William Stafford's Un-National Boundary:
Literature of the Forty-Ninth Parallel

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
Where the unknown soldier never died.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
Where no monument stands,
And the only thing heroic is the sky.

• Bennett, John W. and Seena B. Kohl. Settling the Canadian-American West, 1890-1915: Pioneer Adaptation and Community Building. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Bennett, an anthropologist, studies the"remembered past" of northeastern Montana, southeastern Alberta, and southwestern Saskatchewan (which includes the areas treated by Sharp and Stegner below). Bennett largely disregards the international border (recognizing only certain differences of degree in national character) and treats the area as one last frontier, calling it "the Canadian-American Heartland." This is Bennett's third and most comprehensive book about life on the northern plains.

• Sharp, Paul F. Whoop-Up Country: The Canadian-American West. Reprint, Norman: U. of Oklahoma Press, 1973. Sharp uses the Whoop-Up Trail--the trading route from Fort Benton, Montana (head of navigation on the Missouri River), to Fort McLeod, Alberta--as a point of regional focus and as a symbol of Canadian-American interaction on the frontier. Treating the subjects of trade from the Missouri River, Indian affairs, law enforcement, ranching, sodbusting, the Cypress Hills Massacre, the NWMP, the CPR, and other standard topics, Sharp makes comparisons and pointed contrasts across the border. Although they faced a common environment, American and Canadian civilizations on the plains showed marked national differences.

• Stegner, Wallace. Wolf Willow: A History, A Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier. Paperback reprint, Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 1980. Stegner's family, settlers from North Dakota, had a Saskatchewan homestead the southern property line of which was the Montana border. Wallace went to school in the town of Eastend (which he calls Whitemud), Saskatchewan. Although Stegner argues for the similarity of the two sides of the border, he also talks about growing up with divided loyalties.