Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The US/Canadian Border

Episode Date: August 23, 2020

The border between the United States and Canada is the longest border between any two countries in the world. The total length of the land border is 8,891 kilometers or 5,525 miles long. In addition to being the longest border in the world, it is also the longest non-militarized and non-fenced border in the world. With a border that long, you are bound to have some oddities, and the US/Canadian border has plenty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The border between the United States and Canada is the longest border between any two countries in the world. The total length of the land border is 8,891 kilometers or 5,525 miles long. In addition to being the longest border in the world, it's also the longest non-militarized and non-fenced border in the world. With a border that long, you're bound to have some oddities, and the U.S.-Canadian border has plenty. Learn more about the boundary, which looks really simple on paper, but is really full of a regularity. on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison.

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This episode is sponsored by audible.com. If you like to listen to audio content while you go about your day, and you clearly must if you're listening to this, then I'd definitely check out Audible selection of audiobooks. If you're interested in the U.S. Canadian border, the audiobook I would recommend

is Northland, a 4,000 mile journey along America's forgotten border by Porter Fox. Fox spent two years traveling along both sides of the border, learning about the history and colorful characters which help define it. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks by going to audibletrial.com slash everything everywhere or clicking on the link in the show notes. If I were to tell

you that of the two land borders the United States had, one of them has no disputes whatsoever, and the other has several outstanding disputes, you might think that the disputed border would be with Mexico, and you'd be wrong. As of today, there are at least five outstanding border disputes with the United States and Canada, almost all of which extend back to treaties with the British when available maps weren't as good as they are today. There's also a whole bunch of border oddities, some of which also result from poor knowledge of the terrain, and some of which were done on purpose. So let's start this tour of the border in the far north at the first border dispute, the Northwest Passage. Technically, this isn't a border dispute, as it isn't along the

U.S.-Canadian border. It's more of a Canada versus the world issue. National law holds that a country's territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles off the shore. The exception to this is what's called an international strait. These are important shipping lanes which are not subject to this rule where ships would have to go within 12 miles of the shore of a country. The Straits of Malacca near Singapore and Malaysia is a good example. Canada considers all of the waters around the Arctic archipelago to be internal Canadian territorial waters. The United States and many other countries consider the Northwest Passing, that being the water between some of the islands, to be an international straight open to

international shipping. A strict interpretation of international law would probably work against Canada on this case, as the distances between the major islands are greater than 24 nautical miles. The land border between the country starts where Alaska and the Yukon meet the Arctic Ocean, in the Beaufort Sea. Here, too, there is a small disagreement over a wedge of water which extends north of the border. Canada claims that the border should just keep going straight, into the sea as a continuation of the land border. The Americans claim that the sea border should be equal-distant from the land on both sides. As the American coast immediately west of the land border goes north, and the Canadian coast goes south, the Americans claim that the sea border would angle

a little to the east. This is mostly theoretical at this point as no one lives there, and extracting any resources from this wedge would be extremely difficult and expensive. It could become an issue in the future if the waters were to remain clear of ice all year round. As we go south, the border is pretty uneventful. Because the area is so remote and unpopulated, there was never any real attempt to delineate the border for the entire distance like they did in the south. One place of note is the Little Gold Creek Border Crossing on the top of the world highway. The highway connects Dawson City, Yukon and Talk Alaska, and it is the least busy border crossing. It is one of the only joint U.S.-Canadian border control buildings, with the actual

border being marked by a painted line on the floor. Further south, the borderhead southeast along the Alaskan Panhandle. The border here was set neither by the Canadians nor the Americans. It was set in the 1825 Treaty of St. Petersburg between Russia and the United Kingdom. Basically, the whole area denies Canada any sort of coast along northern British Columbia. At the southern tip of the Alaskan Panhandle, we do have our third border dispute, the Dixon entrance. This dispute has to do with if the sea boundary should be drawn as a straight line between two southern points in Alaska, or if it should follow the 12 nautical mile rule. A couple of rocks that are only above the surface at low tide are also claimed by the United States,

which muddies up the issue. Also of note is the town of Heiter Alaska, population 87. The fjord which separates the southern part of the Alaskan Panhandle and British Columbia is called the Portland Canal. At the end of the Portland Canal is the town of Heider. Hider is connected to the rest of the world by a road only via the town of Stuart British Columbia, which is immediately across the border. Hider is the closest part of Alaska you can drive to from the lower 48 states. Because Heiter is cut off from the rest of Alaska, they are the only town in the United States that mostly uses Canadian currency. They also have a British Columbia area

code instead of an Alaska one. The border station here is only staffed on the Canadian side, as entering Heiter won't really get you anywhere in the United States. They also set their clocks to the time in BC instead of Alaska. As we finally get down to the southern border, we have to deal with the fourth border dispute, which is the Strait of Wandafuka between British Columbia and Washington State. The dispute is not about the border in the strait itself, but rather the water beyond the mouth of the strait. The dispute is pretty minor, and the main reason it has never been resolved is that it tends to get lumped together with all of the other disputes I previously mentioned. We finally reached the 49th parallel, the long, straight line which makes up the single largest

section of the border. The 49th parallel was chosen in the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, which set the border on this line of latitude from the northwest angle of the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, and also in the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which extended it to the Pacific Ocean, but not including Vancouver Island. The westernmost point of the 49th parallel border is Point Roberts, Washington. This is one of the real oddball parts of the border, because when negotiating the original border treaty, they had no idea it existed. They assumed that the border would end just north of what is today Blay in Washington on the coast. The problem was there was a small peninsula, just below Vancouver that jutted below the 49th parallel. That hunk of land became Port Washington and is today totally separate from the rest of the United States. The children who live there have to cross an international border four times a day to go to school in Washington State.

The community, which has only 1,300 residents, makes quite a bit of money from Canadians who cross over to purchase gasoline and rent mailboxes where they can get items sent to an American address. This area was conceded as part of the negotiation which allowed the British to keep all of Vancouver Island south of the 49th parallel. Going east, the border seems pretty simple. It's a straight line. Except, it's not. While the border is officially and theoretically a straight line, the surveying teams who actually set up the border monuments didn't quite get it right. From the Pacific Ocean to the Lake of the Woods, the physical border can deviate north or south by as much as 300 meters. meters. There's a joint U.S. Canadian Commission that is responsible for the border, and all of the trees along the border have been cut such that you can clearly see the line which makes up the border on satellite images. The International Peace Garden sits on the border between North Dakota

and Manitoba. The garden is almost perfectly symmetrical on either side of the border with a chapel that is bisected by the border. The chapel's organ sits directly on the border with one of the organist's hands in Canada and one in the United States. The next oddity is the Piney, Pine Creek Border Airport, which serves the communities of Piney, Manitoba, and Pine Creek, Minnesota. The runway crosses the border and the terminal is in the United States. However, there are two roads that leave the terminal, which go to the two respective border stations on a nearby road. The eastern terminal point to the 49th parallel is the northwest angle of the lake of the woods. When they set this as the endpoint in 1818, they had really bad maps. What they didn't realize is that setting the border

at this point creates a part of Minnesota which just juts into Manitoba, and that section of land is cut off from the rest of the United States. To reach the northwest angle, you have to drive into Manitoba and then cross back into Minnesota. There's no border station to enter the northwest angle, only a video phone, which didn't even work when I went there about 17 years ago. From here it follows rivers and lakes until it reaches Lake Superior. Along the Great Lakes, the border goes down roughly the middle of the lakes, and the rivers which connect them, including the St. Clair, Detroit, and Niagara Rivers. The border then follows the St. Lawrence River until Cornwall, Ontario, where the border goes inland and turns flat again.

Here is the oldest part of the border and where many of the border oddities can be found. The first is right outside of Cornwall itself, Cornwall Island, which is mostly owned by the Aquasasasne Mohawk tribe. The Canadian border crossing is not on the island, so as you enter Canada from the U.S., you can basically hang out on the island without going through Canadian customs. Technically, you are supposed to drive through and check in,

but it's really hard to enforce. The town of Derby Line, Vermont, has a library-slash-opra house that straddles the border with their sister's city of Stansted, Quebec. The books and stages are in Canada, and the checkout desk and the auditorium seats are in the U.S. The joke is that Derby Line is the only library in the United States without any books.

The easternmost end of the border is located where Maine and New Brunswick meet the Atlantic Ocean. Here we have the Canadian equivalent of Point Roberts, Campobello Island. It is an island in New Brunswick that is only connected to the world via a bridge to Lubeck, Maine. Anyone driving to Campobello Island will have to go through Maine, just like anyone going to Point Roberts has to go through British Columbia or anyone going to the northwest angle has to go through Manitoba. Campobello was actually the favorite vacation spot for President Franklin Roosevelt. We'll end this tour with the only honest-of-goodness land dispute between the United States and Canada, the Micah Seale Island. Sitting in the Bay of Fondi, it is almost equal distance from the coast

of Maine and Grand Manana Island at New Brunswick, and it lies within the 12 nautical mile limit for each country's territorial water. No one lives there except C.O. and puffins, but both countries have always claimed it. The UK built a lighthouse there in 1832, and Canada has extended its claim and presence on the island. In 1995, Canada eliminated all of their manned lighthouses along the Atlantic, except for the Micah Seale Island, where they kept a team of people for, quote, sovereignty purposes. Today, there are puffin viewing tours that visit the island from Cutler, Maine. As of now, visitors on the puffin tours are not required. to bring a passport.

Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Macalach. Special thanks to everyone who has subscribed to the show on their favorite podcast player or who has left a review over on Apple Podcasts. The reviews really help the show get discovered.