Northland_A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border

by Porter Fox

  The expedition left Wood River, north of Saint Louis, at four in the afternoon on May 14, 1804. Most of the journey would be on the Missouri, upstream against a five-mile-per-hour current. It took twenty men, rowing full tilt, to make headway against the flow. Several lightweight pirogues rowed alongside, sounding and scouting. The Missouri runs through present-day Omaha, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and western Montana. By late fall the group had made it to a site just north of present-day Bismarck, North Dakota, where they built Fort Mandan to winter in. They met the Shoshone woman Sacajawea there, through her husband, the French Canadian trader Toussaint Charbonneau. Both were hired as interpreters, and they guided the corps over the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass the next spring. From there the group paddled the Clearwater, Snake, and Columbia Rivers. Using Mount Hood as a landmark, they reached the Pacific in November of 1805. After a cold and hungry winter on the north shore of the Columbia, they returned to the Missouri, arriving in Saint Louis again on September 3, 1806.

  The expedition lost just one man in the two and a half years it was in the field. Lewis made 140 maps of the region and documented over two hundred unrecorded plant and animal species. It would be another fifty years before someone created a comprehensive map of Oregon Country, during which time the British occupied it. In 1818, British and American authorities came up with a plan to coexist in the region. It lasted until 1846, when Jefferson’s dream came true. America’s northern border was drawn along the forty-ninth parallel from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific.

  MELTWATER FLOODED A NEARBY STREAM. The air smelled like sagebrush, horse manure, and pine. It was fifty degrees, and last night’s snow in the peaks was already disappearing. This was the West that you saw in movies: log cabins, buck and rail fences, wooden sidewalks, deep-blue rivers, and intersecting mountain ranges. Cumulonimbus clouds hung in the high-pressure desert air. Wind was out of the south at five miles an hour.

  Lewis and Clark came through here. Three Forks, Montana, is a few miles from the Missouri headwaters that Jefferson sent them to find. Lewis spent several days exploring the region, remarking that it was an “essential” point of geography on the continent: “The country opens suddonly to extensive and beatifull plains and meadows which appear to be surrounded in every direction with distant and lofty mountains.”

  I wanted to cross the Rockies like Lewis and Clark had, but not here. I wanted to see where the forty-ninth passed over the mountains a few hours north in Glacier National Park. I followed the Missouri out of Three Forks, past buckwheat fields and side-roll sprinklers to Helena. Sheds, barns, and garages clad with vertical pine planking were stained auburn by sap and the sun. Elk and deer antlers hung over doorways. A few thousand feet higher, auburn scree tumbled toward the road from rocky summits.

  Birch leaves were dry and pale. Woolly buckthorn and red mulberry bushes were still green, but the sunlight was weak. Fields lifted into foothills, which folded into the ten-thousand-foot peaks of the Lewis Range. Central-pivot irrigation systems made bull’s-eyes in every other field. The temperature had been ninety-six degrees in Bozeman the day before. At two in the afternoon, when I drove through Choteau, it was forty-five. A few miles north, in Browning, Montana, a world-record temperature drop had occurred in January 1916: the thermometer fell from forty-four degrees to minus fifty-six in twenty-four hours.

  I followed Highway 89 through Browning and the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. It looked like the tribe was stocking up for winter at the Exxon station. A dozen tribal members stood around the pizza display. Another dozen chatted by the gas pumps. The Blackfeet have lived in the northland for more than ten thousand years. Four bands of the tribe—North and South Piegan, Blood, and Siksika—were hunting in the northern plains when Europeans arrived. Isolation protected them then. Now, it cuts off nine thousand Blackfeet on the reservation from basic social services.

  Browning has served as the eastern gateway to Glacier National Park since 1910. The town stands in stark contrast to the surrounding wilderness that two million, mostly white, people visit every year. A family driving a brand-new SUV stacked with bikes, tents, and canoes cruised past a destitute neighborhood while I was pulled over at a convenience store. Two children in the back seat watched iPads as they drove by two Blackfeet children on the sidewalk who were pushing a baby in a stroller. The Blackfeet were invisible to the white children. Psychologists describe the phenomenon as an extreme form of color blindness. The “invisibleness” of Indians to most Americans comes from the fact that most social representations of Indians today are historical ones. To the average American, Indians are a thing of the past.

  It was getting late, and the forty-ninth was another forty miles north. I stopped at the Saint Mary Ranger Station to find a campsite, but the ranger there told me that all three thousand sites in the park were full. I did a U-turn and headed to the Chewing Blackbones campground on the reservation instead. The man who met me at the front desk said the campground was named for a famous Blackfeet warrior, and that his family line descends from one of the original Blackfeet chiefs who settled on the reservation. He asked where I’d driven from, and I told him Standing Rock. “I worked for Keystone,” he said. “I interviewed tribes between the Canadian border and Nebraska and mapped sacred sites. Then I advised them where to build the pipeline . . . I couldn’t tell people what I did.”

  I asked him how he felt about the protests at Standing Rock, and he said he wished the Sioux tribes well. “But you got to understand that some people need some things and other people need other things,” he added. “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.”

  I asked him how things on the reservation were. “Terrible,” he said. “The schools are terrible. They’ve got meth, and I know they’ve got pills. The doctors give out pills to anyone. Kids are dying in car wrecks. Doctors give pills to the survivors. They don’t understand, we are addictive people. There’s eighty percent unemployment here. A hundred miles away it’s at three percent. But you can’t tell people to stop doing something they don’t want to stop doing. Every now and then you’ll get someone who stands up and does the right thing. There were a couple people in our family who did that. We were lucky. Our family got out. You see someone straighten out and things start to work out for them, and you think maybe I might do that. The next thing you know it passes around. We’re almost all out of it now. I haven’t had a drink or done anything in twenty-five years.”

  Saint Mary’s Lake, where the campground is situated, is mentioned in a Blackfeet creation story. The man at the front desk told me he still “holds ceremony” there twice a year. “I’ll be doing one this fall,” he said. I paid him seventeen dollars for a bundle of firewood and a campsite and drove to the lake to set up my tent. Seven teepees in a wide meadow bordered the water. A few families camped nearby. A group of college-aged kids had set up by the teepees and were barbecuing off the trunk of their car.

  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.

  The ten-million-acre “Crown of the Continent ecosystem” surrounds the mountains. The region has gone virtually untouched since Lewis and Clark first documented it on their return trip to Saint Louis. It is the largest intact wilderness in America, with more than a thousand native plants and threatened species, like the Canadian lynx, cougar, grizzly bear, and gray wolf. It
also holds some of the last glaciers in the northland, though many are now melting out.

  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.

  The temperature dropped quickly that night. A three-quarter moon lit the sage and crushed mullein stalks in the field. The Blackfeet still weave the red osiers growing around the lake into baskets. I could see my breath through my headlamp’s light. There wasn’t another sound. I thought that old Chewing Blackbones would have liked a moment like this—a peaceful night with loons calling on the lake and winter still a few weeks off.

  THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST announcer told stories on the radio the next morning about how Wilf Carter was a ranch hand before he became “Montana Slim” and how the death of Kit Carson’s father had shaped the young western hero. The weather report at 7:00 a.m.: “The snow line dropped last night to six thousand feet in the Golden Triangle. Chance of rain today: one hundred percent.”

  The hills behind Saint Mary’s Lake were white. The peaks were shrouded in fog. The park was gone, completely socked in. A family camping next to me huddled around a fire. Three of the college kids were passed out in their car. Winter comes in the middle of September in northwestern Montana.

  I packed up the tent before the real rain started and drove north to find the border. Black and brown cattle led their calves down the middle of Route 17. The valleys around Chief Mountain were mostly hardwood, and the leaves were starting to turn. It looked like Vermont for a moment, with perfectly straight, hundred-foot lodgepole pines every few yards.

  The highway dropped down to the Chief Mountain border crossing. The 1939 station was built in National Park Service rustic style—stone chimneys, cedar shingles, stone foundation, aluminum lap siding. A shingled porte cochere reached out over the road where two officers checked in a line of cars. Orange barricades and traffic cones blocked the highway. I pulled into a small parking lot near the head of the Belly River Trail, put on a rain jacket, and f­ollowed a path into the woods.

  I was hoping the trail would parallel the border, so that I could get a look at it. 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.”

  I felt like a bear was following me the rest of the hike to the Belly River. The Crown of the Continent ecosystem bloomed alongside the trail. Pines were spaced almost exactly fifteen feet from each other, as if they had been planted. Stunted mountain ash and maple grew beneath the conifer canopy. Three of North America’s largest river systems start in the crown: the Saskatchewan, Missouri and Columbia. There were natural borders here as well. Four floristic regions—the Cordilleran, Boreal, Arctic-Alpine, and Great Plains—meet at the crown, and many of the thirteen hundred plant species in the area exist at the edge of their latitudinal range.

  Four hikers approached and told me it was extremely muddy a mile ahead. They carried massive packs and had muck caked up to their knees. They’d been on the trail for a week. I asked if they’d seen a bear. They laughed and said no. Then I asked if it was possible to bushwhack from the trail to the border.

  “Why?” one of them asked.

  “I want to see it,” I said.

  They glanced at each other, paused, then walked away. I kept hiking and a mile later hit the mud. It was indeed deep, nearly impassable. The GPS on my phone said I was nowhere near the border, so I turned around and decided to use the traditional route instead.

  A middle-aged woman wearing a US customs officer uniform greeted me an hour later at the Chief Mountain Border Crossing. The border patrol agent standing next to her had a brownish coif and blue eyes. He kept his hand on the butt of his gun the entire time we spoke. His uniform was army green, and he seemed anxious. Whenever I said something, he opened his eyes wide and leaned toward me as if he was hard of hearing—or was not used to civilians walking up to his station and asking a bunch of questions about the border.

  “Can I walk to the border?” I asked.

  “What?” the agent asked, leaning in.

  “The cut,” the woman said. “He wants to see the cut.”

  The agent shrugged, and the customs officer said I could go if I showed her my passport when I came back. I walked down the road past a sign that said “Welcome to the United States” and continued toward the Canadian border station three hundred yards away. Halfway there, the forest opened up, and a twenty-foot clear-cut running along the forty-ninth parallel met the road.

  It was a massive slash, the first visible representation of the US-Canada boundary I’d seen on the whole trip. It was perfectly straight and dropped down the flanks of Chief Mountain to the Belly River. The US-Canadian International Boundary Commission is tasked with keeping the cut clear and walks the line every five to ten years. Crews of ten pack up chainsaws, camping gear, and surveying tools and walk 1,349 forested miles of the northern border, including Alaska, trimming trees and shrubs and repairing monuments.

  It was bizarre to see a boundary on a map transposed into a real line on the earth. It looked ornamental, like an environmental art piece. Juniper and cottonwood saplings growing on the floor of the cut colored it light green. Western hemlock and red cedar trunks along the edges were dark brown. The line launched up the opposite side of the valley, then disappeared into a scree field on eight-thousand-foot Mount Boswell, the final obstacle that the Northern Boundary Commission had to navigate in 1874 before reaching the Continental Divide.

  The US commissioner, Archibald Campbell, gathered his American survey crew at Fort Buford in June of 1874 to prepare to mark the final section of the forty-ninth parallel. They had made it more than halfway to the divide the previous fall, after marking the Northwest Angle, and had about four hundred miles to go. The Americans spent a week riding an overloaded steamer—crammed with the commission’s 140 horses and mules, 38 wagons, and 270 tons of supplies—four hundred miles up the Missouri from Bismarck. Marcus Reno and his troops met them at Fort Buford, and the assemblage marched north to meet the British and Canadians on the line later that month.

  Both groups divided into smaller parties to reconnoiter, measure, and mark the border with iron monuments and earthen mounds. They moved quickly across the northern plains and arrived at the thick forests of the Lewis Range in September. Crews dumped the last of their supplies at a depot set at the foot of the mountains and began the arduous job of cutting the boundary across the first few ripples of the Rocky Mountain Front. The forty-ninth passes six miles north of Chief Mountain. It took axe men ten days to cut a slash down to the Belly River and back up Mount Boswell. On the other side of Boswell, the commission continued to Waterton Lake, then cut the last stretch to Mount Akamina and a pyramid of limestone rocks that the Northwest Boundary Commission—the commission that marked the line from the Pacific to the Divide—had left in 1862. The limestone cairn was the terminal monument connecting the longest straight border in the world.

  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 wa
s just that: a line of monuments and cuts through the woods that no one paid any mind.

  I handed my passport to the officer and asked if it was possible to hike along the line.

  “No one does that,” she said.

  “Is it illegal?”

  “You’re gonna want to tell the patrol before you do something like that,” she said.

  15

  I DROVE SOUTH TOWARD HIGHWAY 2 THAT AFTERNOON. THE STORM was getting worse, and I could barely see the road. I hooked a right in Browning and headed into the park. Heavy wind knocked the car around, and freezing rain iced the windshield. Snow had already closed the park’s famous Going-to-the-Sun Road—a fifty-mile scenic highway that crests the Continental Divide at 6,646-foot Logan Pass—and roadside signs warned of icy conditions ahead.

  I pulled into the Glacier Park Lodge ten minutes later. Fifty-foot cedar timbers framed the entryway. Two 1930s White Motor Company buses waited for guests. James Hill’s Great Northern Railway opened the hotel in 1913, across the street from its East Glacier Park station. The Great Northern was the last of the transcontinental railroads built in the 1800s. It started in Minneapolis and zigzagged along the northern border over eight thousand miles of track, ending with a spur in Seattle and one in Portland. It was the northernmost route in the US and delivered millions of emigrants to the Great American Desert, shaping nearly every northland county between Minnesota and the Pacific.

  The Glacier Park Lodge lobby hadn’t changed much since it was originally built. A stack of four-foot logs blazed in the fireplace. Forty-foot Douglas firs, forty inches around with the bark still on, held up rafters above. Log banisters and railings wrapped around the second and third floor. I asked a young woman at the registration desk if it was all right to take pictures. She looked at my drenched raincoat and said, “There’s a special on rooms tonight.” A half hour later, I hauled my soggy gear into a hundred-year-old corner room and draped my tent over an upholstered chair to dry.