Book Reviews

Walk the Line

Tony Rees (Author)
Arc of the Medicine Line: Mapping the World's Longest Undefended Border Across the Western Plains. University of Nebraska Press
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Phil Jenkins (Author)
Beneath My Feet: The Memoirs of George Mercer Dawson. Emblem Books
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Reviewed by Samuel Pane

One of the most enduring elements in Canadian cultural topography is the metaphor of an invisible demarcation stretching the breadth of a continent from Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains. Sitting Bull's Sioux knew it as the "Medicine Line" because only powerful "medicine" could halt charging US Cavalry hell-bent on revenge for the Little Bighorn. Competing empires and nascent nations recognized it as a political boundary imposed upon the 49th parallel of latitude by the force of arms, appropriations and treaties signed by bureaucrats an ocean away. It made a bold stroke on maps of the day. But on the ground, the prairie looked much the same as it had since the glaciers retreated. Enter the surveyors. From their astronomical tents, over two seasons in the field, they read the line in the stars.        

If Wallace Stegner is to be believed their work, but not necessarily their names, must be commemorated. He writes, "there are no heroes among them. And they do not need to be separated by nationality, for it was of the essence of their work that it was international, co-operative, mutual." Unfortunately, it seems that Stegner was largely taken at his word. The men of the commissions have slumbered in the archive with no major disturbance since 1874. Enter Tony Rees and Phil Jenkins, very different writers of very different books, but identical in their determination to remember individual actors in a grand historical endeavour.     

Like the surveyors who forded an ocean of native grass to establish their boundary mounds, Rees fords an ocean of archival documentation to plot a narrative for the Boundary Commission. His methodology is also as meticulous as that of the surveyors. With it he challenges another of Stegner's contentions that no geodetic instrument "lifts the imagination and achieves grace or weight as a symbol."  Rees' portrait of transits, theodolites, sextants, compasses, and chronometers makes a pretty good case, even without the zenith telescope, the very key to the exact mapping of the 49^th parallel. At one point Rees even takes pains to qualify his book's title. For exigency's sake both boundary commissions agreed that the line should be an astronomical, rather than a mean parallel:

So establishing a series of exact measurements along the 49^th Parallel and then, as it were, connecting the dots between them would produce a series of straight lines that, viewed from a larger scale, made a slightly irregular curve that was as close to perfect as it needed to be.

While assiduous in detail, Rees' narrative is never weighed down by technicalities. Explanations of "tangents" and "offsets" and "meridian calculations" are often couched in anecdote. For instance, Rees recalls how Chief Astronomer Samuel Anderson was able to synchronize the British Commission's chronometers in the wilds of the northwest. Because Greenwich time is essential to establishing precise longitude, a novel solution was required. Chief Commissioner Donald Cameron dispatched the Deputy-Surveyor General of Canada, Lindsay A. Russell, to Chicago for the express purpose of providing a time check via the recently completed telegraph line to Winnipeg. Some weeks after the transmission, it was blown down in a fierce snowstorm.  This brief passage gives a taste of events to come. If there is a protagonist in Rees' account it is surely the brilliant and driven Anderson, who overcomes immense natural obstacles and the meddling of his principal antagonist, not an agent of Uncle Sam, but rather his self-important boss, Cameron.

George Mercer Dawson had to contend with his own burdens during the trek to the terminus at Waterton Lake. He too worked on the Boundary Survey as Chief Naturalist and Geologist. It was his duty to collect all manner of scientific data regarding the country near the line. This was an enormous responsibility for a fresh graduate from the Royal School of Mines, let alone one handicapped by fragile health and dwarfism. Yet his efforts resulted in the publication of a landmark tome, which ensured Dawson a respected place and a distinguished career on the Geological Survey of Canada. This episode represents but one chapter in Phil Jenkins' biography, but it is lavishly detailed and supplemented with well-chosen passages from Dawson's field books, and haunting photographs from the expedition. 

Earlier chapters describe Dawson's youth on the ramshackle grounds of McGill College, and his scientific education in Britain. Later chapters track Dawson's progress through the interior of British Columbia, and north to the creeks of the Yukon where his diligence is eponymously commemorated. Each is cleverly labelled as successive strata on a geological section diagram. Like Rees, Jenkins faced a daunting archive. Dawson's official papers and private correspondence fill shelves in Ottawa and Montreal repositories.

Perhaps the sheer volume of source material gave rise to Jenkins' self-described "unusual approach."  Essentially, he writes a frame narrative wherein Dawson prepares a "memoir" from his field notes. Postmodern trickery is certainly not the motivation behind a project so lovingly rendered. Jenkins obviously lived with the documents until they seeped into his marrow. However, the reader will recognize Jenkins' hand in the insertions of Dawson's poetry. Dawson was not ashamed of this work; he proudly maintained membership in literary societies throughout his life. Although the odd snatch of verse appears on blank telegraph forms from the field, it seems that he drew a boundary between his professional writing and his literary aspirations. Indeed the original poems are conspicuously segregated in Dawson's archive, alongside unpublished drafts of his collected verse arranged thematically, and heavily edited by his sister.

Ironically, Jenkins is at his best when he allows his imagination to stray from the documents. He is entirely with Dawson at the summit of Tsa-whus where the geologist recognizes the marks of glaciation on a slab of basalt as he is with Dawson near the Thompson River where the geologist reads the buckling and draining of the earth's crust. Ultimately, Jenkins transmutes a strange note from the end papers of one of Dawson's Boundary Commission field books into a dream and a poignant conclusion. 

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #204 (Spring 2010), 50th Anniversary Interventions. (pg. 187 - 189)

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