Same place, different lines

mapping the borderland

The story Chief Ay Ash Wash told about the US-Canadian border splitting his family in two, like a knife ripping through his torso, is one he passed down to his son, Kakaygeesick, who told it to his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Don told it to me.

The border cuts across Lake of the Woods at a northwest angle to create the “chimney” shape on the Minnesota map. The boundary left a portion of land separated from the rest of the country by water and surrounded by Manitoba to the west and Ontario to the north and east. It’s the only place in the United States besides Alaska above the forty-ninth parallel. Why did the borderline end up looking this way?

It goes back to the Treaty of Paris of 1783 which defined the boundaries of the newly independent United States using the “Mitchell map.” John Mitchell (1711-1768) assumed Lake of the Woods was the source of the Mississippi River.

One problem though. The river begins 143 miles south at Lake Itasca. Mitchell’s map left a gap of uncharted and contested borderlands.

It wasn’t until the Convention of 1818 when the United States and Great Britain resolved long-standing border disputes, that they set the boundary along "a line drawn from the most northwestern point of the Lake of the Woods, along the 49th parallel of north latitude..."

To complicate matters, they hadn’t identified the most northwestern point on Lake of the Woods. Because no one had surveyed it yet. It wasn’t until 1824 that British cartographer David Thompson was hired to map the lake and he identified four possible locations for a survey marker. A year later, a German astronomer in the British service surveyed Lake of the Woods using Thompson’s map and determined the marker should be located at the edge of a pond at Angle Inlet.

In researching the historical archives for documents related to the life of Kakaygeesick and his family members I would find courts documents claiming they belonged to Canada more than a century after colonial powers drew their lines across the water.