Ohio River

===State border dispute===
The colonial charter for Virginia defined its territory as extending to the north shore of the Ohio, so that the riverbed was "owned" by Virginia. Where the river serves as a boundary between states today, Congress designated the entire river to belong to the states on the east and south, i.e., West Virginia and Kentucky at the time of admission to the Union, that were divided from Virginia. Thus [[Wheeling Island]], the largest inhabited island in the Ohio River, belongs to West Virginia, although it is closer to the Ohio shore than to the West Virginia shore. Kentucky sued the state of Indiana in the early 1980s because of their construction of the never-completed [[Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant]] in Indiana, which would have discharged its waste water into the river. This would have adversely affected Kentucky's water supplies.

The [[Supreme Court of the United States|U.S. Supreme Court]] held that Kentucky's jurisdiction (and, implicitly, that of West Virginia) extended only to the low-water mark of 1793 (important because the river has been extensively dammed for navigation so that the present river bank is north of the old low-water mark.)  Similarly, in the 1990s, Kentucky challenged Illinois's right to collect taxes on [[Harrah's Metropolis|a riverboat casino]] docked in [[Metropolis, Illinois|Metropolis]], citing its own control of the entire river. [[Tropicana Evansville|A private casino riverboat]] that docked in [[Evansville, Indiana]], on the Ohio River opened about the same time. Although such boats cruised on the Ohio River in an oval pattern up and down, the state of Kentucky soon protested. Other states had to limit their cruises to going forward, then reversing and going backward on the Indiana shore only. Both Illinois and Indiana have long since changed their laws to allow riverboat casinos to be permanently docked, with Illinois changing in 1999 and Indiana in 2002.