Texas Geography
Source: The Handbook of Texas Online
BOUNDARIES
In the middle of the twentieth century the boundaries of Texas
were 2,845.3 miles long, counting the great arc of the Gulf
Coast
line and only the larger river bends. If the smaller meanderings
of the rivers and the tidewater coast line were followed, the
boundary was 4,137 miles long and enclosed 263,644 square miles
of land and 3,695 square miles of water surface.
The location of Texas boundaries has
been the subject of international and interstate conflict
resulting in treaties, litigation, and commissions from 1736 to
the present. Controversy over details continues, as the
tidelands
controversy and the Chamizal disputeq illustrate. In 1995 the
state legislature authorized a Red River Boundary Commission to
fix the boundary between Oklahoma and Texas, where the
still-shifting Red River has frequently changed course and
muddied the issue for two centuries.
As defined in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819, the northern
and
northwestern boundary of Texas followed the course of the Red
River westward to the 100th meridian and north along that
meridian to the Arkansas River, the whole line as depicted in
the
Melish map of 1818. Then the Compromise of 1850 placed the north
line of the Panhandle at 36°30". No problem arose over this
boundary until 1858, when A. H. Jones and H. M. Brown, who had
been employed to locate the 100th meridian in making surveys of
grants to various Indian tribes, discovered that the Melish map
had erroneously located that meridian 100 miles too far east.
In 1852 Randolph B. Marcy discovered
that there were two main branches of the Red River lying between
the Melish line and the 100th meridian. The supposedly correct
meridian was surveyed in 1860, the same year that the Texas
legislature decreed Greer County. Because of the Civil War and
Reconstruction, Greer County was not organized until 1886 and
was
in process of being settled when the United States land
commissioner protested the Texas claim to the land north of the
Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River. The controversy went to
the United States Supreme Court, which ruled on March 16, 1896,
that the Texas boundary was the south or Prairie Dog Town Fork
of
the Red River and the astronomical 100th meridian.
The northern boundary again became controversial in 1919, when
Texas drillers discovered oil in the bed of the Red River just
north of Burkburnett. Oklahoma claimed the bed of the river and
sued Texas for title in the Supreme Court. The Greer County case
had defined the Texas boundary as the south bank of the Red
River, but Texas claimed that the south bank in 1919 was not the
same as the south bank at the time of the Melish map and the
treaty of 1819. The contest became a three-cornered suit, with
Oklahoma claiming the entire riverbed, Texas claiming title to
the south half, and the United States disputing both claims and
asserting ownership of the south half as trustee for the
Indians.
The decision in the four-year suit was
rendered on January 15, 1923. In it the Supreme Court defined a
riverbank as the bank cut by the normal flow of water, or where
vegetation stopped, gave Oklahoma the north half of the bed and
political control of the entire bed, and gave the United States
the south half of the bed as trustee for the Indians, but
allowed
Texas to retain control of the oil wells in the floodplain
between the riverbanks. To prevent further dispute, the court
ordered a survey of the south bank as it was in 1819 and the
placing of concrete markers along the survey line. The report of
Arthur Kidder and Arthur H. Stiles, the commissioners who made
the survey, was accepted on April 25, 1927.
In the meantime, in 1920 Texas sued Oklahoma on the grounds that
the surveys of the 100th meridian made in 1858 and 1860 had
erroneously placed that meridian a half mile too far west.
Surveys made in 1892 and 1902 had not solved the problem of
ownership of an area 134 miles long and between 3,600 and 3,700
feet wide. One Oklahoma resident complained that she had not
moved a foot in forty-five years but had lived in one territory,
two states, and three counties.
In 1927 the Supreme Court ordered
Samuel S. Gannett to survey the meridian. He worked from 1927 to
1929, largely at night to avoid the aberrations of heat waves,
and placed concrete markers at every two-thirds of a mile. The
court ruled in 1930 that the Gannett line was the true meridian.
Oklahoma tried unsuccessfully to buy back the strip that the
Texas legislature incorporated in 1931 in Lipscomb, Hemphill,
Wheeler, Childress, and Collingsworth counties. Higgins was the
only town in the ceded area. See also neches river boundary
claim, treaties of velasco.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bunyan H. Andrew, "Some Queries Concerning the
Texas-Louisiana Sabine Boundary," Southwestern Historical
Quarterly 53 (July 1949). Jacqueline Eckert, International Law
and United States-Mexican Boundary Relations (Ph.D. Thesis,
University of Texas, 1939). Grant Foreman, "Red River and
the Spanish Boundary in the Supreme Court," Chronicles of
Oklahoma 2 (March 1924). Herbert P. Gambrell and Lewis W.
Newton,
A Social and Political History of Texas (Dallas: Southwest
Press,
1932). Charles W. Hackett, ed., Pichardo's Treatise on the
Limits
of Louisiana and Texas (4 vols., Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1931-46). J. Evetts Haley, The XIT Ranch of Texas and the
Early Days of the Llano Estacado (Chicago: Lakeside, 1929;
rpts.,
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953, 1967). Webb L.
Moore,
The Greer County Question (San Marcos, Texas: Press of the San
Marcos Record, 1939).
This page was last updated January 9, 2014.