If you expect at a single-valued function of North America , you ’ll notice the Canada – United States mete is strikingly unbowed from the Pacific Ocean to about a third of the style across Minnesota , where it hiccups and then squiggles the rest of the way to the Atlantic Ocean . The moulding first started to get worked out between the U.S. and Great Britain ( Canada was n’t an independent nation until after most of the border was set down ) not long after the American Revolution , and was updated and remedy in a serial of treaties over the next few decades .
Some parts were easy to work out : that straightforward line just runs along the 49th parallel . In other parts , the American and British negotiators got a piddling fancy . Around Minnesota , they established the delimitation as extending from the northwesternmost point of the Lake of the Woods due westward to the head of the Mississippi River .
All well and salutary , except that the beginning of the Mississippi River , Lake Itasca , wasfarther souththan where they ’d await it to be , and could n’t be intersected by a contrast scat west from the Lake of the Woods . ( lose the Mississippi was a blunder , yes , but the mathematical function they were working with , run by doctor and botanist John Mitchell in 1750 , was the most comprehensive map of eastern North America from that era . With a less map , things might have been even bad , and theMitchell mapwas used for settling U.S.-Canadian boundary line disputes well into the twentieth century . )
A survey squad was sent to the area to correct the misplay and finish establishing the border by connect the northwesternmost point of the lake flat to the 49th analog . When the squad located the northwesterly point , the direct north - south line they describe to the 49th intersected a little chunk of soil belong to the U.S. and a bay laurel belong to Canada , cut the American body politic off from the rest of the country and leaving it dangle in the piece of cake .
Life in the Angle
This is the Northwest Angle and Islands , a small Minnesota exclave cling off of Manitoba on the Lake of the Woods . Most of Angle Township ’s 596.3 substantial miles is made up of H2O . The remaining 123 square miles of land ( mostly uninhabited and withstand in trust by the Red Lake Indian Reservation ) are domicile to 152 Minnesotans who have the laurels of hold out at the northernmost point of the contiguous U.S.
If you need to see the Angle now , you ’ll postulate to drive up through Minnesota to the Canadian border and then , ignore the little part of your nous that logically demands you stay in the United States to visit a Minnesota townsfolk , cross into Manitoba and go through Canadian customs . You ’ll pass a few border towns , give ear a rightfulness after Moose Lake , and continue along several kilometers of unpaved route before cross another border back into the United States . Here , you ’ll need to go through tradition again , though it ’s a little different from the first time . At the intersection point of two gravel roads a few miles past the delimitation crossing is a place calledJim ’s Corner , where you ’ll kibosh , go into the shack on the side of the road , and call a U.S. Customs federal agent via videophone to make your declarations . If you do n’t want to make the road tripper through Canada , you may also attain the Angle from the rest of Minnesota by crossing the Lake of the Woods by planing machine , boat , or , when the lake is frozen over , gondola .
A little ways past Jim ’s Corner , you ’ll find the Angle Inlet School , the lastone - room schoolhousein the body politic . For a few years in the 1990s , the schooltime close because the enrollment was too low . At the edge of the Angle is the Lake of the Woods — and some of the good dory sportfishing office in North America . Fishing is what sustains touristry , the local economic system , and the livelihood of most everyone living in the Angle , and a trouble with sportfishing is what kicked into motion a half - serious endeavor at sezession during later 1990s .
The Walleye Problem
It started like this : Ontario , which shares a delimitation with Minnesota that pass through the Lake of the Woods , was happy to let people quell at Angle resort fish in Canadian water , but imposed high fee , snatch - and - acquittance regulations , and loads of paperwork on them . Fishermen who bide at Canadian resorts on the lake , on the other hand , had a much easier clip getting certify , get out on the H2O , and keeping more of their match . Resort occupancy in the Angle dropped off , restaurants were empty Nox after nighttime , and fishing guide sat at the dock all twenty-four hours .
Angle residents and stage business owners hollo foul to the Union authorities , calling Ontario ’s sportfishing regulations discriminatory . Their ailment went mostly ignore until 1997 , when U.S. Representative Collin Peterson , of Minnesota ’s Seventh District , declare oneself a constitutive amendment that would admit the residents of the Angle to voteon secedingfrom the United States and join Canada .
For the next few 24-hour interval after that , the little town was a medium circus . Finally , people were compensate attention . It became clean from the sound bite provided by the local on the evening intelligence that they did n’t really want to splinter , but they have a go at it that throwing that word around would at last get someone to do something about their walleye problem . That someone wrench out to beJim Southwick , a Minneapolis - based attorney who had worked as the U.S. Trade Representative lawyer on NAFTA number . Southwick ensure the Canadian fishing regularization as a clear NAFTA irreverence and , with the help of the Minnesota Commissioner of Trade and Economic Development , the chief of fisheries , the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and others in Governor Jesse Ventura ’s administration , promptly bewilder the Canadians to lift their regulations .
mutation fishermen began to return to the Angle , occupy the lodges and restaurants and rental gravy holder and keeping their whole catch , no matter which side of the lake they were on . The locals , flush with John Cash from renew business and still a little high from their moment in the public eye , had just one unaffixed end to in conclusion tie up : excuse copiously to local Red Lake Chief Bobby Whitefeather , whose tribe owns the Leo the Lion ’s parcel of the Angle ’s nation , but who was not consult about whether he and the tribe wanted to go Canadian .
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A version of this floor in the beginning ran in 2013 ; it has been updated for 2025 .
