Clive,
Welcome among us!
The best source of authoritative boundary descriptions is BOUNDARIES OF THE
UNITED STATES AND THE SEVERAL STATES [BUS&SS] by Franklin K. Van Zandt. The
most recent version was published in 1976 as Geological Survey Professional
Paper 909 and is long out of print. You should be able to find it at the UT
library. Some of us have been working on an electronic version of the text,
which should eventually become available.
There have been a handful of Supreme Court decisions and interstate compacts
since that publication that have affected state boundaries. All of the court
decisions and many of the compacts can be found on-line.
Boundaries in and about watercourses can run along the thalweg, the median line,
or the high-water mark, the low-water mark, or even the vegetation line on one
side or the other. Such boundaries can be subject to movement by accretion,
avulsion, or both, or they can be permanently frozen by the stream's natural
position at a particular time or by artificial channelization. Which of these
many regimes obtains along a particular boundary water often depends on the whim
of the statesmen who adopted the pertinent documents.
Some rivers that meet your criterion of having a boundary along one side or the
other are: the Connecticut, the Potomac, the Ohio, the Chattahoochee, and the
Red. There are probably others. The boundary in the Colorado is the "middle"
of the river.
One of the most significant and recent boundary settlements was the Red River
Compact, effective in 1999, that set the Texas-Oklahoma boundary at the
vegetation line on the right bank of the Red River. See
http://ssl.csg.org/compactlaws/redriverbound.rtf .
Lowell G. McManus
Leesville, Louisiana, USA
----- Original Message -----
From: "Clive Dawson" <cdawson4@...>
To: <boundarypoint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 27, 2004 11:37 PM
Subject: [BoundaryPoint] River boundaries
> Greetings BoundaryPoint folks,
>
> I'm new to the group, and have been having great fun browsing the
> past messages and the items in the file repository. I particularly
> enjoyed the document which described the visits to all of the U.S.
> tripoints.
>
> By way of introduction, I have always been interested in maps and
> boundaries and travel in general. During the 1990's, I set a goal of
> flying my kite in every one of the 50 states before the end of the
> millennium. I did a lot of travelling in the final two years, but
> managed to pull it off. In the process, I visited several of the
> tripoints myself and often tried to fly the kite at those locations.
> The kite has also flown in Red Square, the Great Wall of China, and
> various other world landmarks in all continents except Antarctica.
>
> I'd like to throw out a few questions to you folks dealing with my
> current interest, which is rivers on the boundaries of U.S. states.
> By my rough count, there are 39 U.S. rivers that form part of one or
> more state boundaries. I'm now in the process of doing a more
> careful survey and count. I would love to hear from anybody who
> could point me to sources which can supply detailed boundary
> descriptions for each state. So far, I find that the State
> constitutions are a good source, but they usually don't include years
> of court decisions resolving various disputes. Is there a good
> source for the current accepted boundary info?
>
> One of the specific interests I have is identifying rivers where the
> boundary line does not travel down the middle of the river, but where
> in fact one state claims the whole river. I believe the Potomac is
> one example, and I read somewhere that the Colorado between
> California and Arizona is another instance, but I haven't verified
> this. Does anybody know of any other rivers that meet this
> condition? Are there any cases where both banks (as opposed to just
> the entire river) lie in the same state?
>
> Well, I guess that's enough questions for now...!
>
> Clive Dawson
> Austin, Texas
>
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