I posted about Freya Hoffmeister’s quest to circumnavigate South America in a kayak. Is she going to be able to paddle through the Panama Canal when she gets to it? She’s rounding Tierra del Fuego right now.
And also remember that at the time of the Treaty of Paris, Canada and the UK were one nation, so the “UK” referenced in the treaty might actually apply to the modern nation of Canada too, ‘allowing’ Canadian citizens that right too.
Actually, you paddle up the Minnesota River to reach the Red River of the North. One part of that book I found remarkable: deer were so rare that he didn’t see one until he was almost to Canada. Now, you’d probably see herds of them in the Minnesota River bottomlands.
http://steamboattimes.com/images/maps/map_mississippi_watershed1160x971.jpg
A map of the entire Mississippi rivrer basin. A tiny portion does stretch into Canada, and you might be able to legally claim it’s part fo the same river system and therefore . However, I doubt the tiny bit inside Canada can actually be used for transportation, maybe not even for something canoe-sized, without a lot of portaging.
The Milk River would probably work:
You are going to wind up in the Fresno Reservoir, and have to portage around the Fresno Dam, obviously. It looks like there might be a few smaller reservoirs as well. People do canoe the Canadian part which is in a designated natural area. People do canoe the Canadian part which is in a designated natural area.
And, as noted by that article, you can try the Big Muddy Creek or the Poplar River, too.
Well that certainly bears repeating.
He might end up gratefully dead.
Damned 5 minute edit window - I changed the preceding sentence, and managed to cut and paste the final one as well without replacing it.
It turns out that Akins v. United States concerned hiking boots. (No joke.) But it discusses many other aspects of the Jay Treaty, including free passage and peltries, and should be read by anyone seriously interested in the subject matter of this thread.
The “free passage” provision, it appears, is very much in force and actually had application in several cases in the Twentieth Century. The duty exemptions, however (including peltries), have been repealed by law, and the courts have upheld that repeal despite the treaty. As a non-lawyer I am unable to understand such distinctions but there you have it. Poor Mr. Akins, a Penobscot Indian, did end up having to pay $1.20 in duties on his hiking boots.
Indeed, when the US and UK agreed to set the boundary at the 49th parallel, rather than follow the river drainage, the US lost a tiny and insignificant part of what became Alberta and Saskatchewan. The UK/Canada, however, lost a big chunk of what became Minnesota and North Dakota, down to the “north-south continental divide” on the MN-SD border. The British had granted the land in question to the Earl of Selkirk in 1811, and by 1818 he was out of favor, so they didn’t much care if they signed away a big part of his land.
I think the reality of the situation is that you should process across the border normally. If you are pretty certain that you will be denied (e.g. because of a serious criminal record) and you want to use this as a justification to force them to let you in to the US, then you’d better have a GOOD lawyer right there at the border with you who has done the research to confirm that he feels that you are legally entitled to pass unimpeded.