Great States Have Curves: The Reasons For Minnesota’s Shape

I'm glad that the shape of Minnesota isn't an official shape like a square, rectangle, or a lemniscate...because the thought of being tasked by a teacher to find the area using math would've made me drop out of school to be a carny. Maybe I should've, anyway.

Some states - like Wyoming (ew) and Colorado - are relatively proportionately shaped. And then there's our little North Star State. Why are we like this and how did we get here?

Why Is Minnesota Shaped Like it is?

Perhaps the origin of "ope" happened when the state's shape was realized...because errors are part of what (literally) shaped our state.

The Northern Minnesota Border (i.e. The Northwest Angle)

Out of all four directions, this one is the most infamous. That (relatively) little nub on our northern border with Canada is there because of the Treaty of Paris...and the lack of satellites and drones. It was the late 1700s at the time, so I guess we can cut them some slack for not having modern-day technology.

The treaty set the U.S.-Canada border from the Atlantic to the mighty Mississippi. Minnesota's northern border would be from Lake Superior westward to the northwesternmost part of Lake of the Woods, then due west to the Mississippi River. What the drone-less fellas didn't realize was that Lake of the Woods was not shaped like a rough egg, and didn't have a distinctive northwesternmost point.

Ope.

It took until 1798 when a British explorer proved that the Mississippi was not sourced from Lake of the Woods...and that left a boundary gap. It still wasn't until 1825 that an astronomer figured out where Lake of the Wood's northwesternmost point was (the head of Angle Inlet). Finally - in 1842 - the boundaries that became the Northwest Angle were agreed on in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. And that was that...

...until it wasn't. From 1872 to 1875, Great Britain teamed up with Canada to try to eliminate the Northwest Angle. The U.S. rejected offers from the redcoats/maple leafs to buy the Angle, but not for its economic value: they didn't want anything in the treaty that gave them their independence to change. So it stayed, and THAT was finally that.

More on that debacle here.

The Western Minnesota Border

We used to be more Megasota than Minnesota: our western border (before we were a state and still just the Minnesota Territory) extended an additional 200 miles west. Some guy named Henry Rice wanted the western border to be more like our current border. After some backroom negotiations, Minnesota's western border was set as along the Red River and Bois de Sioux River, south to Lake Travers and Big Stone Lake, then straight down to Iowa. Thanks, Iowa.

The Southern Minnesota Border

The explanation of this border is more succinct than the first two: blame Iowa.

Iowa became a state in 1846; Minnesota didn't apply for statehood until 1856. Since Iowa's borders were already defined, we got to geographically sit right on Iowa's head and call it our southern border.

The Eastern Minnesota Border

Back to weirdness. The northeastern Minnesota border is NOT the shore along Lake Superior; the border extends 54 miles from shore.

South of Lake Superior, Minnesotans were liberated from the tyranny of the Wisconsin Territory in 1849. Until then, Wisconsin's border extended west all the way to the Mississippi River. It actually took Wisconsin applying for statehood for the cheese to be sent east: Stillwater residents wanted to be left out of Wisconsin The State.

An agreement was made between Minnesota and Wisconsin to establish the eastern non-Lake-Superior border along the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers.

And here we are: the oddly-shaped but northernmost state in the Union.

H/T: MinnPost / Star Tribune