Where in the World Is Cascadia?

J. Kingston Pierce

“It would be difficult--probably impossible--to identify a time when residents of America's Pacific Northwest and the southwestern corner of Canada were completely content with their political borders. History offers up a lengthy menu of actual and proposed changes.

During the early nineteenth century, the powerful British Hudson's Bay Company lorded over what are now the province of British Columbia and the state of Washington. A boundary compromise dividing Canada from the northwestern United States wasn't settled until 1846, and it took another seven years for Washington to win independence from the vast Oregon Territory (originally encompassing not only present-day Oregon but also southern British Columbia, Washington, Idaho, and western Montana). Ever since, Americans and British Columbians, dissatisfied with national rule from afar, have sought to recarve this wet, wooded quarter, advocating the creation of new cantons called Jefferson or Columbia or Siskiyou, all of which they claim would make better sense than the existing subdivisions.

The more recent idea of establishing a binational domain called "Cascadia" -- spreading out from the Seattle-Vancouver, B.C., corridor to take in all of the old Oregon Territory, plus Alberta and Alaska--might seem to smack of the same provinciality that has permeated previous boundary-jiggering schemes...”