Arizona's Borders

rizona's rambling borders

Historical events shaped the state and gave an outline for its identity While the controversy over the southern boundary was playing out, Congress was also drawing what would become Arizona's northern boundary.

Mexico. The main goal was to secure enough land to ensure a southern transcontinental rail route to California. Had an agreement been reached on Gadsden's most ambitious proposal, Arizona also would have gained a seaport on the Gulf of California.

After weeks of negotiation, the Gadsden Treaty was finished, but the U.S. Senate refused to ratify it. Instead, the United States modified it, and settled on paying $10 mil-lion for nearly 30,000 square miles of land, nearly all of it in what would become Ari-zona. The southern rail route was secured, but the coveted seaport was lost. Maj. William Emory, an experienced topograph-ical engineer, ably picked up where Bartlett left off, completing the international bound-ary survey in 1855.

Down beside the border, the towns of Douglas, Palominos and Nogales carry a strong flavor of Mexico. The languid San Pedro River sidles in from the south without regard for fences or checkpoints. In 1540 Francisco Vasquez de Coronado likely followed the San Pedro, then known as the Rio Nexpa, the first documented European expe-dition to enter the United States. Tall "skyisland" mountains rise grandiosely from the rolling grasslands, golden in winter, green In summer. The border angles obliquely to the northwest across the sere desert lands of the Tohono O'odham. The climate is warm enough here to support organ pipe and senita cacti. The line ends at the Colorado River at Baja California.

Northern Border

While THE controversy over the southern boundary was playing out, Congress was also drawing what would become Arizona's northern boundary. That line-the 37th parallel-was settled only after heated political debate. The decision, called the Compromise of 1850, had little to do with the qualities of the land newly won in the Mexican War. Ostensibly, it had to do more with separating the Mormons in Utah from Hispanics in New Mexico.

But more was at stake. Arizona State University geographer Malcolm Comeaux says that "selection of a northern boundary was of national significance. The problem was one of slavery" and its extension into the Southwest. Northerners, of course, wanted as much slave-free land as possible, while Southerners argued for the opposite.

The Compromise of 1850 admitted California to the Union as a free, rather than a slave, state. Rather arbitrarily, it set the 37th parallel as the southern boundary of Utah and the northern boundary of New Mexico and left the question of slave vs. free to the local populace to determine. When Arizona became a Territory, the 37th parallel ultimately marked its boundary with Utah.

In the two dimensions of a map, the 37th parallel is an arrow-straight east-west line. But the land tells a different story. This boundary crosses through the midst of the chiseled mesas of Monument Valley, bushwhacks tortuous canyons at the base of Utah's Navajo Mountain and swims beneath the sapphire waters of Lake Powell. It claws up and over the swell of the Kaibab monocline, sails across the dusty-gray sagebrush emptiness of the Arizona Strip and splits the town of Colorado City in two. It then bears due west into the starkness of the Mohave Desert and the terra cotta-colored Virgin Mountains.

At Pipe Spring on the Arizona Strip, the boundary line remained in doubt for a time. The Deseret Telegraph Co. had a room on the second floor of the Mormon fort there. On December 15, 1871, at 12:31 P.M., Amos Milton Musser tapped out the first message datelined Winsor Castle, Utah. A year later, Pipe Spring was found to be in Arizona, and thus became the state's first telegraph station.

An 1881 move to join most of Arizona with southern California to form a new state was scuttled. And Utah's repeated attempts to annex the Arizona Strip were denied, keeping the Grand Canyon forever within Arizona.

Western Border

THE COMPROMISE of 1850 also set part of California's eastern boundary at the middle of the channel of the lower Colorado River. Rivers, however, create boundary trouble. Sometimes they mosey along slow and easy, and other times they cut new courses with scalpel-sure quickness. Along the way, they add and subtract land from one bank to the other. The Colorado, says retired BLM surveyor Jim Simpson, was called “The Bull,” because when in flood it was just like a raging bull. This wasn't a big problem in areas where the Colorado was confined to canyons, but where the channel was wider, the river “would move a mile a year,” Simpson notes. Disputes over real estate - like Lost Island near Yuma-arose between Arizona and California. There, the flooding Colorado broke through a new channel and left behind an orphaned oxbow of good farmland claimed by both states. To tame the raging bull and end the riparian boundary disputes, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation began channelizing the lower Colorado in the late 1950s.

Drifting downstream in a rowboat, one oar is in California and the other is in Arizona. The state line saunters down the middle of Lake Mead, jumps Hoover Dam, then follows the center of Lake Mohave, bounded on each side by desert mountains. At Bullhead City, river taxis shuttle itchy gamblers from Arizona to the casinos in Laughlin, Nevada. From Lake Havasu City, party barges anchor in the bays on the California side.

Past Parker, the river slips quietly down through the Cibola and Imperial wildlife refuges, where geese, ducks and pelicans congregate on both the eastern and western shores. South of Yuma, the Colorado dwindles down into the sands, drained dry

after watering laser-straight rows of lettuce and citrus.

Eastern Border

ON FEBRUARY 24, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the organic act that created Arizona Territory. The 109th meridian, a straightforward continuation of the Colorado-Utah borderline, was chosen to separate Arizona from New Mexico. There had been moves to divide the two along an eastwest line, which would have made two narrow, horizontally shaped territories, one on top of the other. But persuasive mining interests saw more possibilities west of the 109th, and sectional rivalries of the time considered it a more neutral division.

The meridian bisects the Chuska Mountains, where Navajo sheepherders sit in the shade of windmills and weavers craft beautiful rugs at their looms. The line edges the pine-forested Defiance Plateau, bypasses the Navajo capital of Window Rock, crosses Interstate 40 and the muddy Puerco River east of Sanders, ignores the White Mountains' pastoral meadows and boggy lakes, then charges south past the Peloncillo and Chiricahua mountains to the international border.

NO SOONER were Arizona's boundaries fixed than contentions arose. Las Vegas might have been the glitter spot of Arizona had not Congress transferred the triangle of Pah-Ute County to Nevada in 1866. An 1881 move to join most of Arizona with southern California to form a new state was scuttled. And Utah's repeated attempts to annex the Arizona Strip were denied, keeping the Grand Canyon forever within Arizona's borders. For nearly half a century, Arizona would remain a Territory, too unpeopled and unrefined to be counted worthy of statehood. Finally on Valentine's Day 1912, Arizona was admitted to the union, the last of the lower 48, a state of 72,688,000 acres.

Borders. They define, describe and delineate. They are political, cultural, geographical, historical and possessory. They frame the identity of this place called Arizona. AH

mystery diamonds from outer space BITS OF TREASURE SPAWNED MURDER, INTRIGUE AND FRANTIC GREED

BY BOB THOMAS

DOLPH CANNON wasn't your usual Arizona prospector. For one thing, he had lots of money, which campfire gossip said he got from selling his finds. He was also a loner who never went on a spree in the saloons and gambling joints when he returned to town. And he never told anyone what he was looking for. In fact, he never talked to anyone unless he absolutely had to.

But then old man Cannon wasn't searching just for gold or silver. He was looking for diamonds-diamonds from the skyand finding them.

Fifty thousand years ago, a meteor 100 to 150 feet in diameter smacked into the plains of northern Arizona, blowing out a huge crater almost a mile wide and 700 feet deep. Limestone rocks as big as trucks were ejected as far as 2 or 3 miles. Chunks of meteorites and smaller rocks were thrown over a 7-mile radius.

Known today as Meteor Crater, the giant, almost perfectly round cavity 22 miles west of the town of Winslow and 6 miles south of Interstate 40, sits in the center of an immense debris field. It was in this debris field that Cannon found diamonds.

Diamonds are nearly pure carbon, formed deep in the Earth under intense heat and pressure. But interstellar visitors, like meteors that impact the Earth at 30,000 to 40,000 mph, can also create diamonds through heat and pressure. Meteors contain many different