Why the U.S. owns a finger of land within Canada
A petition on the White House website demands that U.S. President Donald Trump hand over a piece of lakeside Minnesota that, but for an 18th century surveying error, should rightly belong to Manitoba.
“Make america great by correcting this critical survey error (sic),” writes the anonymous petitioner, C.C.
As of press time, more than 2,000 signatories have backed C.C.’s Dec. 30 call to Canadianize the Northwest Angle; only 98,000 more and the petition will prompt an official response from the Trump administration.
C.C. has a point. The United States does indeed hold a substantial chunk of land that is American territory for the sole reason that an 18th century surveyor couldn’t do his job properly.
When British and U.S. officials met to negotiate the end of the American Revolution, one of their jobs was figuring out where the new U.S. ended, and where Britain’s remaining North American possessions started.
To do this, they relied on a 1755 map drawn up by John Mitchell, a Virginia-born physician. The map is very accurate when depicting the east coast, but goes completely off the rails when depicting the little-explored territory now forming Minnesota.
Lake of the Woods appears on the Mitchell map as a simple oval east of the Mississippi River. To demarcate the border, negotiators simply started a line from the lake’s northwest corner and drew it “due west course” westwards to the Mississippi.
This is nowhere near how the place actually looks (the Mississippi actually begins far to the south), so when British and American negotiators met each other once again after the War of 1812, they simply fudged the border by drawing an awkward line around Lake of the Woods’ actual northwest corner.
The Northwest Angle survives today as a bizarre 320-square-kilometre peninsula jutting out from Manitoba’s eastern border, about two and a half hours east of Winnipeg by car. It holds the record for being the most northerly point of the nonAlaska U.S. According to the most recent census data from 2010, the Northwest Angle has 120 residents, most of them working at a handful of fishing resorts.
There are no ferries across Lake of the Woods and the Northwest Angle has no direct all-season road access to the U.S. On the one road that connects the Angle to Canada, the U.S. border crossing is nothing more than a rudimentary shack with a video phone connected to U.S. Homeland Security.
Although the Northwest Angle has one of the United States’ last one-room schoolhouses, any children older than sixth grade must embark on a daily three-hour return bus trip to the Minnesota mainland.
Most of the land of the Northwest Angle is held in trust by Minnesota’s Red Lake Indian Reservation, who were given back the land in 1945 for the precise reason that the U.S. federal government didn’t really know what else to do with it. Aside from some early 20th century trapping and logging, almost all attempts to homestead the area ended in failure.
Despite this, almost no Native Americans live there. As per U.S. census data, only one of the peninsula’s 120 residents listed themselves as having partial “American Indian” ancestry. Everyone else was “white.”
Canada has generally been indifferent to the Stars and Stripes flying over the Northwest Angle. Since 1901, the term “Northwest Angle” has been mentioned only 21 times in the House of Commons, none of them in relation to any perceived territorial dispute with the Americans.
However, Angleites themselves have occasionally flirted with the idea of joining Canada. In 1998, Minnesota Congressman Collin Peterson introduced a bill that would have authorized a referendum on the Northwest Angle seceding from the U.S.
It was a protest bill: After Ontario cracked down on Lake of the Woods fishing rights, Angleites were frustrated at the lack of pushback from Washington. “What we’re trying to do here is get our government to take up the cause of these 110 people that are kind of up there in the middle of nowhere,” Peterson told CTV at the time.
However, the bill rankled Red Lake representatives who weren’t told about the plan to hand over a huge chunk of their tribal land to Canada. “The most disturbing part of this effort was … that a congressman that serves our district would not have the decency, or even respect, to let us know,” Red Lake Chairman Bobby Whitefeather told Minnesota Public Radio in 1998.
The fishing dispute, meanwhile, was quickly patched up by then-Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura.
The Northwest Angle is far from the only instance of the U.S. sitting atop territory that should be Canada but for a surveying error. Figuring out the precise path of the 49th parallel was quite difficult when the U.S. Midwest was being divided from the Canadian Prairies. The result is a U.S.-Canadian border that may look straight on maps, but in reality zigzags wildly across the western halves of both countries.
The entire north half of Sumas, Wash., a town of 1,307, sits on land north of the 49th parallel that should legally be Canadian. Near Coutts, Alta., the border swings 363 metres south in Canada’s favour.
The wacky border makes things particularly difficult for the International Boundary Commission, the agency tasked with demarcating the U.S./Canadian border. Instead of policing a neat line of latitude, the Commission must keep watch over a patchwork of nonsensical exclaves and historical surveying errors.
Unfortunately for C.C. and the other signatories calling for the Canadianization of the Northwest Angle, however, both Ottawa and Washington seem to prefer this crooked border, if only because it would be too much trouble to straighten out.
As the U.S. deputy boundary commissioner told Postmedia in the late 1990s, “there is no interest on the part of the commission in revisiting treaties that have served both countries quite well.”