Levitated Apples was delighted, on 29th October, to catch up with an old friend, Tony Rees, these days a resident of Geneva but in western Canada for a month to be recognized for his latest book, "Arc of the Medicine Line".
The book tells the story of the mapping of the world's longest undefended border and of the achievements of the boundary commissions - American, British and Canadian - as they drew the Medicine Line across the final miles of the nearly nine hundred miles between Manitoba's Lake of the Woods and the Continental Divide.
The book has won widespread acclaim for its detailed description of that huge achievement - including recognition from the Eastend, Saskatchewan, Arts Council which chose Rees as the 2008 recipient of the Wallace Stegner Grant for the Arts.
Excerpt from Arc of the Medicine Line:
It had taken more than two centuries of blood, bravado and barter, of grand imperial designs and even grander battles fought half a world away. But in the end, it had all come down to this one small moment.
The men who gathered on the grassy bank beside the Red River of the North on that bright, late summer day were British, American and Canadian. Together, over the next two years, they would arc a precise, pencil-thin line across nine hundred miles of forest, swamp and high plains desolation and, with it, draw the long course of empire in North America to a close. Over the following decade or so, the boundary would take on its popular name: the Medicine Line. It was probably the Sioux who first began to use the term in the late 1870s after Sitting Bull and his people crossed into Canada following the battle of the Little Bighorn. Although it was never more than a string of widely spaced markers with no continuous barrier between them, the line was said to have “strong medicine” since it seemed to have the power to stop the pursuing U.S. Cavalry in its tracks.
The former Chief Archivist for Calgary's Glenbow Museum, Tony Rees is the author of Hope's Last Home: Travels in Milk River Country (1995), shortlisted for the 1996 Writers' Guild of Alberta non-fiction award, and Polo: The Galloping Game (2000).
1 comment:
Tony is a wonderful historian and writer and...former fly fisherman. As he exited the sport his final contribution to a pursuit known and loved by all for millenia, was the, "pre-release", a form of catch and release fly fishing that dispensed with the need of trout and rod both. Tony is regarded to this day as the father of "pre-release".
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