How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [29]
would have been ultimately to give the country beyond the mountains a majority of the States.… Shortly after the conclusion of the war with England [the Revolution], very serious difficulties arose between Spain and the United States respecting navigation of the Mississippi. Our settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee … looked to the Mississippi and its outlet through the Gulf of Mexico as their early road to market.… An opinion seems to have sprung up in the Atlantic States that the interests of the transmontane country would always be adverse to theirs.
That earlier Congress did indeed have cause for concern. The residents of North Carolina’s land west of the Appalachians (present-day Tennessee) had grown impatient at the delays preventing it from becoming a separate state, and in 1784 they declared themselves the state of Franklin. Many of its residents further agitated for the state of Franklin to declare itself an independent republic and commence negotiations with Spain.5 This risk not only spurred Congress to begin at once creating states in the land west of the Appalachians, but also to create larger and therefore fewer states than Jefferson had recommended. Fewer states in the region, Vinton went on to point out, would translate into fewer votes in the Senate. And treaties could be ratified only by the Senate.
One other of Jefferson’s proposals, however, did survive the crucible of democracy. At the same time that he was proposing the division of the nation’s western lands into future states, Jefferson offered a separate proposal stipulating the method by which the boundaries of and within these western lands would be located. “It shall be divided into Hundreds of ten geographical miles square … by lines to be run and marked due North and South, and others crossing these at right angles,” he urged. “These Hundreds shall be subdivided into lots of one mile square each … marked by lines running in like manner due North and South, and other crossing these at right angles.”6 Jefferson, whose many accomplishments including surveying, did not invent this approach. It was already known as the rectangular survey system, one of several methods used by surveyors at that time.
East Coast roads and Midwest roads
Today airline passengers flying over the eastern states and the Midwest can look down and see a clear change in the pattern of the roads. East of the Appalachians, the roads generally conform to geographic features. In the Midwest, where the Northwest Ordinance was implemented using the method proposed by Jefferson, they conform primarily to a right-angled grid, positioned north–south by east–west. While Jefferson’s influence on the American map can be difficult to detect, in that grid of roadways we can see his literal imprint on the United States.
CALIFORNIA, OREGON, NEVADA, IDAHO, UTAH
JOHN MEARES
The U.S. Line from Spanish Canada
The Spaniards have seized three British vessels in the fur trade at … Nootka Sound, on the western coast of North America.… Their crews are sent to Mexico in irons.… [The incident] has been transmitted and presented to the government by a Mr. Meares, who came home a passenger.
—LONDON CHRONICLE, MAY 1, 1790
A multistate boundary line separating the southern ends of Oregon and Idaho from the northern ends of California, Nevada, and much of Utah owes its existence to both Spanish Canada and China. Canada is not typically thought of as Spanish, nor are American state lines usually connected to Chinese influence. But a glance at a map of Canada’s Vancouver Island reveals remnants of Spanish Canada in names such as the Juan de Fuca Strait, Flores Island, Cortes Island, and Estevan Point.
Spain, as the first European nation to plant its flag in the New World, proclaimed that it owned it all. And from 1492 into the early 1600s, it did. But then other nations began infiltrating uninhabited coves