this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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In the US, the "Midwest" means the area from Ohio to the Dakotas (and with a southern limit along the Ohio river and southern border of Missouri and Kansas).
Montana is full-blown "West" (or sometimes "Mountain West" or a member of the "Mountain States," if you want to distinguish it from the "West Coast" or "Pacific Northwest.")
If you can grow wheat there, it's the prairie. Therefore the Midwest. Just how the eastern parts of Colorado are the furthest west parts of the mid west. Unless you want to exclude the prairie states entirely from the mid west, which i wouldn't do.
That has never been the definition of the Midwest. If you want to go by the census definition, you are wrong.
If you approach if from a cultural or demographic standpoint, you are still wrong.
I would argue that the Midwest ends at the banks of the Mississippi river and maybe carries halfway into the western states. Past that it is a whole nother place.
Montana is mountain west or west. Always has been.
Is West what the census calls it, too?
Hmm, Texas and Oklahoma in the South also feels funny.
Well, those are descriptive of the geography, I'll give them that.
I'll honestly agree with that. Oklahoma's northern borders literally exist because of the north south break from the civil war.
And... Well Texas is Texas and does Texas things. Can't explain it.
If you look at population centers and distribution, and extrapolate past those to the full state line, it does make more sense. The more west you go, the more empty it gets. Most of Texas, people wise, is south and east in the state. Oklahoma is just a vestigial burial ground for our past sins. Gotta put it somewhere.