Continental Divide and other natural boundaries used in more US State borders?

USA_Territorial_Growth_1820.jpg


As this map illustrates, at one point the United States actually cared about watershed borders. While the deal with the 49th parallel was resolved (as much as I'd like it if the US kept the Red River watershed in mind) not long after 1820, the western lands of the Louisiana purchase followed the Continental Divide until the Civil War.

Why are watershed borders good? Well, I don't like square states, and nor do a lot of other people. Look at Russia, especially Siberia, where there are few square borders to be found, and even down to the district level seem defined strongly by natural features. Now, I think to have something so meticulous as what Russia (Empire, Soviet, modern) did is asking for too much, but as the example of the Unorganized Territory/Nebraska Territory shows, the US can follow the boundaries and hopefully carve out states appropriately using the Continental Divide as their guide. Canada uses the Continental Divide as most of the boundary between Alberta and British Columbia, for instance.

Is there any way to get the people drawing the borders to follow the natural boundaries to some degree? I don't think it's bad if there's a mixture of straight lines and natural boundaries (i.e. Maine). And what might the effect be on the states and territories? If, say, Colorado does not have the Western Slope on the west of the Divide, does that get awarded to Utah? Does Wyoming ever become a state?
 
It's a pretty interesting observation that outside of Colorado and Montana, not even the county boundaries follow the Continental Divide.

For Wyoming, I'd divide the state between Utah, Montana, and Colorado (south of 42 N), including the Nebraska Panhandle within Colorado for best borders.
 
Siberia was conquered before accurate maps were available, which presumably would have something to do with the lack of straight lines -- drawing squares on a map isn't very useful if the map bears only a passing resemblance to the actual terrain.

As for how to get the US to have less straight borders, I suppose you could have some government official come up with a policy of drawling state lines along river watersheds, on the grounds that river basins are natural economic units and it makes sense to have them match up with political boundaries.
 
As for how to get the US to have less straight borders, I suppose you could have some government official come up with a policy of drawling state lines along river watersheds, on the grounds that river basins are natural economic units and it makes sense to have them match up with political boundaries.

I guess you could, but in the American West where the watershed boundaries are tricky and most of the rivers, which don't exist for most of the year have little economic value, well? The Great Basin states make that tricky to enforce. The rest of your idea would have greater use on the Great Plains (irrigation, etc.) and of course the Continental Divide, the most obvious watershed boundary on the continent. In the East the state borders were already drawn long before then.
 

Driftless

Donor
The hook with using navigable rivers as borders - is that they are more central arteries of commerce. Using them as borders tends to complicate rather than simplify. Non-navigable streams can work well for borders. Mountain ranges work fairly well if you carefully delineate what peaks and ridges form the corner points. They do form functional barriers obviously.
 
As for how to get the US to have less straight borders, I suppose you could have some government official come up with a policy of drawling state lines along river watersheds, on the grounds that river basins are natural economic units and it makes sense to have them match up with political boundaries.
John Wesley Powell was a proponent of such a scheme.
 
The hook with using navigable rivers as borders - is that they are more central arteries of commerce. Using them as borders tends to complicate rather than simplify. Non-navigable streams can work well for borders. Mountain ranges work fairly well if you carefully delineate what peaks and ridges form the corner points. They do form functional barriers obviously.

Which it's fortunate that almost none of the rivers of the Great Plains are navigable without internal improvements (or at best only navigable seasonably). But that's more for the Great Plains, and I guess coming up with a better border between California and elsewhere than the Colorado River. And I suppose the Columbia River can also be a problem too, but nowhere near as much as the Colorado River and its tributaries (I don't think any are navigable).

John Wesley Powell was a proponent of such a scheme.

But is there a decent map as to how he'd define the borders? He had a pretty solid idea, certainly.
 
The idea is for each state to be "self-sufficient" with natural resources, agriculture, and taxable industry. The Continental Divide as a border would create states west of it that would be too mineral dependent and lack agriculture. Imagine if Colorado was split by the Continental Divide, well, each side isn't feasible for a state, the eastern side should it join Kansas (as it originally was a part of) and the western side? Give it Utah? Well, no, not feasible given the bigotry of American society, they aren't giving the rich mineral wealth there to a "Mormon state", it just won't ever happen. Plus the miners will not go for a Mormon dominated gov't anyways. So, the idea was to have agricultural and mineral regions together to balance each other. Plus, the great plains and Rocky's are set up to have roughly equal divisions, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakota's all are roughly the same size; Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana all the same number of degrees north-south. Washington and Oregon are roughly the same size. Arizona and New Mexico approximately the same size. California is an anomaly due to it's position and having leverage, Nevada is the result of at least 2 (or 3?) expansions aimed mostly at limiting Utah, and Utah's borders are the result of a universal "screw the Mormons" policy through history. So, in summary- natural borders aren't compatible with how Americans felt about democracy in the mid-late 1800s and how they saw how state borders should be. Natural borders were a 1700s-early 1800s design that ended shortly after the Louisiana Purchase (first state made out of that purchase- Louisiana had their northern border created to be at the extent to which French speaking people were the majority, nothing natural about that)
 
Imagine if Colorado was split by the Continental Divide, well, each side isn't feasible for a state, the eastern side should it join Kansas (as it originally was a part of) and the western side?

I'm pretty sure that Colorado was made this way very deliberately- agriculture was thought to be very important. This is one reason it doesn't "line up" with Wyoming- Wyoming could be more west and still have lots of ranchland.

Nevada is the result of at least 2 (or 3?) expansions aimed mostly at limiting Utah, and Utah's borders are the result of a universal "screw the Mormons" policy through history.

It also lost a large chunk to California, who wanted the gold fields- a good chunk of the California/Nevada Territory border did used to be the Sierra divide IIRC. Historically, California has acted like a bit of an ass in a lot of ways with territorial seizures, water rights, etc. (See Owens Valley and Cadillac Desert. And don't get me started on the Colorado River.)

And, well, the Mormons really tried to claim an unreasonably large chunk of the continent, including about a third of California:

State_of_Deseret%2C_vector_image_cropped_-_2011.svg


But as you can see, if you want 'natural' borders in a *United States, just drop some form of Deseret in there. (Requires one hell of a POD, though.) And no way do they get southern California, either- keep the border at the Sierra divide, and even that is asking California not to act as it has historically.
 
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