History Comes To The Plains (June 1957 | Volume: 8, Issue: 4)

History Comes To The Plains

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Authors: Wallace Stegner

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June 1957 | Volume 8, Issue 4

The Forty-ninth Parallel ran directly through my childhood, dividing me in two. In winter, in the town on the Whitemud, Saskatchewan, we were almost totally Canadian. The textbooks we used in school were published in Toronto and made by Canadians or Englishmen; the geography we studied was focussed upon the Dominion, though like our history it never came far enough west or close enough to the present to be of much use to us. The poetry we memorized seemed, as I recall it now, to run strongly toward warnings of disaster and fear of the dark and cold. The songs we sang were “Tipperary,” “We’ll Never Let the Old Flag Fall,” “The Maple Leaf Forever,” and “God Save the King”; the flag we saluted was the Union Jack; the clothes and Christmas gifts we bought by mail came from the T. Faton mail-order house. The games we played were ice hockey and curling; our holidays, apart from Thanksgiving and Christmas, which were shared by both countries, were Dominion Day, Victoria Day, the King’s Birthday.

But if winter and town made Canadians of us, summer and the homestead restored us to something nearly, if not quite, American. We could not be remarkably impressed with the physical differences between Canada and the United States, for our lives slopped over the international boundary, which was the south boundary of our homestead, every summer day. Our plowshares bit into Montana sod every time we made the turn at the end of the field. I trapped Saskatchewan and Montana flickertails indiscriminately and spread strychnine-soaked wheat without prejudice over two nations.

The people we neighbored with were all in Montana, half our disc of earth and half our bowl of sky acknowledged another flag than ours, the circle of darkness after the prairie night came down was half American, and the few lights that assured us we were not alone were all across the line. The mountains whose snow peaks drew my wistful eyes on June days were the Bear Paws, down below the Milk River. For all my eyes could tell me, no line existed, for the obelisk of black iron that marked our southeastern corner was only a somewhat larger version of the survey stakes that divided our whole world into uniform squares. It would never have occurred to us to walk along the border from iron obelisk to iron obelisk; and if we had walked along it, we would have found only more plains, more burnouts, more shallow runoff coulees down which the drainage from Saskatchewan escaped furtively across toward the Milk, more gopher holes, more cactus, more stinkweed and primroses, more hawk shadows slipping over the scabby flats.

There was not a customhouse for miles; in the summers we lived there we never saw a customs officer or a policeman, either American or Canadian. Even yet, between Willow Creek and Treelon, a degree and a half of longitude, there is not a single settlement or a