The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland

This is a lyrical, vividly written narrative history in a style which will appeal to a general audience. The author has closely studied an area along the Montana-Saskathewan border beginning with Sitting Bull's surrender to the U.S. Cavalry in 1881 and ending with the post World War I influenza pandemic. Although largely empty now, in the early 20th Century this vast dry-land prairie was home to many thousands of small-scale homesteaders struggling to wrest a living from an unforgiving landscape. The author includes interviews and correspondence with the late author Wallace Stegner, whose family attempted to make a living on both sides of this borderland. The numerous photos and illustrations are great, and along with the text give the reader an evocative sense of the hard life on the high western plains.