Point Roberts and the Northwest Angle

Point Roberts: south of the line

George Vancouver named the point in 1792 after a fellow British naval officer, Captain Henry Roberts.^[2] In 1846 the United States and Britain agreed to extend the 49th parallel as the boundary to the Pacific, bending it around the southern end of Vancouver Island, and the tip of the Tsawwassen peninsula ended up on the American side, cut off from the rest of the US.^[2][1]

Point Roberts is bounded by the Strait of Georgia to the west and south and Boundary Bay to the east, so the only road to the rest of Washington goes through British Columbia, and through both Canadian and US customs.^[2] It has no mayor or council; its county seat, Bellingham, is about 80 km and two border crossings away.^[1] Vancouver is less than 30 km north, and many of the people there are Canadian.^[2]

Living off Canadian visitors

Metro Vancouver and Delta, just across the border, supply its electricity and water treatment, and a local realtor estimated that at least half its properties are owned by Canadians.^[1] Its economy is built on Canadian visitors who own summer homes or cross for cheaper gas and groceries.^[1]

It struggled when the border closed in the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2025, after US tariffs and President Trump’s talk of annexing Canada, the number of British Columbians visiting slowed to a trickle. The only grocery store’s owner estimated her business at a quarter of what it once was.^[1]

The Northwest Angle: a wrong map

In the Treaty of Paris of 1783, Britain and the new United States agreed a boundary running through Lake of the Woods to its northwesternmost point and from there due west to the Mississippi. The diplomats relied on John Mitchell’s map, which showed an egg-shaped lake with an obvious northwest corner and the Mississippi reaching north past it. In 1798 the explorer David Thompson showed that the Mississippi rises south of the lake, so a line due west would never reach it.^[3]

The Convention of 1818 closed the gap with a line due south from the lake’s northwesternmost point to the 49th parallel, then west along the parallel. Nobody yet knew where that point was. In 1825 the astronomer Johann Ludwig Tiarks placed it at the head of Angle Inlet, and the Webster–Ashburton Treaty of 1842 accepted his figure, leaving a piece of the lake’s western shore on the American side.^[3]

While the line was being surveyed in 1872–75, Britain and Canada tried to get rid of the Angle and offered to buy it. The US refused: the land had little economic value, but it would not change the treaty under which it had won its independence.^[3]

Life at the Angle

The only road in is a gravel road through Canada. At a shed called Jim’s Corner, travellers report to US immigration by video phone before driving on. There is no grocery store, hospital or traffic light, and residents make a trip of about 60 miles through Canada to reach the nearest Minnesota town. Its one-room schoolhouse was the last in Minnesota in 2016.^[4]

Most visitors come for the walleye fishing. In the 1990s, when walleye caught on the Canadian side of the lake could not be brought back, some residents threatened, partly as a publicity stunt, to secede and join Canada. The “Great Walleye War” ended amicably.^[4]