Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border

(Hardback, Large Print Edition)

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America's northern border is the world's longest international boundary, yet it remains obscure even to Americans. The northern border was America's primary border for centuries--much of the early history of the United States took place there--and to the tens of millions who live and work near the line, the region even has its own name: the northland.

Travel writer Porter Fox spent three years exploring 4,000 miles of the border between Maine and Washington, traveling by canoe, freighter, car, and foot. In Northland, he blends a deeply reported and beautifully written story of the region's history with a riveting account of his travels. Setting out from the easternmost point in the mainland United States, Fox follows explorer Samuel de Champlain's adventures across the Northeast; recounts the rise and fall of the timber, iron, and rail industries; crosses the Great Lakes on a freighter; tracks America's fur traders through the Boundary Waters; and traces the forty-ninth parallel from Minnesota to the Pacific Ocean.

Fox, who grew up the son of a boat-builder in Maine's northland, packs his narrative with colorful characters (Captain Meriwether Lewis, railroad tycoon James J. Hill, Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota Sioux) and extraordinary landscapes (Glacier National Park, the Northwest Angle, Washington's North Cascades). He weaves in his encounters with residents, border guards, Indian activists, and militia leaders to give a dynamic portrait of the northland today, wracked by climate change, water wars, oil booms, and border security.

Reviews

Fox is an excellent guide, capturing the majesty of the Northland's diverse geology, flora, weather and seasons. But [his] greatest accomplishment is that he uses all of the landscape and history to capture the people who live and work on the border now.--Peter Geye
Richly populated with fascinating northlanders, Native Americans, and many border patrol agents, this is highly entertaining and informative travel literature.
A riveting illumination of the northern border's contentious past, made urgent by the denizens we meet along the pages who are fighting--doggedly, courageously--for the right to course-correct its future.--Courtney Maum, author of Touch
In this rip-roaring adventure story, Porter Fox illuminates every imaginable facet of the northern border: historical, natural, economic, environmental, geopolitical, and, above everything else, the human.--Neel Mukherjee, author of A State of Freedom
Porter Fox's wild trip across the rivers and lakes, prairies and mountains is at turns wondrous, meditative, and scary. In Fox's patient telling, the northland is less a border than a threshold, a kind of otherworldly membrane wherein people are in conversation with the stream systems and watersheds upon which life depends and that political boundaries work to ignore.--Robert Sullivan, author of My American Revolution
The border between the US and Canada can seem less significant than other boundaries that have shaped America--the southern border with Mexico, the Mason-Dixon line, the frontier--but this wasn't always so. With a native northlander's knowledgeable and loving eye, Porter Fox seeks and finds the furtive beauties and forgotten histories of our borderlands to the north.--Donovan Hohn, author of Moby-Duck