Argh. My own Grammar Nazi self hoist on mine own petard. 
This little sidebar has two further chapters, in case anyone has a sort of humorous interest in 1500 Americans washed up on the Canadian side of the water!
One is that the city of Sarnia was complaining about the roughly $8K cost of rescuing the Americans and sending them back across the border on transit buses under police escort, and then cleaning up all the garbage they left behind.
The second chapter, which is really quite lovely, is that one of the American group started a fundraiser to pay the city back, which seems to be going along well! 
The Peace Arch is actually the Provincial Park I was referring to. The State Park is on the WA side, of course. If a land swap had been made there, they could have built the arch a little further north, I suppose. AFAIK, they never reached the point of considering a specific piece of land in exchange for Point Roberts - I was just speculating that this would be a logical one. The Americans apparently rejected the notion before it went any further.
That I was referring to in my earlier post, I should have said. Blasted short edit window!
That’s more like it. Kudos to the Americans who showed more respect for our Canadian neighbors.
I used to occasionally play on a golf course where the 9th hole tees were in Saskatchewan and the green was in North Dakota. As such, I can legitimately claim that some of my drives have had over an hour of hang time.
Gateway Cities golf course?
Yep.
Right near my home town!
242 kilometres, per Google, so Europeans may need to adjust their perception of “right near”.
I live in Deadpool’s hometown, not my hometown. 
Hmm. Has anyone ever seen Northern Piper and Deadpool in the same room at the same time? :dubious:
Actually the real answer is the American colonies split from Britain in 1776–about 60-80 years before English really had standard spellings at all. All the modern variations of these words, and then others no longer used, were common in both Great Britain and the colonies in the 18th century because the language had no spelling standardization at all.
Neither country has “hard” standardization even today (as in there is no government body that says “this is spelled this way”) but both do have educational bodies, dictionaries and etc that establish proper spelling in most public contexts. As you said, many of our spelling differences on these words do trace back to Noah Webster, but he was standardizing spellings for which there was no standard, and he simply made different choices than his British analogues.
It’s not the cast that several hundred years ago certain spellings were proper and American English has deviated from them–it’s more the case that we used to not have a firm concept of proper spellings.
That being said, some of the differences between American and British English, British English is actually “more modern” and has evolved more and changed more than American English has. So in many respects American English contains older and more archaic constructs in it, of course we’re mutually intelligible, so the differences are minor.