ABSTRACT
West of Detroit, the forty-ninth parallel became the contested Canadian-American boundary in lieu of the Detroit River and its associated waters. The borderline between Canada and the United States across the prairie is dominated by almost nine hundred miles of an artificial land division that offers no natural geographical barriers between the two countries. In other areas of the United States, natural barriers required smugglers to transfer cargo from a vessel to a vehicle or to transit remote, hostile terrain creating a point of weakness and an opportunity for exposure and apprehension. To smuggling traffic, the geography along the forty-ninth parallel offered no such threat. By simply driving a high-speed auto over the border and into the United States via a back road or across a farmer’s field, the rumrunner limited his exposure to law enforcement along the frontier in the early years of Prohibition. 1
