Northland_A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border
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I dropped Gary off at his father’s house and drove around the reservation. A pickup truck stacked with coolers drove in front of me. Two boys crossed the road, both wearing black hats, black jeans, and fishing boots. They had made a shelter out of driftwood on the shore. They sat beneath it and smoked and watched their nets. Another sign on a telephone pole read: “Keep Your Head Up.”
Down the street, some of the houses were nicer, with less junk in the yard. One was a mansion with two stainless-steel salmon welded onto wrought-iron gates. White people lived there, Gary said. Forty-four percent of the population on the reservation was now white. When I asked Gary how whites had purchased Indian land, he shook his head and said, “They just did.”
The road hugged the shore, then turned inland past a thirty-foot-tall mural that Gary had painted of a squid. The telephone poles running along the soft shoulder were brand-new. The road was freshly paved. “You Are Not Alone,” a sign read. “Kindness Matters.”
I drove past an open-sided lodge at the Lummi cultural learning center that held two dozen traditional Lummi canoes. Then I bought a five-dollar ticket to a Lummi High School football game and watched the Blackhawks dismantle the visiting team. The Lummi team had been to the state championships five times in the previous eight years. Families cheered, and a few women pounded small drums as the Blackhawks ran down the field. A Winnebago parked behind the bleachers had a “We Believe in Blackhawk Nation” sign taped to the side. In the windshield was another sign that read “COAL,” with a slash through it.
It was raining hard now. The horizon line across the ocean was soft and white. Rain hitting the water made a thick fog. I continued inland until I reached a roundabout. A sculpture of two golden salmon crossing each other stood in the middle of the circle. Douglas fir crowded the road, moisture beading up on the needles.
I drove around a few times, looking for a sign. There was nothing, no opening in the trees, nothing down the road. I needed to get back to Seattle to catch a flight that night. It would cross the northland in five hours flat. There was no map in the glove box, no phone signal, no one to ask. I had no idea which way was north, south, west, or east. The last building I’d passed was twenty minutes behind me. I kept circling, waiting for another car to come, peering down each of the roads, the four points of the compass, looking for a way home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK WAS BORN IN 2014 DURING A LUNCH WITH EDItor Matt Weiland And Agent Paul Lucas. We shaped the basic concept in less than an hour. Three years and four thousand miles later that idea became the book you are holding. I am grateful to Matt and Paul for the vision, talent, and blind faith they brought to that table.
I’d also like to thank the MacDowell Colony for offering early, enduring, and vital support for this book, with both a fellowship and a Calderwood Art of Nonfiction research grant. Icebound in the woods of northern New Hampshire, with temperatures dipping to minus-twenty degrees, hundreds of pages of notes coalesced into a story.
I can’t thank enough the captains, guides, mushers, tribespeople, bartenders, and dozens of hapless northlanders I bumped into, tracked down, or downright stalked along the way—who opened their lives, jobs, and hometowns to a stranger. More than anything, I hope that I have told their stories well. The poet Christian Barter was invaluable in editing early drafts of this book, as were friends and colleagues Kim Stravers, Peter Kray, Margaret Brown, and Derek Loosvelt. Finally, big thanks to Em-J Staples who hunted down the most elusive facts in the book and made sure I didn’t mess them up on the page.
Lastly, eternal thanks to Sara Fox—my wife, travel buddy, colleague, and personal photographer—who never says no to a trip and always makes it look better than it was.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
FINDING SOURCE MATERIAL ON THE HISTORY OF AMERICA’S NORTHERN BORDER WAS AN ADVENTURE. Early explorers spent more time surviving and navigating the wilderness than they did documenting their travels. Most accounts are secondhand, and no two chronicles about a subject are the same. There are some exceptions. Samuel de Champlain was devoted to keeping a journal. After facing off against an Indian army, he would sit back against a tree, draw meticulous sketches, and summarize the day’s events. His journals, most of which can be found online now, are the greatest window into northland life before the border. David Hackett Fischer’s excellent interpretation of Champlain’s writings in his book Champlain’s Dream (Simon & Schuster, 2008) is a close second to the real thing. Hackett gives context to the Frenchman’s exploits with extensive detail pulled from the shores of Brittany, Acadia, and the Great Lakes.
It should be said that this book was researched and written from the perspective of an American looking north at the border, and that many Canadian figures and historical events have been omitted. This was not done out of bias, but merely because, having grown up in Maine, that was the path I took and the story I chose to tell. The story of America’s forgotten border is a tale of early mistakes and more than two centuries of fixes. Which is to say that there is no definitive event, treaty, document, or history that sums up the US-Canada border. Much of the language in the flawed 1783 Treaty of Paris, which defined the first miles of the boundary, and a dozen subsequent treaties that attempted to clarify and amend it, can be found online. The language is dense and from another time. Jacques Poitras’s Imaginary Line: Life on an Unfinished Border (Goose Lane Editions, 2011) helps unravel some of the first treaties and explain how the eastern section of the line took its current shape.
Champlain’s journal, and those kept by fellow French explorers Gabriel Sagard and Jean de Brébeuf, are the best sources for Étienne Brûlé’s mysterious life in the northland. Consul Wilshire Butterfield combined their accounts, with additional sources, in Brûlé’s Discoveries and Explorations (Helman-Taylor, 1898). René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, left more of a paper trail on his adventures across the Great Lakes. Francis Parkman does an excellent job painting a picture of the man, his mission, and his manic mind in La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (Little, Brown, 1888). As for the lakes themselves, Wayne Grady’s The Great Lakes: The Natural History of a Changing Region (Greystone Books, 2007) offers a comprehensive resource for how, when, and why the sweet-water seas took the shape that they did. Dan Egan’s study of the lakes in The Death and Life of the Great Lakes (W. W. Norton, 2017) is an eye-opening summary of commerce on the lakes and how invasive species, pollution, and climate change are irrevocably changing them.
A century and a half passed between the Treaty of Paris and the marking of the northern border through Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. William E. Lass uncovers the long-forgotten story of the surveyors who finally penetrated the lake country in Minnesota’s Boundary with Canada: Its Evolution since 1783 (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1980). Grace Lee Nute followed the French Canadian canoe men who carved the first path through the Boundary Waters—documenting songs they sang, their paddling style, and what they used for bug dope—in her book The Voyageur (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1955).
Lack of information was not a problem at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Joye Braun, Harold Frazier, and many others recited Sioux history and 150 years of treaty law from memory, as did many of the youth I interviewed at the camp. Investigative reporting by the Intercept was invaluable when I was comparing contradictory reports released by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, pipeline officials, and North Dakota law enforcement. Sioux chief Red Cloud was the most relevant historical figure to the struggle at Standing Rock and was relatively unknown in contemporary America until Bob Drury and Tom Clavin documented his incredible life and victory over the US Army in The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, an American Legend (Simon & Schuster, 2013).
Driving through North Dakota’s northland, I found Ian Frazier’s masterpiece Great Plains (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989) useful for understanding the region’s importance to Plains Indian nations and US history. The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn: A L
akota History (Viking Adult, 2007), by Joseph M. Marshall III, was similarly helpful in explaining the backstory of the Lakota people and informed my decision to use the word “Indian” to describe American tribes. Beth LaDow homes in on the story of Montana’s northern border and how it changed the northern plains in The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland (Psychology Press, 2002). Wallace Stegner’s memoir, Wolf Willow (Viking, 1962), is a powerful personal history of growing up in Medicine Line country, as is Tony Rees’s precise recounting of drawing the northern border along the forty-ninth parallel in Arc of the Medicine Line: Mapping the World’s Longest Undefended Border across the Western Plains (University of Nebraska Press, 2008).
The boundary commissions that surveyed and cut the northern border have gone unheralded in American history. Anne P. Streeter recounts the first boundary survey in the Pacific Northwest in Joseph S. Harris and the U.S. Northwest Boundary Survey, 1857–1861 (Trafford, 2012). The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History, by Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes (University of Nebraska Press; revised, enlarged edition, 2000) is a must-read when touring the western extent of the northern border. Schwantes covers everything from James Cook’s discovery of the region to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Finally, John Suiter’s Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac (Counterpoint, 2003) is a deeply researched and unrivaled biography of the Beats and their time in the fire lookouts of the North Cascades.
INDEX
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text
Abenaki, 40, 53
Acadia, 45, 46
Adams, Abigail, 195
Adams, John, 16, 134
Akwesasne Mohawk Indian reservation, xiv, 70
Alamosa, Colorado, 209
Alden, James, 220
Alexander VI (pope), 8–9
Algoma Central Corporation, 58
Algoma Equinox. see Equinox
Algonquin Indians, 26, 28–29, 63, 64–65, 118
Alphabet Bookstore (Port Colborne), 97–98
Amasia, 62
American Border Peak (Washington), 220
American Cordillera, 216
American Mariner (ship), 100
Amherst, Jeffery, 100
Angle Inlet, Minnesota, 136, 137–38, 139–40, 142
Anthony of Padua (Saint), 84
Aral Sea, 91
Arapaho, 158, 161, 162, 163, 175
ArcelorMittal Dofasco, 87, 89, 92
Archaic period, 118
Archambault, David II, 172
Argall, Samuel, 45
Argo Lake (Ontario), 130
Armstrong, Ross
career, 71–72
on construction of Equinox, 69
on itinerary, 58, 60, 70, 94
stories about Great Lakes shipping, 71–73, 75, 98, 99–100, 102
working in wheelhouse, 71, 77, 98, 103–4
Aroostook County, Maine, 49
Aroostook War, 51, 52
arquebuses, 10, 29
Arrowhead region, 110, 118, 120
Articles of Confederation, 51
Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline, 179
Attean, Joseph, 53
Badlands (North Dakota), 149, 174
Baker, John and Sophia, 51
Bakken Formation, 149–50
Bakken shale oil, 149, 150, 164, 166, 180
Bancroft, Ann, 113
Baring, Alexander (Baron Ashburton), 52
Basque fishing ships, 9
Bath, Maine, 32
Battle of the Little Bighorn, 147, 155, 174–77, 191
Bay of Fundy, 4, 10
Bayou Bridge Pipeline, 179
Beaufort Sea, 8
Beaver Wars, 46
Belle Isle (Michigan), 101
Bellingham, Washington, 153, 220, 221–22, 224, 225
Belly River, 202, 203, 204
Benewah County, Idaho, 213
Bighorn Mountains, 189
Birch Island (Maine), 43
Bismarck, North Dakota, 146–47, 148, 171–72, 174, 184, 196, 204
Blackfeet Indian Reservation, 198, 199–200
Blackfeet Indians, 198–200, 201, 211–12
Black Hills (South Dakota), 157
Blaine, Washington, 222–23
Blair, Montana, 191
Blueberry Point (New Brunswick), 54
Bois Blanc Island (Ontario), 100
Boise, Idaho, 214
Boldt, George, 76
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 195
La Bonne-Renommée (ship), 10
Booth, John Wilkes, 76
Bottle Lake (Minnesota), 129
Boundary Waters
Arrowhead region, 110, 118, 120
Border Route, 114, 117
border surveys, 120–21
Boundary Waters Canoe Area, 110–11
logging, mining, and commerce in the 1800s, 110
overview and history, 109–11, 114, 116, 119–20
Paleo-Indians, 117–18, 122, 130
Superior National Forest, 110
Treaty of Paris and, 111, 124, 134, 135
see also Minnesota
Boundary Waters Treaty (1909), 121
Bourne, Frederick Gilbert, 76
Bozeman, Montana, 198
Bozeman Trail, 159
Bradford, William, 38
Brainerd, Minnesota, 135
Braun, Joye, 169–72, 182
Brébeuf, Jean de, 67
Breien, North Dakota, 151
Bridger, South Dakota, 170
Brotherton, David H., 168
Browning, Montana, 198, 206
Brûlé, Étienne, 63–67, 77, 78, 95, 103, 124
Buffalo, New York, 88, 96, 97, 99
Buick Motor Company, 101
Bukete Island (Ontario), 141
Bukowski, Charles, 97
bulkers, 58, 93
burial mounds, 118, 122
Bush, George Washington, 216–17
Butternut Bay (Ontario), 76
Cadillac, Antoine de la Mothe, 100
Cadillac Motor Company, 101
Calais, Maine, 17, 18, 35, 40
California Trail, 160
Campbell, Archibald, 204
Camp Robinson, Nebraska, 191
Canada Border Services Agency
Akwesasne tribe and, 70
on Canada–Minnesota border, 120, 121, 136
cooperation with CBP on Saint Croix River, 20
Canada, invasion by US forces, 51
Canadian Border Peak (British Columbia), 220
Canadian Northern Railway, 104
Canadian Pacific Railway, 103–4, 192
Canadian Shield, 44, 62, 74, 77
Cannon Ball, North Dakota, 151, 170, 179
Cannon Ball Pit Stop, 151
Cannonball River (North Dakota), 151
Captain Ross. see Armstrong, Ross
Captain’s Lady (fishing boat), 13, 14
Carrier Indians, 194
Cartier, Jacques, 63, 64, 70, 78
Cascade Mountains, 216, 218, 219–20, 221, 225
Cataraqui, Ontario, 81
Cavelier, Jean, 78, 79
Central Lowland, 149
Chambly, Quebec, 27
Champlain, Samuel de
attack on Onondaga village, 44, 66
Brûlé and, 63–64, 65, 66, 67
expedition into Mohawk territory (1609), 26–29
exploration in 1605, 24
exploration in 1611, 63
exploration in 1615, 44, 66, 77
final years, 45–46
fur trade and, 25, 30
guidance from Indians, 41
Huron Indians and, 26–27, 28–30, 44, 63–64, 66, 78
journals, 12, 28, 64, 103
Lachine Rapids, 57, 63, 78
Montréal and, 63
in Paris after death of Henri IV, 44
in Passamaquoddy Bay, 8
Quebec founded, 25,
64
Quebec surrendered to English forces, 45
recalled to France, 24, 25–26, 29
Saint Croix expedition in 1604, 10–12, 39
Saint Lawrence River exploration, 10–12, 25, 26, 64, 70
search for Northwest Passage, 26, 78
truchements, 64, 65, 66, 67, 75
Charbonneau, Toussaint, 196
Charles I (king), 45
Chewing Blackbones, 199, 201
Cheyenne, 161, 162, 163, 175, 176
Cheyenne River Reservation, 170, 179, 182–83
Chicago, Illinois, 23, 88, 120, 121
Chief Mountain Border Crossing (Montana), 201, 203
Chief Mountain (Montana), 201, 203, 204
Chilliwack River, 220
Chippewa Bay (New York), 75
Choteau, Montana, 198
Chouinard, Charles, 77
Church, Frederic, 96
Chute, Milton, 4, 6–7, 12–15
Citadel, the (Idaho), 213
Clark, George, 195
Clark, William, 169, 195
Clayton, New York, 75
Clearwater River (Idaho), 196
Cleo, 94–95
Cleveland, Ohio, 23, 72, 83, 88
climate change, 73, 91, 151, 200
Clinton, Bill, 171
Clovis culture, 118
Cobscook Bay (Maine), 13
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, 213–16
Colson, Constance, 139–40
Colson, Jake, 137, 139, 142
Colson, Karen, 140–42
Colson, Paul, 137–38, 140–42
Columbia River, 91, 125, 194, 196–97, 200, 202, 216–17
Columbus, Christopher, 9
Continental Divide, 147, 190, 196, 200, 204, 206
Cornwall Island (Ontario), 70
Cornwall, Ontario, xiii–xiv
Coronado, Francisco Vázquez de, 189
Corps of Discovery, xv, 169, 195
see also Lewis and Clark expedition
coureurs des bois, 67, 84
Crane Lake Bar & Grill, 116
Crane Lake (Minnesota), 115–16, 117, 122
Crazy Horse, 158, 163, 191
Cree tribe, 118
Crooked Lake (Minnesota), 130, 131
crop art, 111
Crow Nation, 155, 162
Crown of the Continent ecosystem, 200, 202
Crow (son of Sitting Bull), 168