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In the 1750s, an American physician-cum-botanist named John Mitchell, despite living in Britain at the time and possessing no training as a geographer, nevertheless produced one of the most important maps of the colonial era, on that would ultimately bear his name, the Mitchell Map. The map was impressive at its time and was regularly used to settle border disputes all the way through the 1980s, but it did contain its share of errors. Above, for instance, was Mitchell's depiction of Michigan, which, it's fair to say, stands at odds with what it actually looks like.
The real problem, though, was how Mitchell depicted Lake Michigan. By the turn of the 19th century, some 50 years after Mitchell's first published his map and decades after his death, fur traders began to realize that the lake extended a few miles farther south than Mitchell had imagined. Big deal, though, right? So some old map created by a long-deceased amateur cartographer who'd never set foot in the lands he'd set out to describe got a few details wrong. Who could even care?
The very angry people of Ohio, that's who. It turns out that the architects of the Northwest Ordinance (experiencing high school history flashbacks right about now?) relied on the Mitchell Map to set the border between Ohio and Michigan, and the relevant portion specified that the dividing line would be "an east and west line drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of Lake Michigan."
So now you see the problem: If Lake Michgan's southern tip was, in fact, south of where Mitchell had thought it was, then Ohio's northern border would, consequently, also be shifted south by the same distance. And this was no small thing, because in that narrow slice of land defined by the gap between the Mitchell Map and reality lay the commercially important city of Toledo, which was in the process of becoming Cincinnati's gateway to Lake Erie thanks to the construction of the Miami and Erie Canal (not to be confused with New York's more famous Erie Canal, but both waterways were instrumental in linking the interior to the Atlantic).
Head below the fold to find out what the disputed territory came to be known as and much more.
It was for this reason that the area became known as the "Toledo Strip":
Matters came to a head in the early 1830s, when Michigan sought statehood, Toledo Strip included. Ohio, obviously, said "No freaking way." What followed next, as Rob Lammle of Mental Floss details, was
one of the most unusual "wars" in American history:
In an effort to make Michigan concede the Strip, Ohio's governor, Robert Lucas, used his political connections to convince Congress to deny Michigan statehood. Upset by Lucas' scheme, Michigan governor Stevens Mason enacted the Pains and Penalties Act in February 1835. This law said that anyone caught in the Strip supporting the state of Ohio could be jailed for up to five years and fined $1,000 (about $24,000 in today's money). To enforce his act, Mason raised a militia of 1,000 men and stationed them inside Toledo. In response, Governor Lucas sent 600 men. It was a fight just waiting to happen.
For the next five months, a series of skirmishes, arrests, lawsuits, and general chest thumping occurred in the Toledo Strip. But no one was killed or seriously injured until July, when Michigan sheriff Joseph Wood attempted to arrest Major Benjamin Stickney for voting in an Ohio election. Stickney and his sons, named—I kid you not—One Stickney and Two Stickney, resisted. In the melee, Two stabbed Sheriff Wood with a pocketknife.
The dispute threatened to get uglier, and President Andrew Jackson, eager to keep Ohio's 21 electoral votes in the Democratic column,
proposed a compromise, offering Michigan the whole of the Upper Peninsula—that long tendril of land sandwiched between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, which had mostly belonged to the Wisconsin Territory—if it would give up its claim to Toledo.
Michiganders initially rejected the idea, believing the U.P. to be a worthless wilderness, but by constantly mustering militias to puff its chest out at its richer and more populous southern neightbor, the territory found itself in a financial hole and finally relented. Ohio would keep Toledo, and Michigan would join the union. Thus, in 1836, ended the Toledo War.
Yet things didn't turn out too badly for the fledgling state. Vast mineral deposits were soon discovered in the U.P., which became the country's top source of copper by the time of the Civil War and its top source of iron by the end of the century. Those mines are almost all shuttered now, but they brought jobs and wealth to the region—and, of course, environmental damage, which is still being remedied today.
But in that tale lies the story of how Michigan and Ohio fought a war—and Wisconsin wound up the loser.