How A Bad Survey And Powerful Connections Added 1,000 Square Miles To Texas' Lands
You can never underestimate the value of a good friendship forged early in life. If not for such a friendship, Texas would be nearly 1,000 square miles smaller.
Before I get to the friendship, come with me up to the northwest corner of the panhandle where Texas meets Oklahoma and New Mexico. If you were looking at a map, you would see that the border between Oklahoma and New Mexico doesn’t meet up exactly with the border between Texas and New Mexico.
The line makes a jog to the left. It goes 2.3 miles left before heading straight south. That jog is the result of a survey error that some have called the worst survey error in U.S. history. But it isn’t just a two mile error – that error gets bigger as it continues south, 310 miles to the bottom Texas-New Mexico corner, where it turns west and heads for El Paso. All totaled, the mistake amounts to a 942 square mile error, a land mass bigger than Houston, though long and skinny, like a gerrymandered voting district.
In truth, that land should have gone to New Mexico. That was what was supposed to happen when Texas sold off its northern and western territories for $10 million in 1850. The border between Texas and the New Mexico Territory was to be exactly along the 103rd meridian. When the official survey was undertaken, almost ten years later, there was a problem with water, Indians, stars, algebra and math, which all contributed to the error that ended up a blessing for Texas.
Read more: http://www.texasstandard.org/stories/how-a-bad-survey-and-powerful-connections-added-1000-square-miles-to-texas-lands/
