Oddities of U.S. Borders, Part 1

On the border between southern Alaska and British Columbia, Hyder gets most of its services from the larger Canadian community of Stewart. Although there is a Canadian customs station at the border, there is no inspection on the American side since the road pretty much dead-ends at Hyder. The telephone service is Canadian, and until 2000 all students had to be bused into Canada to go to school. Unofficially, Canadian time is used also. And there's a dead-end road north of town that crosses over the border again with no formalities to the Salmon River Glacier.

A little further south, there's Point Roberts. It's an unincorporated part of Washington State, but you have to drive through Canada to get there. It exists because the Tsawassen Peninsula extends south of 49 degrees latitude (the border settled by the 1846 Oregon Treaty). Students beyond 3rd grade have to cross the border twice just to get to school. The phone service was Canadian until 1988, and most summer residents are actually Canadian citizens.

The next place of interest is the Northwest Angle, in Minnesota. A rural area of about 100 residents, it's cut off from the rest of the country by the Lake of the Woods. Access is normally by gravel road through Manitoba, although it's usually also possible to reach "the Angle" by boat or snowmobile from Ontario or from Warroad, MN. The most recent claim to fame was in 1998 when residents frustrated with border crossing and fishing regulations threatened to secede from the United States. After all, fish are big business, actually pretty much the only business in the Northwest Angle. The unmanned border crossing at Jim's Corner is managed by videophone, and students attend the last one-room school in the state.

At the intersection between New York, Ontario, and Quebec, is another kind of border anomaly. The lands of the Akwesasne Mohawk Indian Nation straddle the border here. In New York, they are officially the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation, while the Akwesasne #15 First Nation Reserve is in Ontario and Quebec. Besides the obvious jurisdictional issues, there are also overlapping claims of authority by elected tribal councils, traditional chiefs, and the Warrior Society on both sides of the border. At times there has been open violence and blockades relating to gambling, smuggling, and law enforcement issues. The situation is complicated even more by the Mohawks special status under Article III of the Jay Treaty of 1794, which gives certain tribes unrestricted border crossing privileges. For several years, the Mohawk/Haudenosaunee have even asserted their right as a sovereign nation to issue their own passports. As if all this wasn't enough difficulty, the Quebec portion of the Akwesasne reserve is only accessible by means of a road from New York.

At the northern tip of Maine, Estcourt Station is a tiny collection of houses that were built as part of the town of Pohénégamook, Quebec. However when the 1842 international boundary was resurveyed in 1910, it was discovered that some of the Pohénégamook homes were in the United States and that others were actually on the border itself. In fact the driveways of the homes only connect to Rue Frontiere, which is still in Quebec. Until recently this wasn't too big of a deal, and even had the nicety that the Estcourt Station gas station could sell gas without the higher taxes of Canada. But on October 11, 2002, that changed when the U.S. Border Patrol arrested Pohénégamook resident Michel Jalbert for crossing the border to get gas after the official closing of the port of entry at 2:00 PM. Things have calmed down some since then, but it underscored the awkwardness of living on the border. It is technically possible to visit Estcourt Station from the rest of Maine by driving on private logging roads, but the rules imposed by the North Maine Woods forbid doing this in order to cross the Canadian border.