In the September of 1872, some two-hundred and fifty astronomers, blacksmiths, cooks, engineers, medics for the work animals and the working humans, naturalists, surveyors, topographers, wheelwrights, and woodworkers, gathered at the small isolated town of Pembina two degrees south of the parallel. When their American counterparts, flanked by the United States cavalry, arrived, the five-hundred members of the North American Boundary Commission were united in common cause. - From Beneath My Feet
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| George Mercer Dawson |
A few months back, a friend of
Jake Rempel - who is also a friend (and a fellow local historian) of this blog's writer - found a dish in an old basement north of
Fort Dufferin near modern day Emerson, Manitoba.
How it got there is not known. Oral history has it that the building that used to be upon the foundation, was once a bar and
a house of pleasure.
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| Boundary Marker Plate |
Jake said, "I know they used different types of steel markers; I am not sure what they used right in the beginning, pole markers of some kind. George Mercer Dawson followed the survey crew and seems to have placed soup plates as each marker. This reference (below) in his book,
Beneath My Feet, is all I have found about this type of marker..."
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| From George Mercer Dawson's Beneath My Feet |
There is still an
International Boundary Commission to this day. They describe their ongoing mission "...as maintaining the boundary in an effective state of demarcation. This is done by inspecting it regularly; repairing, relocating or rebuilding damaged monuments or buoys; keeping the vista cleared, and erecting new boundary markers at such locations as new road crossings."
