The U.S.-Canadian border, from Grand Portage down to the Saint Lawrence River, goes basically on a median line through the middle of the Great Lakes. Following the St Clair River and the Detroit River makes sense, because those rivers join Lakes Huron, St Clair and Erie. The Niagara River downstream of Lake Erie makes an equally natural boundary, as part of this line through the middle of the Great Lakes.
Conducting the normal business of a government for a small portion of a municipal entity that is separated from the rest by a formidable physical barrier is a pain in the ass. Collecting taxes, chasing law-evaders, providing mail, providing law and fire-prevention are all immensely more difficult when you’ve got a long haul over a river in between. And even worse in the winter. That’s why boundaries pretty often are defined by rivers and mountains, and why you don’t have towns straddling the Hudson. New York City and Brooklyn used to be different municipalities, separated by the East River. Heck, in our own day, the town I live in is hard-pressed to provide proper fire service to the other side of town, and the only thing dividing the two halves is US Route 1.
Just because you can cross the river in a boat doesn’t make it easy or obvious to join the two sides as one political entity, but the difficulties did often – “usually”, I am tempted to say – make it easier to administer them separately.
Here’s a PDF talking about how Oregon territory was split up into states and why the state lines don’t follow the most obvious natural boundary … the Cascades.
Short answer … instead of a North-South boundary along the Cascades, they picked the Columbia River as an e-w boundary to give autonomy to the populations of the Wilamette Valley and the Puget Sound. They drew the western Idaho state line to split the mines off when Idaho had some gold rushes.
[responding to Giles]
You keep using the term “natural boundary” as if it proves something. A river is really only a “natural boundary” to someone whose sole familiarity with a region is looking at a map devoid of any social, cultural, or economic information.
The Ottawa lived on both sides of the Detroit River, and, indeed on both sides of the Great Lakes. The Shawnee lived on both sides of the Ohio River. Several Indian tribes that lived along the Mississippi lived on both sides of that river. So, not really much of a “natural boundary,” is it?
Look at places where boundaries grew naturally out of historical processes rather than cartographic exercises. Major rivers aren’t default boundaries.
I keep using it because it’s a common term. It doesn’t mean that every river separates every group that’s separated by them. If that were the case every single river would create a town or a county, and they obviously don’t. Your saying that various tribes lived on both sides of a river is irrelevant in this regard – Britain is full of rivers, but it’s one country.
But rivers and mountains are barriers to casual crossing, and broad rivers and high mountains are barriers to even serious communication. I’ve studied the Indians of New York and New Jersey, and the demarcations between tribes and sub-groups pretty frequently were given by broad rivers, and for the most obvious of reasons. You can say that the Delawares covered both sides of the Delaware river, but the subgroups were definitely restricted by it. So, yes, it’s a natural boundary, because it’s easier for things to take place on one side or the other, rather than incur the considerable bother of having to cross every time something needs to be done.
Are you suggesting that rivers aren’t obvious boundaries – especially in a well-settled region before bridges? Then why do so many political entities follow them?
No, it’s because the Dutch set up patroonships on both sides of the river. Their land was part of New Amsterdam and when the English took over, the patroons wanted to remain in New York, since they shipped things up and down the river. There are also mountains near New York’s eastern border that served as a natural boundary that separated it from Massachusetts and Connecticut more decisively than a river which could be easily crossed.
Curiously, the boundary between Vermont and New Hampshire is the Vermont shore of the river. In other words, the entire river (up to the mean high-water mark) is in New Hampshire.
But, I suppose nothing can be considered odd with respect to state borders when you consider the Delaware/New Jersey border. Not only is the entire river in Delaware (for some distance between the two states), but a tiny slice of the Jersey shore is actually Delaware!
Similarly, the entire Ohio River, west of the Pennsylvania state line, is in West Virginia and Kentucky. Originally Virginia drew the line, and it took the whole river, and the Northwest Territory started at the northern shoreline of the river.
Similar to this similarity, Maryland’s southern border with West Virginia and Virginia extends across the Potomac River.
Another odd thing about that part of Delaware’s border is that it’s defined to be a circular arc. I don’t think there are many of those in the world.
Speaking for my home, New Mexico is the square shape it is to keep Mexican, Catholic culture from developing political power in the federal government. At the time of statehood, 80% of New Mexican spoke Spanish as a first language. Not to mention our high population of native peoples. Creating a controversy that still pops up now and again today, El Paso was supposed to ‘belong’ to New Mexico but was seeded by the federal government to predominantly white Texas because of it’s trade hub status.
Louisiana is actually shaped the way it is for the same reason, only with the goal of segregating the French and Creole people from the rest of the union.
Or Canadian provinces, Australian states, or many African countries.
One of the problems with using natural features like rivers as borders is that they move over time. Sometimes quickly and dramatically, as from earthquakes and other natural disasters. I experienced this on a small scale when I owned some property where one border was defined by a creek and the creek shifted.
A friend of mine wrote a fascinating book about the original surveyors of the border between Wyoming and Montana. The book is called “<i>Wyoming-Montana Border: They Followed the 45th - 1879-1880</i>.” As the book title indicates, the northern border of Wyoming is the 45th north parallel. Growing up in Boulder, Colorado, I remember being fascinated by “Baseline Road,” which follows the 40th north.
Which pretty much describes the US east of the Mississippi.
Huh? That’s news to a lot of people. A not-exhaustive list:
[ul][li]The Connecticut River divides NH and VT[/li][li]The Piscataqua River and its tributaries form part of border between NH and ME (originally MA)[/li][li]The Merrimack River forms part of border between NH and MA[/li][li]The St. John River and St. Croix together make up more than half of the border between ME and New Brunswick (originally MA and New France)[/li][li]The Pawcatuck River forms part of the border between CT and RI[/li][li]The Hudson River divides NJ and NY[/li][li]The Delaware river divides NJ from PA and DE[/li][li]The Delaware River also forms part of the border between PA and NY [/li][li]The Potomac River divides MD from VA[/li][li]The Savannah River and its tributaries divide SC from GA[/li][li]The Chattahoochee River forms more than half the border between GA and AL[/li][li]The St. Mary’s River forms part of the border between GA and FL[/li][li]The Perdido River forms the Western border of FL and AL [/li][li]The Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and Great Lakes formed the borders of the Northwest Territory, and hence are parts of the borders of WI, IL, IN, OH, and MI[/li][li] The Mississippi River formed the western border of the territory ceded by Great Britain to the fledgling US, and hence no less than 10 states use it as a partial or whole border[/ul][/li]
Does that strike you as not using rivers as default boundaries? Of the original 13 colonies, only North Carolina does not have a border at least partially defined by a body of water.
The St. Mary’s River shows particularly well how early cartographers preferred rivers as boundaries over straight lines. The southern border of GA runs along a surveyed line for most of its length, and then follows the twisting course of the St. Mary’s to the sea.
If people preferred not using rivers, why do that? Because such a hypothesis is wrong. There was such a strong preference for rivers they only used such a straight line in the absence of a significant river that formed a natural boundary. Where there was such a river, they used that instead.
That’s not the case, although there is a relationship between the river and the border there. Check the map and you’ll see that the border does not run along the Merrimack River, but rather some distance to the north. It turns out though that the river was used in defining the border. Specifically, the border was defined as a line offset 3 miles from the river.
Nice job on the list. I’d add the rivers separating Minnesota and Ontario, the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers separating Michigan and Ontario, the Niagara and St. Lawrence Rivers separating New York and Ontario, the Red River separating Minnesota and North Dakota, the other Red River separating Texas and Oklahoma, the Sabine River separating Louisiana and Texas, the Sioux River separating Iowa and South Dakota, and the several states for which the Missouri River serves as part of a boundary (partial list Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota).
Also I’d add a correction to your 13-original-states list: a small ortion of the North-South Carolina border. near Charlotte, follows Lake Wylie, a dammed-up portion of the Catawba River (which was the original border).
Another reason that rivers tended to be natural boundries was that they were primary means of transportation. A river divided down the middle allowed the use of both political entities use of the waterway. If a city/state/country could get the boundry drawn to include both shores, they had the advantage revenue-wise for the use of the river.
Made trickier by the fact that Arizona does not observe Daylight Savings Time. If you’re in one state and have an appointment in the other, it takes a little extra attention.
No, the vast majority of the boundaries you list are colonialist line-drawing exercises, not boundaries that sprung up naturally from human settlement patterns. The few instances in U.S. history when boundaries were formed naturally include New Netherlands and New Sweden, both of which straddled major rivers, not bound by them.
No, it strikes me as artificial line-drawing exercises, which is what colonialists did throughout North America and Africa. Very few if any of these constitute natural boundaries.
Also, as per the book mentioned by Icerigger, in many cases when the territories “out west” (which in some cases it no longer looks that much west to us) would get organized and partitioned, prior to evolving into something that could succesfully lobby for statehood, there tended to be a desire to make the subdivisions more or less symmetrical by degrees of latitude and longitude for the sake of management efficiency. Later on adjustments would be made for the sake of including mining areas or navigation/railway accesses or not cutting off half a city or keeping opposing interest groups away from each other’s throats or to correct for surveying errors (pre-Civil War there was also the issue of balancing free v. slaveholding jurisdictions). Even for the original colonies it was not uncommon to have really a relatively thin strip of development while claiming a huge swath of barely-settled “frontier” land.
But the “natural” borders could also be troublesome, as often you’d get conflicting views of what exactly was meant by “the North Whasamatta River up to its source” or “3 leagues inland from the upper reach of Udontgettitt Bay and from there on along the line halfway between the East and West brances of the Saywha”, that often were tied up in court from colonial well into republican times.
The phenomenon in the NW corner of Arizona contrasts to what happened in the more settled regions, where notches and mini-panhandles in borders accommodated communities more used to doing business in one particular state or another (e.g. Missouri/Arkansas, Conecticut/Massachussetts). At the time, though, they probably felt that place in NW AZ would be forever empty save for Natives who did not count so it did not matter. Originally that line would have continued until intersecting California’s border, but it was cut off (and Nevada’s east border shifted) to give NV access to the river.
It has to do with the PLSS, and the distribution of property. The PLSS is essentially made up of squares 1 mile x 1 mile. These are called sections, sections are subdivided into smaller sections known as 1/4 sections 1/16 sections and eventually “Lots”. When every smaller unit is a square then counties end up being square and states end up being square. States that are not under the PLSS system typically go by a surveying system known as “Meets and Bounds”. This system is much more complex because your cornerposts are determined at the sole discretion of the surveyor. A common method in the old days when there wasnt any good landmarks nearby was to simply dig a hole in the ground and the mound from the dirt would be the corner.
This isn’t to say that the PLSS system was flawless. A fairly common occurence which you can still see on maps of counties was the surveyor forgetting (Or if the plot of land is old enough, not knowing about) to take into account magnetic declination. The end result being the boundaries are all a little crooked.