How Well Do You Know Your U.S. Geography?

The Iroquois Confederacy was formed sometime between the 12th century and 15th century, joining together five Iroquois nations: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. (The Tuscarora later joined in the 18th century.) Governed by the Great Law of Peace established by Indigenous leaders Hiawatha and Deganawida, the confederacy was primarily located in modern-day upstate New York and parts of southeastern Canada.

The United States gained possession of the eastern portion of the Samoan Islands in an 1899 agreement between colonial powers, in order to secure a naval base there. American Samoa remains an unincorporated U.S. territory today (and not a U.S. state). The National Park of American Samoa was established in 1988, protecting unique rainforest and coral reefs.

In the summer of 1673, Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet were the first Europeans to lay eyes on the Missouri River, which feeds into the Mississippi River. Although the Mississippi River is often cited as one of the longest rivers in the world, that statistic actually includes the Missouri and Ohio rivers. Measured separately, the Missouri River is actually longer than the Mississippi by about 100 miles.

The United States and Canada share the longest land border in the world at 5,525 miles. A 1,538-mile stretch of that runs along Alaska’s eastern edge, which makes it the longest international land border of any U.S. state. Texas comes in second place with a land border shared with Mexico that runs 1,254 miles.

At 14,494 feet, California’s Mount Whitney is the highest peak in both the Sierra Nevada range and the contiguous United States. Although an impressive height, Whitney is only the 24th largest peak in North America, with many of the tallest mountains residing in Alaska and Canada’s Yukon territory.

In 1909, the U.S. and Canada firmed off its borders with the Boundary Waters Treaty. The only lake that wasn’t really in question was Michigan, which is the only Great Lake that rests entirely within the U.S. Lake Michigan is second in size to its watery cousin Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area.

On March 1, 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed legislation that made Yellowstone the first U.S. national park. Grant followed a presidential precedent created by Abraham Lincoln, who in 1864 protected part of what is now Yosemite National Park. Lincoln’s call to preserve the land for “public use, resort, and recreation” was the first of its kind.

Although named the Oregon Territory, this large swatch of the present-day northwestern U.S. actually included several modern-day states: Washington, Idaho, and Oregon, as well as parts of Montana. Nevada was a possession of New Spain and then Mexico before becoming a part of the Utah-Nevada Territory in 1850.

Although a prominent state on the eastern coast, Florida was a colonial possession of Spain during the United States’ early years. That all changed with the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819. Negotiated by then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and Spanish envoy Luis de Onís y González-Vara, the treaty ceded Florida to the U.S. and established its border with Spanish claims. Today, the treaty is seen as a triumph of diplomacy.

The U.S. took possession of the Philippines in 1898 after winning the Spanish-American War, and it remained part of the United States until World War II, when Japan took control of the islands. In 1946, after the war ended in victory for the Allies, the U.S. signed the Treaty of Manila, finally granting the Filipino people their independence.

The dispute between whether to set the border according to the Nueces River or the Rio Grande, along with the annexation of Texas, set the Mexican-American War in motion in 1846. The war ended in a U.S. victory in 1848, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo recognized the Texas-United States border at the Rio Grande.

When the United States defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War in 1898, the island of Puerto Rico officially became a U.S. territory. To this day, Puerto Rico has not been incorporated as a state, but many Puerto Rican citizens and government leaders have been pushing for this to change.

Washington, D.C. was established as the United States capital in 1800, but before that eight different cities served as the capital for some period of time. Lancaster, Princeton, and New York City were among them, but Dover, the capital of Delaware, was not.

In 1867, the U.S. managed to rustle up about $7.2 million in gold so that it could purchase the Alaskan territory from Russia. The territory stretched more than 580,000 square miles, over twice the size of Texas. Spearheaded by President Andrew Johnson's secretary of state, William Henry Seward, the purchase was considered a foolish move at the time, but the state has proved to be industrially strategic.

Hawaii is the 50th state in the union. It joined the United States in August 1959, after Hawaiian voters approved a referendum proposing admission as a U.S. state. At that point, Hawaii had already been a territory of the U.S. for 60 years.

The first permanent British colony in what would become the United States was established at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607. This was a full 13 years before the Pilgrims even spotted Plymouth Rock, even though popular American stories sometimes incorrectly claim the Pilgrims were the first British settlers to land in the U.S.

The historic Oregon Trail began in Missouri and traveled through Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington state. It didn't officially go through Colorado, though it passed close by and many settlers splintered off in that direction.

When Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821 and expanded the Texas territory, it brought in settlers from the United States to help develop the land. Eventually, those settlers fought for their own independence, establishing first an independent Texas Republic and then joining the U.S. in 1845.

Situated at the geographical center of colonial America, the city of Philadelphia was the site of many of the events leading up to the founding of the United States, and it was the first city to serve as the nation’s capital. The First Continental Congress took place at Philadelphia’s Carpenters’ Hall from September to October of 1774.

The land that is now West Virginia used to be part of Virginia, but when Virginia voted to secede from the United States in 1861 during the Civil War, the delegates of the state’s western mountainous region opposed secession. They formed a new state, which was admitted by Congress to the United States in 1863, on the condition that slavery there would be abolished.

When wagon trains lit out for the territories in the mid-1840s, the trip was made possible thanks to the South Pass in modern-day Wyoming. Used by Indigenous peoples for millennia and found by settlers in 1812, the relatively low grade of the South Pass made the journey less perilous as it circumvented the need to trek through the Rocky Mountains.

The Four Corners is the only place where four U.S. states touch. A monument in the desert plateau region where Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico meet allows tourists to stand in all four states at once. It lies where a surveyor marked the border between Colorado and New Mexico with a piece of sandstone in 1875.

The Appalachian Trail was proposed in 1921 by forester Benton MacKaye, who conceived of a utopian project dotted with self-sustaining farming camps. The Appalachian Trail Conference formed in 1925, and a continuous footpath through the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia to Maine was finally completed in 1937.

Many towns across the U.S., in areas such as Texas, the Great Plains, and Pennsylvania, experienced population booms in the 19th century when oil was struck, then were left behind when it became unprofitable to drill. It is estimated that there are more than 6,000 of these abandoned or “ghost” towns in Kansas alone.

In 1862, the U.S. passed the Pacific Railroad Act, tasking two companies with connecting the vast country by rail. The two ends of the railroad started in Sacramento, California, and Omaha, Nebraska. Workers laid track over treacherous terrain for seven years before the railroads finally met at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869. A memorial marker at the site commemorates where the last railroad spike was driven into the track.

Alaska’s Aleutian Islands extend west from the mainland into the Pacific Ocean, and some of the islands jut so far out that they cross over the 180th meridian into the Eastern Hemisphere. That makes Alaska’s Pochnoi Point on Semisopochnoi Island, which crosses the meridian, the easternmost location in the U.S, while Amatignak Island is the westernmost location.

Before Florida was annexed into the United States, it was colonized by the Spanish. And before that, it was the domain of indigenous groups such as the Seminole. Florida became the 27th U.S. state in 1845.

During the 1930s, a large region of the United States, stretching from Texas to Nebraska, experienced a combination of extreme drought and windstorms that blew choking dust through the air. Overcultivation and poor land management had damaged the soil, leading to the ecological disaster that became known as the Dust Bowl. The crisis worsened the effects of the Great Depression as farmers lost both livestock and crops.

Known as the District of Maine from 1780 until 1820, the most northern state of the lower 48 was actually part of Massachusetts, even though it was separated by New Hampshire’s 13-mile coastline. During the War of 1812, the British held vast swaths of Maine. Massachusetts' weak response increased calls for statehood, which it was finally granted on March 15, 1820.

St. Louis, Missouri, was founded in 1764 as a fur-trading post on the Mississippi River. It grew rapidly as a commercial port starting with the arrival of steamboats in 1817, and became a major crossroads during the U.S. westward expansion as it marked the start of the Oregon Trail. In 1965, the world’s largest architectural arch was completed on the St. Louis waterfront as a national monument to America’s “Gateway to the West.”

In 1803, the United States paid France only $15 million (about $345 million today) to acquire 828,000 square miles of territory stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. President Thomas Jefferson and future President James Monroe were both instrumental in negotiating the deal with France’s leader, Napoleon Bonaparte.