Close examination of the western borders of Oklahoma and Texas reveals that there is a slight offset in what would appear in a more casual look to be a straight line. The western border of the Oklahoma panhandle is slightly to the east of that of Texas, perhaps just a mile or so.
The book “How the States Got Their Shapes” doesn’t mention this particular issue. Oklahoma became a state long after Texas, and one would think they could have easily lined up the western side of Oklahoma with that of Texas. There is usually an interesting story behind the reasons for establishing borders (and there’s always a reason), so what’s the story behind this little oddity?
Surveying was a very inexact science in those days, and two survey lines taken at different times from different starting points under different circumstances rarely, if ever, met exactly.
That’s plausible, but a two mile difference is a bit more than I would have expected, even then. There are surveying benchmarks all over the country; surely there would have been one at the northwest corner of Texas from which they could have started.
The authoritative source on state boundaries is Boundaries of the United States and the several states, a US Geological Survey report available as a PDF here or older versions on archive.org or Google Books.
Mark Stein’s book How the States Got Their Shapes is a popular book telling the same tales. It’s more fun to read, but somehow completely misses any mention of the Washington Meridian.
And what’s with the extreme NW corner of Oklahoma’s panhandle? It starts out even with the New Mexico/Colorado border, then kind of bends down a little before leveling off. I’d think that would have been corrected at some point.
You can’t just correct things like that, without affecting things hundreds of miles down the line. It is settled law in the USA that once a point is civilly recognized as a border (by land owners, tax levy etc.), it is fixed and cannot be changed according to a new measurement using later technology. If you own a house that is deeded in one state and you find out later that it is within the defined limits of another state, you are still forever subject to the original state and deemed to be within it.
Also, when rivers change course, whether naturally or by intent, the state line remains the same, which is why nearly all the TX-NM border north of El Paso is on dry land, regardless of where Rio Grande finds its way. And there are town in Illinois west of the Mississippi.
Oklahoma blows and Texas sucks. The resultant wind patterns have gradually blown one state eastward and the other westward, not to mention having generated a substantial number of tornados over the years.