Straight to Canada

Story and Photos by Stan Myers

In circular searches, I made my way through thick brush and lodgepole, drawing ever closer to a point on my GPS. Finally, as I pushed through limbs and looked up, there it was, ten feet in front of me—one of those “good thing it wasn’t a bear” moments.

Relief flooded me at the sight of the ten-inch-square, three-foot-high pillar of granite with “Idaho” and “Montana” chiseled on opposite sides.

This was 2023, my second trip to the border divide in the Coeur D’Alene Mountains south of Clark Fork to search for the marker of the southernmost point that begins the straight line of the Idaho Panhandle’s eastern side.

The previous year I had failed to find it, and thought perhaps it had disappeared in the 125 years since it was put in the ground. This time, my goal was to at least locate where it once had been.

As I stared at the monument, my mind went to the men of the US Geological Survey (USGS) who put it there in 1899 by packing it in ten sections on mules from the railroad depot at Heron, Montana, ten miles below and beyond me to the northeast.

I envisioned the surveyors as they cemented the pieces together and inserted three feet of the six-foot marker into the ground, and it seemed likely to me they were more than a little anxious about what was to come.

The monument is at an inflection point in the Idaho border. To the south, it follows the curve of the Coeur d’Alene Mountains divide, but to the north, it’s a straight line seventy miles to the border with Canada.

What was to come for these surveyors was to cut a ten-foot swath along that long straight line, which had been surveyed the previous year, and to plant ninety-one more monuments at prominent ridges and stream crossings along the way.

Among them were two more granite pillars, to be placed near the Clark Fork River and Kootenai River crossings, and the other eighty-nine were iron pipes six feet long and three-and-a-half inches in diameter, each with a bronze cap that noted the monument number and mileage from the Canadian border.