What's up with that
Making a river your border is fun! Because rivers change their courses all the time. Fun fact, while Missouri is generally on the west side of the Mississippi River and Illinois is on the east side, the town of Kaskaskia, IL is actually on the west side. You can walk from Missouri to Kaskaskia without getting your feet wet, but you can't get from Kaskaskia to the rest of Illinois without using a boat.
IMO river borders should automatically change with the river. If you're going to make your border a river, commit to it. Don't just draw a line on a map where the river currently is and say that's the border.
And if the river puts you on the other side of the river, you’re just a part of that side now.
This is why borders should be based on watersheds. It drives me insane whenever I look at a map of counties and it's just straight lines through dozens of topographic features that would make sense as borders. Like the native Hawaiians who administered land based on ahupua'a because they correctly recognized water as the foundation of all life.
Yeah, but how are you supposed to lie to natives who use natural boundaries if you don't use totally made up surveying maps
I think they will in the global communist revolution lol, I really think all states, nations all those borders will dissolve and people will live in bioregions likely mostly defined by watershed. It's the thing that makes sense to me, all your agriculture is defined by your bioregion especially if we try to grow food and transport it way more sustainably. All your timber or other construction materials will be defined by the vernacular of what you can get easily and sustainably in the bioregion. People will think with a global consciousness but I think people will probably define themselves as like "Cascadian" or "Mediterranean" or "Wallacean" (probably have a local word for that one).
Kaskaskia was also once the capital of illinois, for literally no reason.
Clearly a compromise staging ground in case Illinois decides to invade Missouri again.
The IllInois border marker floated downstream :ooooooooooooooh:
it's possible that it's just botched data,
but what I also saw is that some of the borders were decided, and the river has moved, or some borders were decided when the water was low, and there was some marker that we now can't see.
did some more looking at maps, and there are a TON of these types of fucked up water borders all along the river. i got to memphis before i gave up, and there were a bunch of wacky ones.
This is actually just a bug in Google's data, the OSM boundaries are fine. Google is probably using river boundary shapes and merging improperly them together creating this issue
Hell yeah, what's great is that the local GIS services there are probably all totally conflicting
I didn't have my glasses on and read that as "old town road" and now that earworm (in a good way) song is back in my head
Do you wanna go to the old town road :absolutely-safe-capsule:
this happens to borders between countries too, when they're on a river.
the funny thing is, the US being one country, shit like this should be an easy fix. it's not like you have to convince both serbia and croatia to play nice, or whatever.
but no. dysfunctional to the hilt.
That's not even the most fun, there's an exclave of Kentucky on the full north side of the river near Evansville, IN
The southernmost 30ish miles of Indiana have blue grass and that fact alone justifies Kentucky's sovereignty over the region.
oh certainly, southern indiana is culturally part of kentucky, as well as the Cincinnati ohio area
oh shit, you're right, i'd forgotten that as well but it totally is. northern kentucky & cincinnati are collectively very weird, it's like a little upper germanic midwest in the foothills of appalachia because of all the catholics packed in there.
I mean I don't think that's the reason for this but there is unironically a huge fault line right in that area
