Frazz by Jef Mallett for March 25, 2021

There are a couple of maps that kind of look like this one. I can’t decide if it’s James Finlayson, 1822, or David Burr 1831, or neither of these.

I never have understood how good cartography was even possible in those days, much less feasible.

I was born and raised in Flint. I left before all the nonsense with the water supply. I would love to move back to Michigan, to be close to family again.

Love this and Frazz is totally correct! I live in Michigan and have a very old map of the state on my wall. It is truly amazing how accurate the map is for the time.

I wonder which is more work intensive when trying to establish clear geographical boundaries, following an irregular natural feature like a river (Rio Grande) or tracing a perfectly straight line?

What…… They did a bad job on the shoreline for Colorado and Wyoming?

Of course, what we have here is cartoonography.

Want an eye-opener? The earliest map of Virginia’s boundaries – when the colony was first established – shows that the southern border ran along VA/NC line from Atlantic to Pacific and the northern border was a diagonal from Eastern Shore NW to Alaska’s coast or thereabouts. Lots of new states from that early colony.

But then, he was not alone. Balboa claimed what was to become the Pacific and all the lands touching it, while De Soto claimed the Mississippi and all the lands watered by all the rivers that emptied into it.

Gave mapmakers guaranteed employment for a very long time. And no sooner had they finished one, then another explorer returned with new discoveries. A busy profession.

notice at the southern border, the “Toledo strip”

Jef is from Michigan, isn’t he?

The government apparently hired a surveyor here in the 1800s, to survey in this area. He put in a few corners, then absconded with the money. Now, where the lines are is anyone’s guess, unless you hire a surveyor, and that costs plenty!

You know where else on the planet has lots of straight-line boundaries? The Middle East. The national borders were all drawn with ruler and pen in some office in London after WW1 had deposed the previous rulers. The locals had nothing to say about where the lines went. (To be fair, many of those lines ran across empty desert, where it really didn’t matter much WHERE they went. But not all of them.)

I will add to Caufield – those old maps are simply beautiful. I have a few framed hanging up in my house. Newer maps may be more accurate, but I have no desire to frame them.

This is all too serious for a comic strip, but I confess that on most days, I prefer geography to politics, no matter where I read it. Thanks!

Colorado and Wyoming can be tricky, while driving home from the east, I missed the split in the freeway in New Braska and ended up in Colorado. My wife asked me how I could make such a mistake, and I explained that Colorado and Wyoming look the same on the map and it is an easy mistake to make.

A nice history lesson about my state.

I’m waiting for the comic to get into distortion maps. They would show the normal outline of the continental United States, with a particular state blown out of scale. The map would then be titled something like “A Texan’s view of the United States” or “How Californian’s see the United States”. I’ve seen examples with New York (state), Texas, California, Florida and Massachusetts.

I walked a good portion of the west Michigan shoreline when I was WAYY younger, and it felt like it was a straight line south, just like this map.

What’s the only state with NO straight-line boundaries?

They did have a problem with Lake Woebegone, Minnesota.

A Minnesota farmer decided to get a GPS confirmation of his property. They walked his fence and gave him their report. His house and the fields west were in North Dakota. The barn and the fields north were in Canada. He said "Good. I’m tired of Minnesota winters.

Jef Mallett’s BlogPosts

Frazz 17 hrs · I really am in awe of 18th- and 19th-century cartographers. Without satellites, aircraft, drones or even cameras on balloons, they were able to draw a map of a huge and complicated land mass — say, Michigan and its 3,000+ miles of squiggly shoreline — better than most of us could freehand it with another map in front of us for reference. I particularly like the map I dropped into today’s strip. And not, wise guys, because it seems to put me farther away from Ohio. It does put me close to Canada (oh, how I love Canada), but no closer than a modern map. It does seem to put me closer to the Straits — a glorious arrangement, although, given the transportation available at the time, nothing was effectively close to anything.

And speaking of outdoing technology before that technology existed, I like how they pretty much phoned in the rivers well before the invention of the telephone. You can practically hear the head surveyor: “Ya, just make a bunch of evenly spaced squiggles perpendicular to the shore. It’ll be a hunnert years before anybody checks."

The cartographers got the shoreline of Wyoming and Colorado wrong? They must have been exhausted.

On my wall, I have copy of an 1813 map of the Detroit river between Detroit and Windsor Ont. from Hog Island (today Belle Isle) to Lake Erie. If I look very carefully I can find the exact location of where my apartment stands today on the Detroit side. It seems to have been a mud flat.