Smugglers and the portable boundary
Monday, 23 November 2009 05:00
November 23, 1893. A traveller, speaking to a Victoria Times reporter in the bar of Victoria's Tecumseh house, describes a unique method of smuggling goods into the United States. Republished in the Regina Standard.
You are doubtless aware that ordinary every day smugglers are content to transport their goods over the line from one country to another, the object being, of course, to evade the payment of the customs duties. The people with whom I came in contact were superior to such common methods, which might do for low pirates and outlaw brigands but not for a live, wide-awake Yankee, and especially a Canadian Yankee. They didn't move the goods. They moved the line itself.
Up in the farthest easterly part of Maine there comes a place where Maine stops and New Brunswick begins. That is the boundary line between the two countries. That is where the Canadian Yankees spoken of have their homes.
They are naturally given to farming, some of these people, and even if the United States did put a duty on grain, poultry and other things, it didn't make any difference with some of the sturdy yeomen who lived alongside the line. They simply went on raising the Canadian wheat and their Canadian oats. At the same time they kept their eyes on the boundary line—what they could see of it.
The visible portion of this remarkable boundary consisted of upright iron posts set at intervals throughout the land. Not being clinched on the other side of the earth, these posts are somewhat responsive to influences that may be placed on them on the Canadian side. In other words, they can be taken up and reset.
About the time these honest and upright farmers over the line have the crop in condition to harvest a peculiar thing happens. Some dark night some half dozen of them go coon hunting, and when they return to their firesides they are on American soil, they and their grounds, and with them their crops. The boundary line has moved, and is located half a mile or so nearer the Arctic Ocean. These guileless tillers of the soil then dispose of their products at United States prices and sometime during the winter, in some unknown manner, the boundary line takes a backward step, leaving them again on Canadian soil.