Mapping the Medicine Line, Part One: From Sea to Sea
Across the Medicine Line: Tales From the 49th Parallel.
The articles in ‘Across the Medicine Line’ are written in hopes of learning more about how North America came to be. How our peoples lived, ate, drank, travelled, loved, fought and thought during the time between the discovery, founding and solidification of our long partnership and our current society. We believe that learning these stories can further strengthen the many ties that bind our two nations and better understand – or even heal! -- the divisions that still separate us.
“O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee. And crown thy good with brotherhood.
From sea to shining sea!”
Manifest Destiny in Action
The concept of a single nation spanning the breadth of the American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific – from Sea to Shining Sea – is famously enshrined in U.S. culture in the patriotic anthem America the Beautiful. With lyrics first written as a poem by Katharine Lee Bates and published in 1895, it’s not the official U.S. national anthem but it’s become so beloved that today it’s second in American hearts only to ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. There have been efforts to make it a second national anthem, and it’s quite often played at major sporting events like the Super Bowl and NBA finals.
The ‘sea to sea’ sentiment is a metaphorical embodiment of Manifest Destiny, the 19th century belief that the United States was destined to expand its dominion across the North American continent. Coined by newspaper editor John O’Sullivan that phrase was first used in 1845 to advocate annexing Texas. It became a widespread belief among proponents that God had chosen the American people to spread democracy and capitalism across the continent and beyond.
As a goal – and a concrete, achievable plan – it’s by no means unique to the United States of America.
The concept of Manifest Destiny is inextricably linked to the establishment of America, no doubt. But to the north, Canada has always been just as expansionist. It was the 19th century, and the very peak of the Age of Empire. And the new Confederation, less than 20 years old, explicitly shared the American goal of dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Ever since Caesar Augustus issued coins in 27 BC, currency has offered valuable insights into national identity:
In God We Trust.
E Pluribus Unum.
Dieu et mon Droit.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.
Canada’s official motto, as displayed on its coat of arms, is “A Mari usque ad Mare”, which translates as “From Sea to Sea.” It’s on all Canadian currency and passports, and on all official Canadian proclamations.
The Painting ‘American Progress’ by John Gast, 1872. Few images offer more insight into the concept of Manifest Destiny in the United States…or the headlong settler colonialism that lay behind it.
First coined in 1873 by George Monro Grant, the phrase was a statement of aspiration, conceived long before Canada had encompassed the territory to make it a statement of fact. At that point, the young nation was no more than a tiny cluster of separate populations, strung like Christmas decorations from the Maritimes down the St. Lawrence River, and clustered around the Great Lakes.
The Lawless North-West
An unconceivably vast wilderness separated Canada from the west coast, where the Oregon territory was uncomfortably split between by the United States and the British. With the disputed boundary between American claims and the Columbia territory having been defined – if not always honoured – by the Oregon Treaty of 1846.
Meanwhile, between Canada and the Columbia District lay the North-West Territory, immense, wild and almost entirely lawless. Home to Metis trappers and hunters, First Nations and a handful of isolated, lonely trading outposts, connected by single-track wagon traces, long days of wilderness travel and thick woods through which canoes portaged frequently.
On the great plains, whiskey traders, buffalo skinners and wolf hunters made no distinction between the United States and what would become Canada.
Fort Whoop-Up, East of Today’s Lethbridge, Alberta. The centre of gravity for whisky traders in the North-West Territory.
Trains of ox-carts drove at will between the Dakota Territory and the District of Saskatchewan, winding their way north and east Fort Carlton and Fort Edmonton, or west to Fort Qu’appele and Fort Ellice. The Woods Trail between the railhead at Breckenridge, Minnesota and the Selkirk River Settlement at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers was pounded into the prairie turf by the hooves of oxen and horses over thousands of trips. Metis, Ojibwe and Stoney Nakoda clashed with Lakota Sioux in the east and Niitsitapi Blackfoot in the west.
What semblance of sovereignty there was came entirely from the barrel of a Henry Lancaster trade rifle. Or the folding field desk of a Hudson’s Bay Company factor in Cumberland House. Or a buffalo-robed I.G. Baker and Company agent, tallying wolf pelts in a two-room adobe in Fort Benton, on the upper reaches of the Missouri River.
A Lancaster Trade Rifle. Sovereignty often came from the barrel of a gun.
The Crown Colony of British Columbia
On March 22 and 26, 1858, the Puget Sound Herald made an announcement that set in motion the movement of thousands:
“LATE AND IMPORTANT FROM VICTORIA. V.I., GOLD DISCOVERY CONFIRMED!
“By the arrival at this port yesterday of the schooner Wild Pigeon, we have been put in possession of late and highly interesting intelligence of the gold fields of Suswap country,” said the accompanying story.
“Capt. Jones reports that the excitement relative to the gold fields lately discovered on Frazer’s and Thompson’s rivers is very great. A large number of persons had returned to Victoria, Vancouver’s Island, for provisions and implements for mining, bringing large quantities of gold. They report the miners to be making from EIGHT to FIFTY dollars per day.”
In short order, more than 30,000 prospectors – mostly from America – flooded through Fort Victoria and into the narrow Fraser Canyon. They based themselves at Fort Yale, downriver from the homeland of the Nlaka’pamux First Nation. The Canadian Encyclopedia tells us:
“As the summer wore on, miners disrupted Nlaka’pamux communities. Some of the men committed acts of sexual violence against Nlaka’pamux women, euphemistically referred to in a letter by an HBC official as “insulting there [sic] women.” The men mined gold without consulting Nlaka’pamux community leaders for permission, and threatened violence when challenged. Most critically, they disrupted the Nlaka’pamux salmon fishery, a critical economic activity that took place at the end of each summer, by occupying fishing sites and diverting many rivers, creeks and lakes to wash gravel through mining sluices. In the process, they ruined crucial spawning grounds, jeopardizing the future of the salmon fishery.”
The New Eldorado. An artist’s conception map of the location of the Fraser River Gold Rush of 1858.
In July of 1858, open conflict between the miners and the Nlak’pamux led to numerous deaths, mostly of noncombatant indigenous peoples, but also five chiefs. The deaths were almost all at the hands of militia companies of miners marching beneath the stars and stripes.
In an effort to restore order and maintain sovereignty, British officials led by territorial governor Sir James Douglas claimed the Fraser Canyon as part of the Crown Colony of British Columbia on August 2.
With the passing of the British North America Act on July 1, 1867, the Dominon of Canada was created. Colonists in British Columbia debated joining the new country, a proposition that had became more urgent when the United States purchased Alaska in March of that year, sparking fears that the United States would try to annex the colony to link Alaska with American territories in the Pacific Northwest. This had been a concern for more than 25 years, since the slogan ’54-40 or Fight’ had originated in the Oregon Territory. The Canadian Encyclopedia again:
“One major obstacle to union was removed in 1869 with the death of Governor Frederick Seymour. He had opposed joining Canada. His replacement, Anthony Musgrave, supported union. The following year, Canada also purchased Rupert's Land and the North-West Territories from the Hudson's Bay Company. This gave Canada control over the vast territory between the Great Lakes and BC. It cleared the way for a coast-to-coast country and, eventually, a transcontinental railway.”
Back to George Munro Grant. He was a Presbyterian minister and principal of Queens University in Ontario. In the words of Pierre Berton, Canada’s most influential popular history writer, he was leather-tough. High-spirited, restless and untroubled by adversity, including the loss of his right hand in a youthful incident involving a hay-cutter.
Crucially, Grant was also a close friend of the chancellor of Queens University, Sandford Fleming. A Scottish immigrant and chief engineer of the Intercolonial Railway in the Maritime Provices, he would gain fame as a railway engineer on Canada’s first transcontinental railway. (Fleming’s life is worth a whole article by itself, but we’ll leave in-depth discussion of him for another time.)
Fleming was also the inventor of Standard Time and the prime meridian, and was a key member of the contingent present at the driving of The Last Spike. Those of us on the northern side of the Medicine Line will recognize the last spike event as being the culmination of the Canadian National Dream narrative – a vision as central to Canadian identity as the story of the opening of the west by the iron horse is to Americans.
In 1872 Fleming undertook an expedition to survey the route for the proposed Canadian transcontinental railway. To cross the Continental Divide, they originally planned to use a gap in the Rockies that the Hudson Bay Company had been using for some time. That pass was the Yellowhead Pass, named after the Tete Jaune Cache, which had been built by a fair-haired Metis trapper to store furs.
George Munro Grant accompanied Fleming as his secretary on this trip, and documented their travels in his book ‘Ocean to Ocean’, describing a remarkable journey:
“103 days of hard travel…5300 miles by railway, steamer, coach, wagon, canoe, rowboat, dugout, pack and saddle horse and their own sturdy legs. They had made sixty two camps on the prairie, river bank, rock, brush, swamp and mountainside; and they were convinced that the future railway would follow their route across the Shield, up along the Fertile Belt and through the Yellow Head Pass, which was Fleming’s choice from the moment he saw it.”
Grant’s grandson, Michael Ignatieff, says that his ancestor’s use of the phrase ‘from sea to sea’ “encapsulates the national vision of the railway age.”
A Surveying Party in the North-West Territory
The Treaty of 1908: Defining the Medicine Line
Among the stack of documents that together create our modern border, one of the most comprehensive is the Treaty of 1908. It’s mostly not very groundbreaking. It basically just formalized what had gone before. But in one very specific way, it was monumental. It used modern surveying techniques to consolidate the boundaries described in the patchwork of earlier border agreements, into a consolidated single definition of the U.S. and Canadian borders, whose provisions we still honor today. The treaty says it is a:
“…treaty between His Majesty King Edward VII and the United States respecting the demarcation of the international boundary between the United States and Canada signed at Washington on April 11, 1908.”
It was this treaty that Donald Trump – in a February 2025 phone call with then Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – threatened to tear up. His threat convinced Trudeau that President Trump was serious with his 51st state rhetoric, turbocharging Canada’s nascent ‘Elbows Up’ movement.
According to the Toronto Star, when speaking to an aide shortly afterwards about President Trump’s motivations, he said:
“… not only does the Trump administration know how many critical minerals we have but that may be even why they keep talking about absorbing us and making us the 51st state. They’re very aware of our resources, of what we have, and they very much want to be able to benefit from those. But Mr. Trump has it in mind that one of the easiest ways of doing that is absorbing our country, and it is a real thing.”
Cartography From the Age of Discovery to Today
Before we can understand how the numerous treaties consolidated in the Treaty of 1908 resulted in our modern border, we should better understand how cartography and surveying worked in New World, and before.
First, we need to understand the distinction between navigation and surveying. Both involve determining position and spatial relationships, and especially in the early exploration of the New World, navigators were the first to define many of the boundaries that would prove such a source of conflict between the key players of the Age of Discovery.
Navigators used tools like sextants, backstaffs and dead reckoning, all to take measurements that – when documented on maritime charts – guided sailors from Point A to Point B. Navigation was key to exploration. By contrast, surveying focuses on measuring and mapping land, determining relative positions of defined points on the surface of the Earth's. Measuring distances, angles, and elevations, surveying allows the creation of maps, establishes property boundaries, and guides construction and engineering projects.
At the risk of oversimplifying, navigating will help you find stuff, while surveying and mapping will help you to document boundaries. It defines who owns stuff.
Most early claims to land in the New World were based on maritime voyages of discovery, with surveying taking a back seat until the later establishment of colonies …. it shouldn’t surprise us that the early New World would see all sorts of conflicts between the colonial powers about who owned the discoveries and where ownership begins and ends. Let’s take a look at how the disciplines of navigation and surveying evolved, and learn something about the institutions that surrounded them.
In medieval times and well into the Age of Discovery, sailors relied on maps called portolans as guidelines for where to sail. Portolans provided a graphical depiction of a specific port, with directions on how to get there. The details get more specific with time, but in general, all that was included was the port’s description, the compass bearing on how to get there, and something called ‘rhumb lines’, or a circle of 16 to 24 lines, all converging at a center point. Each rhumb line represents a path with a constant bearing along a compass direction.
Medieval Portolan Chart with Rhumb Lines.
With these early maps, all the navigator needed to do was to determine the compass direction the ship was heading, then estimate the speed and measure the amount of time that has passed.
To do that, they’d use an hourglass, or drop a floating piece of wood over the side, and count how long it takes to pass it. The captain would write down the time it took pass this log or floating piece of wood to calculate the ship’s speed. That’s where the term ‘the Captain’s log’ comes from.
The invention of the printing press in the 15th century stimulated cartography immensely. It prompted the spread of navigational knowledge and contributed to standardizing mapmaking conventions, methodology, symbology, projections and geographical representations. Oldmapster.com describes the importance of printing which made it “….possible to produce [maps] in large numbers and disseminate more widely. This led to an explosion in map production in the following centuries, making it available to use for everything from scientific exploration to military planning to political propaganda.”
To aid in direction-finding, by the thirteenth century, sailors were using mounted magnetic compasses affixed with a card depicting cardinal directions. Eventually, they mounted these on gimbals that allowed the inner compass box and its card to remain relatively level when the ship was pitching or rolling in a seaway. When enclosed in a protected stand near the helm, the gimballed compass became known as a binnacle.
We know, too, that – at least by the time of Columbus – mariners were well aware of the impact of magnetic declination, and the need to compensate for the difference between true north and magnetic north.
The declination problem was that compasses work by magnetism, so the north arrow on a compass dial points to the earth’s magnetic north pole rather than the actual geographical north pole. The number of degrees of offset between these two points is called declination. Explorers figured out declination by comparing a compass bearing to the true north direction, then determining the latter by astronomical observations using astrolabes or quadrants.
To determine a ship’s current position in the Middle Ages, navigators used a simple cross-staff to measure the position of the sun above the earth at noon. Other celestial objects, for example, the planets and the moon, could also be used. Finding out this angle, and then consulting astronomical tables, enabled navigators and surveyors to calculate latitude.
In 1590, the backstaff improved on this concept, increasing accuracy and making measurements easier to take. Then, by the middle of the 15th century, astrolabes led to invention of the sextant, which enabled latitude to be pinpointed.
Determining Latitude with a Cross-Staff. Sextants would be a major improvement on the concept.
What they did not know how to do was to calculate longitude. That would need to wait until the invention of the spring-driven chronometer by John Harrison in the 19th century. That discovery was told by author Dava Sobel in her highly recommended 1995 book Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time.
John Harrison’s Marine Chronometer. Having made possible the calculation of longitude, this model is on display in the Royal Museum at Greenwich in England.
Surveying technology closely followed navigation improvements. For terrestrial cartography, two types of surveying are performed: boundary surveying correlates legal records with field observations to define property lines and title descriptions. Topographic surveying, a bit like the portolans we described earlier, identifies natural and human-made features. Elevations, contours, roads. Buildings, bodies of water and vegetation. Topographic surveying allows the creation of maps describing terrain in detail.
Both types of surveying use three main methods: triangulation, traversing and levelling. Triangulation divides the area to be mapped into a network of triangles, measuring the angles within each triangle, and then calculating distances and coordinates. Traversing establishes series of connected survey lines, and then using distances and angles of those lines to create a framework for more detailed measurements.
Finally, levelling determines height differences between points. This is important for understanding the topography of the land being surveyed and is especially crucial for engineering tasks like road construction and drainage design.
Surveying with the Triangulation Method.
In 1620, the first survey chain was introduced. A standardized 66 feet long, the Gunter chain enabled accurate and consistent length and area measures in the field. 10 square chains equals one acre.
In New France, surveys were essential in order to accurately distribute land allotments to those holding land grants, and for the seigneurs who held those grants to distribute subdivided plots to their tenants, also known as ‘censitaires’.
According to The French Canadian Genealogist site, “The professional surveyor was the only person qualified to practice this trade. Between 1626 and 1760, there were at least 78 surveyors active in Canada. From 1663 to 1760, the intendant of the colony was responsible for issuing surveying commissions. To become a surveyor, one had to obtain a certificate from Father Allioux, a professor of hydrography at the Jesuit College of Quebec, and the sworn surveyor Dubeau, confirming the candidate's knowledge and experience.”
Censitaire Holdings in the Seigneurial System. Lots were surveyed and marked as long strips maximizing river access. This would cause significant clashes when English land ownership schemes were imposed following the French and Indian War.
Surveying and Private Land Ownership
From this point forward, surveying only took on more and more importance. It’s no stretch to say that private land ownership is at the very foundation of American identity. For that reason, land surveyors have always occupied a respected position within the community, even before Manifest Destiny was articulated as national policy. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy describes the position of ownership at the very foundation of the country:
“Starting in the colonial era, private land ownership was a major attraction to European migrants who tried to escape feudalism in Europe and sought freehold ownership in North America. Private property was viewed as a means to secure political and economic freedom. Therefore, private property symbolizes the political and ideological beliefs upon which the United States is founded, and strong constitutional protection of private property was deemed necessary.”
That protection took the form of something called ‘the takings clause’ in the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution, ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights, and extended to cover the states in the 14th amendment in 1868. It constitutionally enshrines the principal that the government cannot seize property without due compensation.
Given the foundational nature of private property to the U.S. character, it should be no surprise that pivotal figures in American colonial history have a surveying background: George Washington, Daniel Boone and Abraham Lincoln were all property surveyors.
Thomas Jefferson worked as a surveyor in Virginia in 1773, following in the footsteps of his father, who had occupied a position as ‘Land Surveyor of the Crown’. That was an English royal office that began in 1625, when it was known as Surveyor General of the Land Revenues of the Crown. It persists to this day in Canada as the Office of the Surveyor General of Ontario and the Surveyor General Branch of Natural Resources Canada.
Surveying in Canada
In Canada, cartography and surveying have an equally consequential history, dating back to the very earliest explorers of New France and British North America.
Not long after Columbus’ first voyage, Giovanni Caboto – known to English speakers as John Cabot – undertook voyages of exploration to the New World, on behalf of the King of England, Henry VII. His first unsuccessful attempt took place in 1496, and then in May of 1497 he tried again. He sighted what was probably Newfoundland on June 25 after an ocean journey of 35 days from Bristol, establishing an English claim to a foothold in North America, only four years after Columbus’s New World discoveries.
A Reconstruction of Cabot’s Vessel, the Matthew. Built for Newfoundland’s Cabot 500 anniversary celebrations in 1997.
Cabot’s maps have unfortunately been lost to history, but some surviving maps from the early 16th century – including a 1544 map by his son, Sebastian, appear to contain information provided by the original Giovanni Caboto voyages.
Next up in the exploration of the northern part of the new world was Jaques Cartier of St. Malo in Brittany. His three voyages from 1534 to 1542 would form the basis for French land claims in the New World. Cartier was the first European to map the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. He also mapped the shores of the St. Lawrence River as far as today’s Montreal, which he named Hochelaga.
Sadly, just as with Cabot, the maps Cartier produced have been lost, but it is likely that they were handwritten sailing instructions, without latitude or longitude, or as they were called in the day, ‘portolans’.
Cartier’s voyages, and those that took place immediately after, were marred by failed French colonies that saw the majority of colonists wiped out by scurvy, horrifying winter weather conditions, inadequate provisions and the reluctance of the indigenous peoples to provide much in the way of help to the newcomers, if for no other reason than Cartier’s habit of kidnapping them and shipping them off to Europe.
Clashes in Europe, particularly the French Wars of Religion, also meant that European powers would take their eye off the ball for more than 50 years – although throughout this time, Basques, Bretons, Normans and fishers from England’s West Country would continue to visit the region. Some of them cultivated side hustles, trading knives, axes and kettles to the indigenous peoples in exchange for furs to be sold back in Europe – kicking off the fur trade that would shape so much of the next two hundred years.
But, like fishermen the world over, they preferred to keep the knowledge of their best spots something of a secret, until the arrival of the first of Canada’s great mapmakers, one Samuel de Champlain.
We will meet Champlain in Part Two of this article, so stay tuned.
Across the Medicine Line: Tales From the 49th Parallel.
The articles in ‘Across the Medicine Line’ are written in hopes of learning more about how North America came to be. How our peoples lived, ate, drank, travelled, loved, fought and thought during the time between the discovery, founding and solidification of our long partnership and our current society. We believe that learning these stories can further strengthen the many ties that bind our two nations and better understand – or even heal! -- the divisions that still separate us.
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