WATER ENDED THE NEXT DAY 150 MILES WEST OF ELY. Dust coated the windshield, my clothes, and houses along the road. The horizon was a shifting channel of light. Minnesota is an anvil split in two: half is in the Great Lakes region, the other half borders the dusty grasslands of the northern plains. Half is Laurentian mixed forest, half tallgrass prairie. Half was once Dakota country, the other half Wisconsin territory. The Mississippi River splits the state in two as well, starting in the north and cutting through Minneapolis to the southeastern border.
I was headed to the Northwest Angle, the northernmost point of the contiguous US. The Angle is a blip on the northern border—an isolated pocket in Minnesota set a hundred miles above the northernmost stretch of the line. It is the northland of the northland—surrounded by Lake of the Woods on three sides and Canada on the other. You have to drive through Manitoba to get to it. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. The Angle was another mistake at the Treaty of Paris. The map Benjamin Franklin used indicated that the origin of the Mississippi River was 150 miles north of where it actually is.
Information about the US West was sparse in 1783. Franklin was living in the Hôtel de Valentinois at 62 Rue Raynouard then. He’d been in Paris since the Continental Congress sent him in October 1776 to broker an alliance with France. He stayed throughout the Revolutionary War and led the US negotiating team following the colonists’ victory.
America’s farewell to the British Empire did not go as smoothly as history books depict. When negotiations began in 1782, George Washington’s troops were on the verge of revolt. A majority of leaders in Congress did not want a union—but rather the appearance of a union, followed by the creation of thirteen independent nation-states. The federal government was bankrupt following the war, and appeals to Spain and others for a loan were dismissed. In Paris, Franklin’s cohorts, John Jay and John Adams, ran out of money while traveling Europe in search of funding and alliances. Adams was the taciturn, polar opposite of Franklin and was angry that he had to work with his longtime foe. Franklin was tormented by gout throughout most of the Paris talks and devastated that his son had sided with British Loyalists. Jay’s newborn daughter died while he was waiting to hear back from the Spanish court about financial aid. He himself then fell ill in an influenza epidemic.
Somehow the delegates made progress, and in the fall of 1782, all parties were in agreement that America’s northern border would extend from the Atlantic to the head of the Mississippi River. The boundary would split four of the Great Lakes, follow the voyageurs’ fur-trading route through the Boundary Waters, and continue to the northwest corner of Lake of the Woods. From there it would pass due west to the Mississippi’s headwaters.
The map that delegates brought to the negotiating table had been drawn by John Mitchell—a physician-botanist in London who dabbled in mapmaking. Mitchell never traveled to the western US, but rather combined information from known maps of the region into one. His compilation was four and a half by six and a half feet and covered the East Coast to the Dakotas. It was sold in eight sheets and denoted mystical—and often fictional—tribes and places like “Isles Phelipeaux and Pontchartrain” in Lake Superior, “River of the Cherakees,” and “Wandering Savage Indians.” Descriptions printed on the map suggested that the headwaters of the Mississippi were near the fiftieth degree of latitude, more than a hundred miles north of the actual start of the river. It misplaced other geographic features as well—like the Saint Croix River in Passamaquoddy Bay, and lakes and islands in the Boundary Waters. At the time, the Mitchell map was considered the most comprehensive of the northwestern frontier.
Negotiations continued, and the line was drawn. When the Treaty of Paris was signed on September 3, 1783, US sovereignty was acknowledged by Britain; all British influence was absolved; the Mississippi was to be shared by both countries; British protection of American interests around the world was lifted; American fishermen were given rights to the Grand Banks; confiscated Loyalist property was to be reinstated; and the northern border was set from the northwest corner of Lake of the Woods to nowhere.
CORNFIELDS GREW BETWEEN STANDS of cottonwood trees, and harvesters cruised down the double-yellow line spewing golden dust on the way north. A series of white signs with red lettering advertised gifts of Minnesota’s northland: moccasins, wild rice, Vikings, Twins. The radio played an entire Bruce Springsteen live concert: Rutherford, New Jersey, 1984. I drove past Saint Cloud, Brainerd, and the actual headwaters of the Mississippi in Itasca State Park.
Salt grass and meadow sedge edged the highway in Warroad. Five miles north, I passed by a brand-new, $50-million US border crossing. Drugs and a handful of illegal immigrants had been the only problems along Minnesota’s northern border for decades, until 2017, when an American immigration crackdown caused a flood of US immigrants to reverse the flow along the northern border and sneak into Canada. A loophole in Canada’s immigration law encouraged more than fifteen thousand to make the journey in 2017.
Many traveled on foot in the middle of winter, a dangerous season in the northland. Two men from Ghana lost all of their fingers on the trek from Minnesota to Emerson, Manitoba, and many others had to be rescued. In May of 2017 a fifty-seven-year-old Ghanaian woman died of exposure trying to cross seventy miles west of Warroad, near Noyes, Minnesota. She was on her way to see her first granddaughter, born five weeks earlier in Toronto.
The agent at the Canadian station a half mile down the road did not smile when I pulled up. He asked where I was going, if I’d been there before, how I’d heard about it. I said I was going to Angle Inlet, and he handed me a piece of paper that read, “Phone Reporting from the Northwest Angle.” A map at the top showed the Angle’s north–south boundary. Three bubble quotes with telephones on them read “Carlson’s,” “Jim’s Corner,” and “Young’s Bay.” “You’ll be reporting from Jim’s Corner,” the agent said.
I followed Route 12—“Mom’s Way”—through Middlebro, Manitoba, to Sprague. The guard said to take a right at an abandoned gas station there. I did and fishtailed onto a washboard dirt road. Thirty minutes later, the road crossed into US territory, and I spotted four men in their seventies huddled next to a phone booth at an intersection. I parked next to a gray Chevy pickup truck hitched to a bass boat.
“Is this Jim’s Corner?” I asked.
The men looked at me, then looked at each other.
“We’re wondering the same thing,” one of them said.
The men watched as I picked up the phone and pushed a button with an American-flag sticker on it. After a couple of rings a voice answered, “US Customs and Border Patrol.” The agent ticked off the usual list of ambiguous and prying questions. “What are you doing? Where are you going? Why are you going there? What kind of fish are you fishing for? Have you ever caught one of those before? What does it taste like?” Then the agent said I was checked in, and I left the old men, still huddled by the booth.
THE NORTHWEST ANGLE is 80 percent water. The other 20 percent is a rectangle of land that juts into Lake of the Woods. Angle Inlet, set on the northern shore, is the only town. The population as of 2010 was 119.
I drove past a few houses in town, a one-room schoolhouse, and a general store that opens daily from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. A hundred yards past the gravel greens of a five-hole golf course, a sign pointed to a resort called “Jake’s Northwest Angle.” Another sign on the office door read: “ring the pager (it works).” I did and Jake’s grandson, Paul Colson, drove up in a golf cart. He looked like a backwoods Chevy Chase—handsome, short-cropped brown hair, dimple on his chin, smirk on his face. He wore sweatpants and a baseball hat and flipped a beeper in his hand as we spoke.
I told him I was a writer, and without a hint of sarcasm he asked, “What’s your angle?” He seemed relieved when I told him about my trip. Television stations and newspapermen had visited the Angle for the better part of a century to document life in the northernmost point of the contiguous US. “We had a television crew here this morning,” Paul said. “They rode with my sons sixty-five miles to Warroad to go to school. The boys do it twice a day. Border patrol stops them in both directions. It’s insane what they’re doing down there.”
Paul’s grandfather had pioneered the Angle and built three of the six cabins at the family resort. The old man had also built the road from Sprague and half the town. Paul’s boys grew up going to the Angle Inlet School, the last one-room schoolhouse in Minnesota, until the sixth grade. After that they had to commute to Warroad.
Paul had spent the last twenty years fighting US and Canadian authorities who cut off access to hospitals and schools, unfairly taxed Angle residents, and changed fishing and guiding regulations on Lake of the Woods, where most residents earn a living. The town has tried to secede from the US several times. The last effort was in the 1980s. The hassle of living in the Angle has kept families from moving there, and the community was slowly dying. “You gotta think how much longer we can keep doing this,” Paul said.
A deep inlet lined with tall reeds connects the resort to Lake of the Woods. A light breeze rustled the grass and cooled what was becoming an extraordinarily hot day for late September. Twenty minutes into our conversation, Paul asked if I wanted a room at the resort. I told him I’d be there for a night, and he tossed me a key and nodded to a cabin behind the office. “The AC works,” he said.
AFTER BRITISH EXPLORER DAVID THOMPSON discovered the headwaters of the Mississippi in 1798, well south of Lake of the Woods, British and American officials scrambled to patch the gap in the border. The British suggested that the boundary run straight across the forty-ninth parallel to Lake of the Woods, creating an uninterrupted line. Thomas Jefferson’s administration rejected the plan. Britain then offered to purchase the stranded parcel, but that option was also rejected. The Northwest Angle had little value. What was at stake, Jefferson said, was the integrity of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that had given America its independence.
Four decades later, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty extended the line from the northwest terminus of Lake of the Woods due south to the forty-ninth parallel, creating a 120-square-mile chunk of America floating in southwestern Ontario. The US and British Northern Boundary Commission traveled to Minnesota to survey the border in the summer of 1872. British astronomers and a Royal Engineers detachment took a steamship across the Atlantic, a smaller steamer across the Great Lakes, and the Northern Pacific Railroad to one last steamer headed for Fort Pembina in North Dakota. The Americans had arrived by train, two weeks earlier. The commissions started working their way east immediately, dispatching two parties to Angle Inlet and two to the intersection of the forty-ninth parallel and Lake of the Woods. It took three years, working seasonally, to draw the line from Pembina to Lake of the Woods, and from the Northwest Angle south to the forty-ninth. The line wouldn’t be marked until 1912, by some of the same surveyors who had worked on the Boundary Waters.
Ojibwe drumming reverberated through the forest in 1917 when Jake Colson moved to the Angle. The Angle was four hundred miles and a boat ride north of Minneapolis. Jake found what he described as a Shangri-la there stocked with fish, game, wild rice, and a wilderness few non-Indians had ever seen. He settled down with a cow, a few chickens, and a garden. The Ojibwe called Jake Poh-zhash, meaning “big Indian.” He met his wife when his sister arrived for a visit with a friend. The couple lived in a tent until they finished their cabin. They fished, logged, and harvested marsh marigolds to survive. Jake worked as a guide and saved money until 1945, when he built a few guest cabins.
Without a road to his resort—boat access only—business was slow. He added an electric generator and running water. He helped build the first post office and was its first postmaster. He got permission to build a connector road to Route 308. A benefactor tried to offer Jake a college education, but Jake turned it down. When Hubert Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis, sent his son to visit the Angle, Jake proclaimed him mayor for the day, and regional newspapers ran the story on the front page. A popular Christian writer named Bernard Palmer rented a cabin and wrote his “Danny Orlis” series about Lake of the Woods—putting Angle Inlet on the map. When fishermen left in the summer, duck hunters arrived. When the hunters left, ice fishermen came.
CB radio was the original form of communication. Jake’s black-and-white Zenith television got one channel, from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. To deliver a baby or set a broken bone, the family drove 130 miles to Winnipeg. There was often a delay at the border as customs agents tried to figure out which country Angle Inlet was in. Paul’s sister, Constance, attended the one-room schoolhouse with Canadians and Ojibwe children. The schoolhouse was built in 1934. Telephone service arrived in 1991.
I spent most of the afternoon at Jake’s unpacking and drying out my gear from the Boundary Waters trip. Wind hummed through the trees and rippled water along the inlet. Paul’s kids drove an excavator around the grounds after school, and I read a pile of articles and books about homesteading in the Angle.
Transporting settlers and military across Lake of the Woods to the Canadian prairies was big business at one time as Canada tried to keep up with western expansion in America. The first steamer began operating there in 1872. The Shamrock had accommodations for twenty-five first-class passengers and fifty in steerage. The three-day trip across Lake of the Woods cost twelve dollars, including room and board. Ferry service expanded in the late 1800s along with mining, lumbering, and fishing. Side-wheelers, stern-wheelers, and propeller boats roamed the waters—ranging from 30-foot lumber freighters to the 150-foot Kenora steamer, which had twenty-two state rooms and one hundred passengers.
Fishing was big business too. In 1888, fishermen hauled in 40,000 pounds of of whitefish, walleye, burbot, tullibee, and northern pike. Five years later that number had risen to 1.65 million pounds, plus 124,000 pounds of sturgeon roe. Lake of the Woods was one of the world’s largest sources of caviar for a time, producing 1.5 million pounds between 1893 and 1895. By 1900 the fishery was in decline. Less than 60,000 pounds of sturgeon was caught that year, and fifteen years later the number was a fraction of that. Now, sport fishermen chase primarily walleye and muskellunge on the lake.
Paul knocked on my door the next morning to ask if I wanted to go fishing. Lake of the Woods is seventeen hundred square miles, and fishermen pay Paul $500 a day to make it a bit smaller. I grabbed my jacket, and we walked to his boat. Paul’s wife, Karen, came along. Paul drove sitting sideways with his legs crossed, one hand on the wheel, the other tucked under his right knee. He was wearing a camo hat and camo sweatshirt and chatted with Karen about their kids’ homework. Internet could be spotty in the Angle, and one of the boys had had trouble emailing a paper to his teacher. Karen held her phone over her head trying to get cell service and eventually managed to reach the teacher and get her kid off the hook.
We drove past Fort Saint Charles, a French Canadian fur-trading post built in 1732. A trader named Pierre La Vérendrye had built the fort with his sons, before going on to explore and claim the western half of Canada for New France. The fort had been reconstructed with new logs and asphalt shingles. It sits on the American side of the line now, and someone had hoisted an American flag behind the log palisade.
There were no boundary markers on the lake as Paul crossed into Canada. He drove past long slabs of granite on the shores of Bukete Island and pulled into a bay he made me swear I would not reveal. He handed me a fishing rod, drove a hook through the head of a minnow, and tossed my line overboard. He did the same for Karen and himself, and they cast their lines off opposite sides of the boat. Ten minutes later we had eight fish packed in a cooler.
“Let’s find a place where they’re biting,” Paul said and started the engine. He drove ten minutes northeast. The wind was out of the west, and a light chop was building. There are more than 14,500 islands in Lake of the Woods. Granite and greenstone in the north resisted glaciers, leaving most of the islands there. Glacial deposits on the US side created broad sheets of shallow water, sand dunes, and marshy shorelines.
We dropped our hooks near a granite outcropping and caught eight more walleye in about eight minutes. Paul added them to the cooler, looked at his watch, and said we had to get back to meet the school bus. He said he wasn’t sure how long his family would last in the Angle, as the boat skipped over the chop. His sister wasn’t interested in running the resort. Border security and tense relations with Canadian game wardens were hurting his business. The Angle school had closed when his youngest boys graduated, and it didn’t look like there were many more kids on the way.
Karen hopped off the boat at the dock and headed home to meet the kids. I followed Paul to a fish-cleaning station, where he emptied the cooler onto a stainless steel counter. He filleted each fish with one sweep using a long, thin knife, then tossed the head, tail, and spine into a bucket. “We put up this building to keep the flies down,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe it in the summer.”
Paul asked whether I wanted to join the family for fish tacos. I declined and packed my things for the trip home. He was already dropping fillets on the grill when I passed by on my way out. I drove west past road signs riddled with bullet holes and a few commuters headed home from Warroad. A wall of hardwood lined each side of the dirt road that Jake Colson had cut.
The road had been graded recently and ran straight and smooth for fifteen miles. I couldn’t imagine the old man and his neighbors chopping their way through the forest. It must have taken thousands of man-hours, hauling brush and removing stumps. Jake would probably be proud that his grandkids drove the road twice a day, following the dusty finger through Canada back to the US.