Howder Travel Adventures: Strange Geography USA

Inconvenient Rivers

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Those pesky rivers! People go to great trouble to designate a river as a boundary, decide who has ownership or how it will be split, draw all those maps, and then the river has the audacity to jump its bank and form a new channel. Does this mean the boundary automatically changes too? Of course not. Nobody wants to lose territory they once controlled.

The Former DeSoto Point, Louisiana

A stranded chunk of Louisiana in Mississippi

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DeSoto Point, Louisiana resulted from a sharp bend in the Mississippi River next to the city of Vicksburg. It played a small role in the 1863 Vicksburg Campaign when Gen. Grant tried to dig a canal across it in a failed attempt to bypass the city. An 1876 flood cut across the point and redirected the river. This left the tip of DeSoto Point disconnected from the rest of Louisiana and contiguous with the State of Mississippi. I took the photograph above where the Yazoo River Diversion Channel met the Mississippi River. Louisiana is visible on the left horizon, with the residual portion of DeSoto Point -- physically removed from the rest of Louisiana -- located on the right. The State of Mississippi is visible straight ahead.

The National Park Service has a great Park Map that clearly shows the location of DeSoto point in 1863 superimposed with its present configuration.

There are literally hundreds of similar situations along the Mississippi River.

Carter Lake, Iowa

Travelers who land at Eppley Airfield in Omaha, Nebraska and then drive downtown into the city first enter Iowa (briefly). The "Welcome to Iowa" signs can be a little disconcerting unless you know the story behind it. This small sliver of Iowa on the "wrong" side of the Missouri River is known as Carter Lake. The City of Carter Lake.com web site describes how the Missouri River shifted, leaving this little community of about 3,300 people surrounded by Omaha on three sides and physically disconnected from the rest of Iowa.

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