If we stop thinking east-west, and turn the map around, we will find that the longitude of the Runestone is the easiest point to cross the American continent north-to-south! Hudson's Bay cuts way in on the north, and that is just the proper longitude to get in to the Mississippi system and float down to New Orleans. No mountains, lots of water, and the only real problem is the portage and dry spell up there in NW Minn/E NDak where they had some troubles...
The Michigan tablets will be the next to be verified, I believe. Thousands of them. Many destroyed because people didn't want a "hoax" around.
Americans were very moralistic a hundred or two years ago, and when "scientists" would come out with their usual denunciation of anything that did not fit existing theories, ordinary people thought "hoax" was like a lie or fraud, a terrible moral failing that ought to be punished by lifetime shunning if not jail.
What this poor family the Ohmans, suffered over the last 104 years is beyond belief, and it is still going on! Look at the posts just this past winter of "Darlene," a local young woman in that area.
I now believe that the lost boatmen were intentionally trying to move ESE into the Mississippi system, and were using the (few) high hills NE of the present village of Kensington as a landmark in the trackless prairie. Runestone Hill, the third and lowest, is where this stone was found.
Vannrox, thanks for putting this up. -Laters, Darksheare