How the West Wasn’t Won: Powell’s Water-based States The prototypical American border is the straight line. Not a single US state lacks one. Wyoming and Colorado are perfect rectangles, and a dozen other states are bounded by enough straight borders to resemble boxes. These near-rectangles are prevalent west of the Mississippi where, in the worlds of the folk song, ‘the states are square.’ That might not have been so if the US government had heeded the suggestions of John Wesley Powell, who in 1890 produced this Map of the Arid Region of the United States, showing Drainage Districts. Powell argued for those districts to become the essential units of government, either as states or as watershed commonwealths.

How the West Wasn’t Won: Powell’s Water-based States

The prototypical American border is the straight line. Not a single US state lacks one. Wyoming and Colorado are perfect rectangles, and a dozen other states are bounded by enough straight borders to resemble boxes. These near-rectangles are prevalent west of the Mississippi where, in the worlds of the folk song, ‘the states are square.’

That might not have been so if the US government had heeded the suggestions of John Wesley Powell, who in 1890 produced this Map of the Arid Region of the United States, showing Drainage Districts. Powell argued for those districts to become the essential units of government, either as states or as watershed commonwealths.

-•-