Abstract
Writers and scholars who have studied the northern Great Plains borderlands argue that the region possessed a unique, cross-border community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This dissertation argues that this community persisted beyond the settlement era, well into the 1930s. This is significant because powerful forces threatened to divide Canadian and American borderlanders during this period. National authorities effectively closed the border in late 1929 in response to the economic disaster that afflicted both countries. Steep tariffs limited cross-border trade, and strict immigration rules restricted migration from one country to the other. Border crossers were under increased scrutiny from border officials and lawmakers. But none of this stopped Americans and Canadians who lived near the forty-ninth parallel from intermingling on the northern Plains. Indeed, the sense that they belonged to a special community only intensified.
This dissertation is a grass roots social history of the northern Great Plains borderlands. It makes a contribution by exploring the significance of the border in ordinary borderlanders’ lives. It shows that borderlanders’ relationship with the border came to shape their identity. People who lived near the forty-ninth parallel had more in common with each other than with their fellow countrymen and women. They asserted their borderlands identity alongside or over and above their respective national identities.
Newspapers, memoirs, letters, government records, local histories, and interviews with people who lived in the Plains borderlands in the 1930s show that borderlanders’ many transborder interactions helped them juggle multiple identities and transcend national, ethnic, and cultural differences. Canadian and American borderlanders of different backgrounds regularly crossed the border and participated with each other in national, social, business, and other events. They took a keen interest in each other’s lives. They saw each other as people experiencing similar hardships and they looked to each other for ideas, resources, companionship, and inspiration. Borderlanders felt their cross-border ties set them apart from non-borderlanders. Maintaining their community was very important to them. Long after the border was established and settlers filled the borderlands, grass roots connections continued to unite people on both sides of the line.
