Wolverines versus Buckeyes

continued

to the south.

When Ohio was admitted to the union in 1803, he writes, it unilaterally redrew its northern boundary to include the mouth of the Maumee River. By the time combative territorial governor Stevens T. Mason sent Wolverine militiamen to chase off the Buckeye surveyors in 1835, it was already too late. Though the surveyors fled, Ohio enjoyed overwhelming superiority on the only battlefield that mattered—the U.S. Congress, which ordered Michigan to give up the 470-square-mile “Toledo Strip.”

Faber celebrates an unsung hero of the debacle: not-yet-official Michigan senator Lucius Lyon, who demanded compensation for the loss—and won what is now the western Upper Peninsula.   

[Originally published in December, 2008.]