Drawing a Line in the Water

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Lake Superior

Everyone knows Lake Superior as binational water shared by the United States and Canada.

The international boundary splits the Lake from Sault Ste. Marie northwest around Isle Royale to the Pigeon River, then along a chain of lakes and the Rainy River to Angle Inlet in Lake of the Woods, where it forms Minnesota’s unique Northwest Angle before dropping

to the 49th Parallel and on to the West Coast.

Unlike other Great Lakes, Lake Superior seems less of a 50-50 division. Indeed, today’s familiar boundary might have been very different but for confusion from an early map and the 60 years of re-negotiations it ignited.

The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the war for

American independence, set the original boundary from the Atlantic Ocean to Lake of the Woods. It described this region’s portion of the boundary as extending “through Lake Superior Northward of the Isles Royale & Phelipeaux to the Long Lake,” then along “the Water Communication between it & the Lake of the Woods … to the most Northwestern Point thereof, and from thence on a due West Course to the River Mississippi.”

Looking at the text today, we see several problems. First, there is no Isle Phelipeaux (or Philipeaux) southeast of Isle Royale. Second, the Mississippi River does not extend west of Lake of the Woods. Third, just what is that “Long Lake” at the mouth of a non-existent river flowing direct from Lake of the Woods into Lake Superior? There were other issues, too.

The problems stemmed from negotiators in Paris using copies of Dr. John Mitchell’s 1755 map. Mitchell, trained in medicine at Edinburgh, was neither a geographer nor professional mapmaker, but came from a wealthy family in Virginia and created the map in London while recovering from ill health. He did not travel the region himself, but used other resources.

Although the Mitchell map was almost 30 years old at the time of the Paris Treaty, it was then the most widely accepted representation of North America, sort of the Rand-McNally of the 18th century.

Unfortunately, once beyond the settled eastern regions, Mitchell’s map became increasingly inaccurate as it moved toward Lake Superior, and no authorities in London, Montreal or Philadelphia really knew what the interior of the continent looked like. So while the boundary from Sault Ste. Marie to Lake of the Woods seemed reasonable with Mitchell’s map on the table, it was confusing from a canoe in Lake Superior. Knowing which side of the border you were on could be critical, especially for fur traders. (The treaty was probably one reason that, in 1803, the Montreal-based North West Company moved its fur trade post from Grand Portage to Fort William to avoid U.S. jurisdiction.)

If you look at the map above, you see that its distorted Lake Superior, divided from the Sault over Isle Royale, would seem to split the Lake more evenly between the two countries. The actual “wolf’s head” of the Lake, though, is longer and narrower. Would the line decided in Paris have been drawn farther south given a more accurate map? And had the negotiators better understood the true worth of Isle Royale, would there have been a bigger battle over it?

One of the delightful myths about the border creation is that Benjamin Franklin, secretly knowing the copper-mining potential of Isle Royale, fought to have it included on the U.S. side. Mount Franklin on the island is named for him, but alas, his wily brokering may not have happened. The Ojibwe people had long hunted, fished and even extracted copper on the island, but commercial copper mining didn’t occur until the 1840s.

The problems created in Lake Superior by the Paris Treaty were not addressed until the end of the War of 1812, the second war between the United States and Britain, when the 1814 Treaty of Ghent created four joint commissions to arbitrate all boundary issues. The first commission began work in 1816, but the sensitive East Coast boundary defied agreement, putting the Lake Superior-Lake of the Woods line on hold.

By the summer of 1822 when the Boundary Commission finally entered the Lake Superior region, there was a better understanding of the true lay of the land and water.

In 1798, explorer/fur trader David Thompson had located one source of the Mississippi River (north of today’s Bemidji) for the North West Company, and he had descended the St. Louis River to Fond du Lac. Clearly, he knew, Lake of the Woods did not drain into Lake Superior, as on Mitchell’s map, and many, not one, “water communication” linked the Big Lake with the interior lake.

In 1818, Britain and the United States agreed to the 49th north parallel latitude as the border west of Lake of the Woods, but a gap in delineation remained from it to Lake Superior. Two questions remained: Which “water communications” did the Paris Treaty intend, and where was Lake of the Woods’ northwesternmost point?

A series of claims and counter-claims followed in the negotiations.

Mitchell’s map, and its imitators well into the 19th century, seemed to show the Grand Portage-Pigeon River route. This passage had been used as a major fur-trade canoe route since at least 1731, despite waterfalls that forced an 8-mile portage to and from Grand Portage. The American commissioner argued that the Paris Treaty specified the boundary was to extend north of Isle Royale, so the obvious intention was for the border to run directly into the Pigeon River.

However, “Long Lake” on Mitchell’s map was much larger than the Pigeon Bay, a narrow estuary extending only about 2 miles into Lake Superior. The British commissioner claimed St. Louis Bay conformed better to the Paris Treaty’s “Long Lake” so the St. Louis River should be the boundary. The St. Louis did connect to the Rainy River and Lake of the Woods via Lake Vermilion – a difficult route, but used by the French as early as 1679. The St. Louis estuary had been home to both North West Company and American Fur Company posts. This claim would have put the future Duluth in Canada with Superior as a border town.

The challenge surprised the Americans. To respond, the U.S. commissioner shifted his border claim to the Kaministiquia River. From Thunder Bay, the Kaministiquia led to Dog Lake, the Dog River, then farther to a chain of lakes and streams that joined the Pigeon River route – thus a workable route to Lake of the Woods. Moreover, French explorers had used the route back to 1659. This, insisted the American commissioner, was the route intended in 1783 treaty, putting the boundary through Thunder Bay.

The British commissioner derided the claim, but reconsidered Pigeon River, which he agreed to if the Americans would give up the old Grand Portage fur trade post and its 8-mile portage trail. The U.S. commissioner countered that he didn’t have the power to agree to a line that was not a “water communication.”

On-site surveys were being done. U.S. surveyor James Ferguson and his assistant George W. Whistler were on the crew that accurately measured for the first time Isle Royale’s distance from the mainland. (Two fun facts about the U.S. team: 1. They wintered at Fort William and paid, with U.S. government money, for the customary New Year’s liquor for the Hudson’s Bay Company crew there. 2. George’s son was painter James McNeill Whistler, famous for a portrait of his mother, so George was “Whistler’s Father.”)

Meanwhile, to tackle the problem of identifying the northwesternmost point of Lake of the Woods, both British and American survey parties entered Lake of the Woods in 1823.

The northern two-thirds of that lake is a tangle of pine-clad, rocky islands. The surveyors focused explorations on the waters crossed by fur traders traveling to and from the Winnipeg River to Lake Winnipeg. Early surveys produced three possible northwesternmost points in Lake of the Woods:

Portage Bay, Monument Bay or Rat Portage. The British commissioner sent the map to the London Foreign Office with the comment that Rat Portage was the likely northwesternmost point. The Foreign Office sent the map to the Hudson’s Bay Company in London and an immediate reply insisted that all three choices extended the U.S. boundary too far north and would jeopardize the British fur trade route.

 In 1825, the Foreign Office sent Dr. Johann Ludwig Tiarks, a German scientist who had served the Boundary Commissions before, to help Thompson identify a point less injurious to fur-trade interests.

In the meantime, Thompson had located a fourth possibility, a finger of water some 81⁄2 miles long. When Tiarks took fresh astronomical sightings, he determined that Thompson’s new site at 49° 23΄ 55˝ – today’s Angle Inlet – was indeed the northwesternmost point of Lake of the Woods. From there, a line could be drawn straight south to the 49th Parallel, creating a U.S. thumbnail peninsula of about 150 square miles.

The U.S. commissioner agreed to Angle Inlet, but with Lake Superior still in dispute, the commission folded in 1827 without agreement.

Anglo-American relations deteriorated sharply in the 1830s. The Canadian Rebellions of 1837 spilled into the United States, and in 1839, a crisis exploded about disputed timberland in Maine, raising the possibility of another British-U.S. war.

Fortunately, before things elevated to war, the governments in both countries changed. In 1840, William Henry Harrison was elected president and John Tyler vice president. Although Harrison died one month after taking office, he had appointed Massachusetts Sen. Daniel Webster as Secretary of State, kept by Tyler, too.

In England, Sir Robert Peel formed a government in 1841. He and his foreign secretary, Lord Aberdeen, persuaded Alexander Baring, the Lord Ashburton, to

be a special envoy to the United States. Ashburton had been the lead merchant banker in Britain and had many U.S. connections; his bank had financed the 1803 U.S. “Louisiana Purchase.”

Webster and Ashburton began talks in June 1842. A month later, Ashburton submitted a draft proposal for a boundary from Lake Superior to Lake of the Woods. It was substantially the British claim in 1827 – the Pigeon River route west to Lake of the Woods with the border along the old 8-mile portage trail. Webster countered with the Pigeon River itself as the boundary, plus offered the right of passage along the old trail for all British subjects. Ashburton accepted, acknowledging Pigeon River as the boundary intended in the 1783 Paris Treaty.

As for the northwesternmost point on Lake of the Woods, Webster accepted without protest Angle Inlet, creating Minnesota’s iconic Northwest Angle, a small portion of the United States not reachable directly by road without crossing into Canada.

On August 9, 1842, signing of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty created the boundary across Lake Superior to Lake of the Woods. A conceptual, contentious line in the water finally became a definitive – and today a friendly – line on the map.

Francis M. Carroll, professor emeritus of St. John’s College, Winnipeg, wrote A Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the Canadian-American Boundary, 1783-1842.