Why is there such a smooth border between the USA and Canada

Surely many people thought about why the border between the US and Canada is so perfectly flat. Nowhere else in the world is there such a state border, as if drawn with one stroke of a pen on a map. Today we will tell about the history of relations between these countries at a time when the border between them was established.

Since the end of the 15th century, Spanish ships rediscovered the American continent for Europeans, a flood of immigrants poured here. Adventurers, runaway convicts, poor people who wanted to get rich, and many others rushed to North America with the hope of a bright future. The territory of modern Mexico and to the south began to develop the Spaniards, and the rest of North America began to settle the British and French.

At the end of the 18th century, right up to the American Revolution and the proclamation of US independence from the British Empire, there was no difference between Canada and the United States. Both of them were settled mainly by immigrants from the UK with a small number of Frenchmen and were a colony of the British Empire. But after the southern regions began to show separatist sentiments, the northern territories (modern Canada) became the refuge of traditional monarchists, mainly belonging to the upper strata of society. During the War of Independence, the northern part of the colony became a place of concentration of British troops, where all representatives of the colonial society fled, disagreeing with the declaration of US independence from the former metropolis.

As a result of the conclusion of the Paris Peace Treaty of 1783, a border was formed between the two countries. It was the border between the independent and democratic United States and the colonial possessions of the British Empire in North America. Despite the fact that after gaining independence, the United States announced the formation of a new nation - the American one, ethnically they remained the same British who spoke English, like their northern neighbors.

But the situation between the two countries remained tense, armed conflicts continually arose on the border. Finally, the controversial issues were resolved only in 1818 after the signing of the Anglo-American Convention. Since the parties were already tired enough of the negotiations on the delimitation of the Great Lakes and fishing grounds, it was decided to draw a land border exactly 49 parallels. The British Empire and the independent USA were quite happy with this state of affairs, and the border passed from Lake Erie in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west exactly along the line coinciding with 49 degrees north latitude.

Today, the border between the United States and Canada is one of the longest in the world, devoid of border guards and the military. Good neighborly relations make border posts, guards and checkpoints unnecessary. Only on major freeways are there customs control points. But this does not mean that the state border can be crossed by anyone who pleases, and the local population is well aware of where the state border passes between the two countries. But tourists and visitors sometimes get into unpleasant situations associated with an unintentional violation of the state border. A similar curious incident that happened with Frenchwoman Sedella Roman, we have already mentioned in one of our materials.