Around here, we sometimes joke that no matter what you see on a map, the real boundary between the United States and Mexico is Poncha Pass, a 9,025-foot crossing between the upper Arkansas Valley and the upper San Luis Valley. Place names north of the pass, no matter how Iberian their origin, are pronounced Anglo, as in “Suh-LIE-duh” and “Bewnie.” South of the pass, Villa Grove is “VEE-uh Grove” and Conejos is “Coh-NAY-hohs,” and the farther south you go, the better the chili verde and the more it helps to know some Spanish.
Poncha Pass has never served as a recognized international boundary, but this informal cultural divide illustrates the source of some of our current immigration controversies.
For our purposes, the simplified story can start with a 1682 trip down the Mississippi River by Rene Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. He claimed the river and all its drainage for France. France lost the Seven Years War of 1756-1763 and had to give up its claims in North America. The east side went to Britain and the west side to Spain.
France regained control of Louisiana in 1802, thanks to some intrigues and maneuvering by Napoleon in Europe. This worried President Jefferson. He saw Spain as a weak empire that America could handle when the time came, but France was a different matter. And he wanted to ensure that American farmers in Kentucky could continue to ship their produce out through the port of New Orleans.
So he dispatched Robert Livingston to Paris to buy New Orleans. To everyone’s surprise, Napoleon offered to sell all of Louisiana Territory. That was the famous Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
But what were the exact boundaries of Louisiana? Where was the line between French, now American, territory and the provinces of New Spain? The area had never been surveyed and the maps of the interior were more conjecture than geography. The last major tributary to the Mississippi from the west side is the Red River (part of today’s boundary between Texas and Oklahoma), and finding its source is one reason that Lt. Zebulon M. Pike was ordered west in the summer of 1806.
Mapping the Red River would define Mississippi drainage and solidify American claims. Pike was arrested by the Spanish in the San Luis Valley, far from the headwaters of the Red in the Texas panhandle, and his was only the best-known of many border incidents of that era.
Diplomats attempted to settle the question with the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, negotiated by John Quincy Adams, American secretary of state, and Luis de Onis, Spanish ambassador to Washington. From Dodge City, Kan., north and west to its source and then north to the 42nd parallel, the Arkansas River was the boundary between America and New Spain. And the United States “forever” renounced any claim to Texas.
In this case, “forever” lasted about 27 years. After Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821, it inherited the border. But in 1836, Texas declared its independence of Mexico – and the boundary between Texas and Mexico was vague. Mexico put it at the Nueces River, but Texans stretched it to the Rio Grande from mouth to source in our San Juan Mountains.
Texas joined the United States in 1845, which led to the Mexican War of 1846-48.
Texas abandoned its claims up here in the “Compromise of 1850,” as well as its claim to the Rio Grande north of El Paso. But the border between the United States and Mexico was not quite settled.
Jefferson Davis, secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce, wanted a southern railroad route across the continent, so he persuaded the administration to spend $10 million to buy about 36,000 square miles of what is now southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico from Mexico.
Through the lens of history, the boundaries out here have often been in a state of flux. There has never been some permanent natural barrier like an ocean to separate New France from New Spain, or to define the limits of Texas, or to delineate the United States of America from los Estados Unidas Mexicanos. People come and go, and empires have come and gone, no matter where the lines appear on our maps.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
