I was reading Tim O’Brian’s The Lake of the Woods several years ago and he mentions that a “cartographer’s mistake” was the reason for that odd piece of land up there in Minnesota that is US territory. I’d never been cognizant of it, and when I went to the Atlas, there it was–an odd piece of territory up in Canada that belongs to the U.S., called the Angle, I think. What are the details on what O’Brian called a “cartographer’s mistake”? I know there were a bunch of conferences and meetings (and near-wars) dealing with boundary lines between the US and British throughout the nineteenth century, and this Lake of the Woods oddity may have been settled as early as 1818. Would appreciate any enlightenment.
The story I heard was that they thought that the source of the Mississippi was there.