Minnesota's Northern Border
N 47° 58.572 W 089° 41.119
16T E 299602 N 5317144
Historical marker located in rest area located about 4.8 mile southwest of the Canadian border.
Waymark Code: WM6ZAW
Location: Minnesota, United States
Date Posted: 08/09/2009
Views: 13
Determining, surveying, and marking Minnesota's border with Canada took 142 years and left the state with a tag end called the Northwest Angle standing isolated and alone on the Canadian side of Lake of the Woods.
At the end of the American Revolution in 1783, British and American negotiators agreed to separate Canada and the United States by a line running from the Atlantic Ocean to the northwesternmost point of Lake of the Woods in what is now western Ontario. They based their work on the mistaken assumptions that the Mississippi River would be the western border of the U.S. and that a line drawn straight west of Lake of the Woods would intersect with that river.
By the time the U.S. purchased the Louisiana Territory from France twenty years later, it was clear that the river's source lay south, not northwest, of Lake of the Woods. In 1818 British and American negotiators dropped the U.S. - Canadian boundary line straight south from the northwesternmost point of Lake of the Woods to the 49th parallel and then straight west along the parallel to the crest of the Rocky Mountains, leaving a chimney-like projecting that included the Northwest Angle.
The eastern part of Minnesota's northern border lay along the old fur trade water routes beginning at the mouth of the Pigeon River near Grand Portage, now a national monument just a short distance from here. The routes connected Lake Superior and Lake of the Woods, but the boundary's exact demarcation had to wait until a survey in the 1920s.
(#221 in Minnesota History Along the Highways: A Guide to Historic Markers and Sites)