Lake Wobegon Days
“Sometimes those towns were farther apart than they should have been. Many maps were drawn by French explorers in the bows of canoes bucking heavy rapids, including Sieur Marine de St. Croix, who was dizzy and nauseated when he penciled in the river that bears his name. He was miles off in some places, but since the river formed the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, revision was politically impossible and the mistakes were inked in, though it left thousands of people sitting high and dry on the other side.
A worse mistake was made by the Coleman Survey of 1866, which omitted fifty square miles of central Minnesota (including Lake Wobegon), an error that lives on in the F.A.A.’s Coleman Course Correction, a sudden lurch felt by airline passengers as they descend into Minnesota air space on flights from New York or Boston.
Why the state jobbed out the survey to drunks is a puzzle. The Coleman outfit, headed by Lieutenant Michael Coleman, had been attached to Grant’s army, which they misdirecte...d time and again so that Grant’s flanks kept running head-on into Lee’s rear until Union officers learned to make “right face”MoreLess
A worse mistake was made by the Coleman Survey of 1866, which omitted fifty square miles of central Minnesota (including Lake Wobegon), an error that lives on in the F.A.A.’s Coleman Course Correction, a sudden lurch felt by airline passengers as they descend into Minnesota air space on flights from New York or Boston.
Why the state jobbed out the survey to drunks is a puzzle. The Coleman outfit, headed by Lieutenant Michael Coleman, had been attached to Grant’s army, which they misdirecte...d time and again so that Grant’s flanks kept running head-on into Lee’s rear until Union officers learned to make “right face”MoreLess
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