The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland
The medicine line, a hundred-mile stretch of the U.S.Canadian border at the top of Blaine County, Montana, epitomizes borderlessness. "The prairie stretches seamlessly outward," LaDow writes, "as if the wind were blowing it toward the Rockies." But the region is thick with stories: Sitting Bull crossed and recrossed the medicine line during the Sioux resistance, and the settlements that arose on both sides of the border in the late nineteenth century included Chinese, Norwegians, Jews, and Mennonites. Wallace Stegner, who grew up near the medicine line, caught the landscape's harsh, wild beauty, and in this fine book LaDow gives it the history it deserves.Copyright © 2005The New Yorker