no houses or people in sight. Just buffalo grass bending in the wind, the pale-blue Missouri sliding around an oxbow, and the furry, brown beasts wandering in circles. It was a perfect system, all of the parts moving in synchronicity. In two hundred years, a scheme that took millions of years to evolve was methodically being taken apart.

POWER LINES GLIDED OVER THE ROAD. RIBBONS OF ASPHALT, steel, water, soil, and trees ran parallel with the highway, cutting the northland off from the rest of the country. I was on US Route 2, somewhere in eastern Montana. The two-lane “Hi-Line” shadows the northern border twenty-five hundred miles from Maine to Washington, with a break over the Great Lakes.

“Montana” is a Spanish name, though Spanish explorers never made it that far. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado crossed the Rockies in 1540 near present-day Santa Fe, but he chose to trek east to Kansas instead of north. Montana license plates call their home Big Sky Country. It was easy to see why. The state is larger than Japan. You can see a good chunk of it from almost any vantage point. Humidity averages in the low sixties. The whipsaw crest of the Rocky Mountains is visible from a hundred miles away. Big Sky Country averages seven people, one pronghorn antelope, one elk, and three deer per square mile. Eighty percent of the counties are still classified as “frontier,” meaning they are occupied by six or fewer people per square mile. There are more elk, grizzly bears, loons, and trumpeter swans in the state than anywhere else in the continental US.

Montana and “Oregon Country” were some of the last unexplored and unmapped regions on the planet in the early 1800s, along with interior Africa, Australia, and both poles.

Montana and “Oregon Country” were some of the last unexplored and unmapped regions on the planet in the early 1800s, along with interior Africa, Australia, and both poles. Oregon Country stretched 250,000 square miles from the Pacific coast to the Continental Divide in western Montana. Thomas Jefferson considered it the last piece of America, that would someday complete an “Empire of Liberty” from sea to sea. It was a pipe dream. America was having a hard time managing the territory it already had. And the Northwest was already claimed by Russia, England, France, Spain, and dozens of Indian nations.

The land wasn’t flat like in North Dakota.

Low-angle autumn light glanced off buttes alongside Route 2. Barn swallows flitted over hay fields. Dirt driveways in Culbertson and Blair were dry and dusty. Covered porches had been closed up for winter and storm windows installed. The Continental floated ahead of me. The car was an apparition. Wheat and flax fields moved by like they were on a studio set. The land wasn’t flat like in North Dakota. Combines ran up and over knolls and ravines, harvesting wheat. Bright-red fire hydrants had been installed every quarter mile in one field, thirty-foot-tall iron sculptures of birds in another.

They retreated farther north and, the same month that Crazy Horse and nine hundred Sioux tribal members surrendered at Camp Robinson, Sitting Bull crossed into Saskatchewan over what Indians had begun to call the “Medicine Line.”

The winter of 1876 was severe, with fierce wind and temperatures dipping to minus thirty. Miles outfitted his men with buffalo robes, mittens, and face masks cut from wool blankets. Sitting Bull went largely undetected, but freezing temperatures and a lack of game weakened the tribe. They retreated farther north and, the same month that Crazy Horse and nine hundred Sioux tribal members surrendered at Camp Robinson, Sitting Bull crossed into Saskatchewan over what Indians had begun to call the “Medicine Line.” The “strong medicine” of the forty-ninth parallel stopped US forces in their tracks, allowing Indians a measure of peace to the north. American officers wouldn’t have thought twice about pursuing an enemy across the US-Canada border twenty years earlier. But cross-border bootlegging skirmishes in the 1860s had alerted Canadians to the porous and dangerous state of their southern boundary. After Britain granted Canada dominion status in 1867, and the line along the forty-ninth was marked in 1873, Canadians and their North-West Mounted Police let it be known that the border was real.

Montana’s “Medicine Line” was not the first in America.

Montana’s “Medicine Line” was not the first in America. The Iroquois used the same sobriquet for the French-British boundary in the Seven Years’ War. They documented the border on their wampum as a white line between two black ones. Great Lakes tribes used the term as well for the line between British Ontario and the American colonies.

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.”

I DROVE ROUTE 2 past draws, moraines, hollows, arroyos, rift valleys, and mesas in the east near Frazer and Nashua.

The sun became a spotlight just before it set, shining through an opening in the clouds and splintering on my bug-splattered windshield.

Triple Divide Peak sits in the middle and is one of two “hydrological apexes” of North America, marking the intersection of the Continental and Laurentian Divides.

The sky was clear, and the blocky summits of the Lewis Range were reflected in the lake. The 160-mile-long range forms the northernmost leg of America’s Continental Divide. Ten summits crest ten thousand feet. Triple Divide Peak sits in the middle and is one of two “hydrological apexes” of North America, marking the intersection of the Continental and Laurentian Divides. Water on southwestern slopes makes its way to the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean. Drops hitting the southeastern side just inches away flow to the Gulf of Mexico, and those to the north end up in Hudson Bay.

There are 25 glaciers in the park. There used to be 150.

There are 25 glaciers in the park. There used to be 150. The number of glaciers shrank by more than a third between 1966 and 2015. One of the country’s oldest climate change research facilities is based in the park. Glaciologists there forecast that the glaciers will be gone by the end of the century.

There were no signs indicating whether you were allowed to wander off the trail. There were a half dozen that reminded hikers how likely it was they would be eaten by one of the three hundred grizzly bears living in the park. If you saw a bear, the signs said to stand tall, act casual, and not run—kind of like when you see a friend in a crowd. If the bear charged, you should hold your ground, as it was likely a bluff. A bear charges at about forty miles per hour, which means that at two hundred feet, you have two and a half seconds to decide whether the bear is faking. If a bear ever sneaks up behind you, the signs said, you are to assume it is a man-killer. At that point you should run faster than the bear and fight it with whatever weapons you have, “including fingernails and teeth.”

The building was a reminder of a different time, when the world’s friendliest border was just that: a line of monuments and cuts through the woods that no one paid any mind.

The customs officer was waiting for me when I returned to the station. The bright lights, yellow pilings, and security cameras at the crossing were a stark contrast to the old post-and-beam structure next to it. The building was a reminder of a different time, when the world’s friendliest border was just that: a line of monuments and cuts through the woods that no one paid any mind.