The Mississippi Line

In one of Walker Percy's novels (Lancelot, I'm pretty sure), the narrator mentions a 19th century duel that was fought on an island in the Mississippi river so as to be outside the jurisdiction of any state. The theme resurfaces later on in one of the meant-to-provoke questions in Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: Why didn't anyone ever write a novel about rafting down the Hudson River? The answer, if any, has to do with the statelessness of a border-river: you're neither in one place or the other, passing by without necessarily entering.

Of course, no islands in the Mississippi are truly without jurisdiction—there's always a dotted line on some map. But the current dotted line's often quite fascinating. Below's a particularly jigsawed stretch south of Vicksburg. Some of the jogs are reminders that rivers change course from time to time (hence too the beautiful-from-above filigree of oxbow lakes). But I'm not sure the dotted line always follows a former river-course either.