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

by Porter Fox

At 5,525 miles, including Alaska, the northern border is the longest international boundary in the world. Without Alaska, the 3,987-mile line capping the Lower 48 is the third-longest.

Unless there’s oil or gas to drill for, the economy is typically slow.

The Saint Croix has marked the boundary between New England and Canada since the day Samuel de Champlain landed there. The official line was drawn along the river at the 1783 Treaty of Paris.

Ninety percent of Canadians live within a hundred miles of their southern border. Twelve percent of Americans live in the northland, and most of them in cities like Seattle, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cleveland.

From 1616 to 1619, disease killed 75–90 percent of coastal Indians living in the Northeast. About two million Indians lived east of the Mississippi when Champlain arrived on Saint Croix Island in 1604. By 1750, that number was 250,000.

A mariner’s rule I learned growing up is that you have a 50 percent chance of swimming 50 yards in 50-degree water.

Angeles. Most people don’t travel anymore. They arrive. Unless you’re riding the slow boat. Then you see every mile.

It takes a drop of water about four hundred years to travel from Lake Superior to the Saint Lawrence River, meaning that the water Champlain navigated is still meandering east today.

The northland is America’s water tower, making water quality—and availability—there a national, not regional, issue. Ninety-five percent of America’s surface freshwater sits in the Great Lakes basin.

Ted seemed like a man who had seen a lot of the same thing for a long time. He stroked his gray goatee when he spoke.

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

In sixty years, the population of buffalo in the West plunged from thirty million to less than a thousand. Statistically, it was the greatest slaughter of warm-blooded animals in human history, including the whaling years.

“Everybody’s fighting for what they think is right, but whatever you think is right usually turns out being wrong, and whatever you think is wrong somehow ends up getting through anyway. You can’t fight the people in Washington. You can’t fight the money.”