how the states got their shapes

Creating the American West: Boundaries and Borderlands by Derek R. Everett (University of Oklahoma, 2014)

There is actually another book with the title of this post, but it's loose, anecdotal, and speculative. This book is a scholarly study of several specific western U.S. state border segments, thoroughly researching the reasons for placing the borders where they are, and also discussing the effects on the surrounding populations.

After an introductory section on the previous history of state border-drawing, going all the way back to the "sea-to-sea" colony grants of James I, it concentrates on the 19C creation of six exemplar borders:

1) Arkansas and Indian country (later Oklahoma), or how the whites kept granting the Indians land and then changing their minds and taking it back, pushing them further and further out.

2) The "Honey War" between Missouri and Iowa over competing lines for a poorly-surveyed border. What I hadn't known about that is that the governor of Iowa Territory at the time was the same man who'd been Governor of Ohio during the similar "Toledo War" with Michigan. Both times, his side won.

3) Oregon and Washington, and how the governors of same ignored jurisdictional borders to cooperate moving troops around during the Indian wars, to the annoyance of the feds, who thought they should be rigidly separate.

4) California and Nevada, and the chaos that ensues when people have no idea which side of an unsurveyed border they live on. (It seems like they're wrong more often than not.) Also each state's attempts to lay claim to the other state's territory.

5) New Mexico and Colorado, or how Colorado was created with a bite taken out of New Mexico just so it could be a perfect rectangle, and how the New Mexicans in the area felt about being moved to a hostile Anglo-dominated jurisdiction.

6) North Dakota and South Dakota, or, should the Dakota Territory be split at all, and if so in which direction and where?

I found this a fascinating account of just the kind of niggling detail that interests me.