Hit the Dirt, Make History

I have a meeting tomorrow with a historian extraordinaire and one of the best people you will ever meet. She is allowing me some of her valuable time to explain this project and ask for the endorsement of the organization she chairs at a large western university.

If the organization endorses this project, or if it decides that may not be compatible with everything else on their table doesn't matter as much as being able to talk about it with someone as knowledgeable in her field. She has such a deep and abiding love and knowledge of western American history I can't help but come away enriched. She is the lightning rod for and one of, if not the, founder of a vital new approach to the history of the West. But she is much more. She is a teller of wonderful stories, a crafter of the written and spoken word.

Those of you who elect to traverse the borders and tell those stories here are contributing to a new cut of history. One way to think about the narratives you construct from your experience is comparing them to journals kept by early pioneers and colonizers. Stories, narratives, video and photography that you post here contribute a unique and needed perspective on history. A history being made and shaped in large degree today by this method of participating in recording it.

Home on the Rang....er, Border

Cowboys aren't supposed to own up to this but I have spent time with sheep. Not in the prurient sense of the character in Dirck Van Sickle's Montana Gothic, and not even in Montana. This was in the borderlands country south of American Falls, Idaho.

I worked for a fellow named Barkdahl, and he ran sheep on government grazing in the higher lands above Rockland Valley where Highway 37 goes south. He had some of the best Basque sheepherder-dogs-horse teams that I ever ran into. Those sheepherders all lived out with the sheep in Sheep Camps like the one pictured here. These Conestoga Wagon-looking "camps" were probably among the first travel trailers. They were well equipped and could be pulled from graze to graze over some pretty serious terrain.

When I came up with the idea of walking the western borders I tried to find one to use as a portable base camp but these babies are not cheap these days. You can grab the one in this picture for a mere $35,000. Etsy, the web site with all the info, has some great pictures of the inside of this custom-built sheepwagon. The guy who built this camp, Jimmy Howard, lives in Seattle and displays his rustic art in all the posh western ski towns. I'll have to look him up.

Check out the Walk the Lines, Tell the Stories site too. I plan to put up another Tall Tale there soon. And hopefully some diagrams of sheep camps. In the meantime if you want to get some idea of what it is like to live in a sheep camp check out this true account.

I ended up with a little 16' RoadRunner trailer that isn't nearly as salty as a sheep camp but I got a deal on a new one for about 1/3 the price of Etzy's camp. Maybe I'll through up some diagrams of that, too, and we can compare them to the tried and true Basque floorplan.

Walk the Lines, Tell the Stories

One of my classmates at Mizzou said she wanted to read the Stretch story that used to be posted here but the type was just too small. Part of the reason for that is I had html problems posting it. But she was right.

Then my instructor and online mentor suggested I post a recent class essay, but backpedaled a bit saying the content didn't quite match the focus of the blog.

When Blogspot finally released its long-promised knol I immediately got fired up and published one because I thought it might solve the problem. But almost as immediately I unpublished it after realizing my content and intent didn't quite fit what a knol was about.

I mulled all of this over and came up with a radical new solution - not!

I'm starting another blog related to this Borderlands Traverse blog that will be a repository for the Tall Tales and Damn Lies fictional approaches like Stretch, and other tangential material that doesn't quite fit here. And I'll keep it on the Blog List here at Borderlands. I'm calling it Walk the Lines, Tell the Stories and you can click that link to get to it or go to the Blog List in the lefthand column.

Don't expect daily updates though because it is meant to serve the purposes outlined above.

Sense or Nonsense?

Albert L. Fisher, Geography Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah, penned some strong opinions about Utah's straight borders. In his 1980 article, written for the Journal of the Utah Academy of Arts and Sciences, Encyclia, Fisher made the argument that borders should define logical functional and service boundaries rather than be arbitrary political lines.

"It is said that geometric boundaries are used when there is ignorance of the land or people or both," Fisher wrote, not saying who he might be referring to as the quote originator, but you get the idea that it might well have been him. His article is not available online but it goes on to make some well-reasoned arguments in detail for redrawing the internal county boundaries for that state, also mostly "geometric." He ends with the revolutionary thought that those boundaries should not be fixed and rigid at all but "bend or be removed according to need." He sounds like a man worth a visit.

The full title of Fisher's article is "Boundaries and Utah: Sense or Nonsense?," and appears on pages 127-133 of the 1980 Encyclia. It is definitely worth a read if you have a research library within reach.

Border by Brigham

Most folks know that Mormons settled Utah. They arrived in 1847 led by Brigham Young. Young and his religious followers were and are many things to many people but this leader's role as a colonizer finds few peers.

Young and the Mormons had been driven out of Illinois, Missouri and other areas of the Eastern States after their original prophet-leader, Joseph Smith, was killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. Young was determined to create a sanctuary where he and his followers could worship and live as they believed.

When they arrived in the West most of it below the 42nd Parallel belonged to Mexico. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the end of the Mexican War ceded what is now Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and California to the United States. Young wasted no time and proposed the Provisional State of Deseret in 1849.

As seen from the map here (taken from a version developed by Dale Morgan (1947) and published in Rocks, Rails and Trails by Paul K. Link and E. Chilton Phoenix) the boundaries of the proposed state covered most of the Great Basin and Colorado River Drainage. Young used these natural watershed borders as logical boundaries and extended the eastern borders to the Continental Divide south to the Gila River and to the western coast south of present day San Diego. This southern border paralleled the northern Mexican border of that era.

Young was also economically astute and included and ocean port within the boundary before it moved west along the eastern drainages of the Sierras and the northern Great Basin watersheds including that of the Bear River. This marks the first and only time this kind of boundary-making was officially registered for statehood in the U.S. But it was not to be.

With the Compromise of 1850 California was admitted to the Union (although technically created in 1849) and the Territories of New Mexico and Utah were created. Oregon Territory was created in 1848 and the proposed Deseret would have encroached on some of its southern border.

As an official territory, Utah was unlike its neighbors in that it kept a separate, church-sponsored active legislature and government as Deseret with its official one until 1880. It tried three more times to gain official state recognition failing each time in the face of national distrust of Mormon Church wielded government power and the now in-the-open church practice of Polygamy.

By gaining statehood first, Colorado and Nevada started nibbling away at Utah Territory in 1861. Nevada would take two more bites and Colorado and Wyoming got their chunks before Utah renounced the practice of polygamy and was able to reassure congress that the Mormon Church would be kept at a respectable distance from direct involvement with state government. In 1896 Utah finally achieved statehood with the borders as we see them today.

Straight Lines and Square States

One of the challenges of traversing our state borders is their unnatural straightness in so many places. Those straight lines are the result of many influences but probably first among them is that mariners and mapmakers were able to fix latitude before longitude. Most charters in colonial times fixed northern and southern borders of the first colonies by declaring a line of latitude. Since no one at the time had a clear idea of what the land was like to the west, that border was often vaguely defined or extended "to the western oceans," as in the case of Virginia and Connecticut. In later years after independence, congress made boundary decisions based on many factors including slavery and polygamy. The Missouri Compromise brought Missouri and Maine into the Union at the same time, the former as a slave state, the latter as a free state. It split the Louisiana Purchase into a northern and southern division at 36 degrees 30 minutes latitude with any future state except Missouri to be a free state and any future state south of that line to be slave. I tagged that latitude on the map above. It tracks from Virginia (just south of Virginia Beach) and was used as the border between Virginia/North Carolina, Virginia/Tennessee until the Cumberland Gap, Kentucky/Tennessee, Missouri/Arkansas, Kansas/Oklahoma, Colorado/New Mexico, and Utah/Arizona. All of these borders, it's true, don't track exactly at that latitude, but it was the guide and it is a strikingly continuous dividing line across the U.S. to Nevada. That latitude reaches the west coast near Monterey, California.

When California petitioned Congress for statehood toward the end of 1849 it was an 'island' in the West with no neighboring states. But the Gold Rush had made some folks there wealthy and with the wealth came power. Henry Clay, the U.S. Senator from Kentucky who crafted the Missouri Compromise, together with Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, senators from Massachusetts, South Carolina and Illinois respectively, led debates that resulted in a series of bills called the Compromise of 1850. This gave Californians the right to choose free or slave status and did not apply the Missouri Compromise to the territories of New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona or Utah. It also was, with the Dred Scott case, a festering issue that contributed to the Civil War.

Utah, after some royal yet visionary ideas about its own borders, was gradually chewed down to its current boundaries by the penchant of post Civil War Congresses for admitting states around it that did not subscribe to the practice of polygamy. More on this aspect of the Borderlands in the next post.

Planning Another Chunk of Border Traverse - By Horse

Plans are shaping up for what will be the first piece of border traverse by horseback. I'll be riding with a local man through the Naomi Wilderness and Wasatch-Cache National Forest in mid-August. This chunk of the Idaho-Utah border runs about 10 miles between Franklin, Idaho and Bear Lake, which straddles the border.

Planning a traverse by horseback is taking some thinking and planning. When I originally conceived the idea of the Borderlands Project I briefly entertained the idea of doing it all on horseback or with a mule or even llama. Then I read Tim Moore's hilarious Travels with My Donkey: One Man and His Ass on a Pilgrimage to Santiago, about his traverse of the Pyrenees pilgrim route. Even though Tim ended up loving the donkey in the end, so to speak, it was the proverbial pain most of the way.

I have heard that llamas make great pack animals but I couldn't figure out how to do the endless transport necessary for my approach to hopscotching the borders. Someone doing them will hopefully use them and tell us all how it works out.

Stories, Tall Tales and Damn Lies

Traversing the borderlands, talking with the people who live there, you hear a lot of good stories. Some of those stories are for reporting and some are for telling. We collect both kinds here but so we don't confuse folks, we will put them in different places and clearly label them. I've attached a sample in the lower left hand column of the blog.

BTW, when you are talking about western things it is always good to know something about western gear, like saddles for instance. This Parts of a Saddle shows the saddle tree before the leather is fitted and attached. This Western Saddle shows a finished western saddle with its clothes on.

The Border By Horse

Some time ago I told my dentist about my idea for the Borderlands Project. His family is from a borderlands area in southeastern Idaho near Montpelier, where I used to own a small community weekly newspaper.

My dad would love to do this, he told me. So I got his dad's email address and eventually sent him an invitation. I heard back from him last Thursday.

"Yes," he answered. "I'd be interested in participating. I've never been out in the area near the UT/ID/WY border, so that would be interesting."

Then he added, "Any chance that I could ride a horse? I have a knee that has been acting up which may limit the distance that I could walk." So, we are now in the process of working out how to do some border stretches on horseback. This will add a different set of challenges than walking or boating the borderline but horses are about as eco-friendly a means of transport as you can get.

It also turns out that my riding companion is an electrical engineer with a Ph.D. who has years of experience in academia, nuclear power, and the space industry. He even knows who the Cassinis were! And better still, he is currently designing landing systems for aircraft that make use of GPS satellites so I'm hoping he can help me more accurately orient my handheld GPS unit more accurately to the border line.

This is shaping up to be a good traverse. I have a little experience aboard a horse, which you can read about in Summer Stretch, at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar. It is a little story I did about the cowboy days of my youth.

Making Some Adjustments

Yesterday I spent some time with Cynthia Mitchell, a good friend, ex-Wall Street Journal reporter and current Assistant Professor of Journalism at Central Washington University talking about the Borderlands Project. She had a number of good suggestions that I hope to implement over time and one explained below that I have already taken some steps on.

She asked me several times about the name I chose for the company I have created to eventually handle the technological and project management aspects of the Borderlands Project. Since I have taken a lot of pride in assembling the name, I explained, at length I'm afraid, about the famous French Cassini family of astronomers and scientists who, among many other projects, spent several generations mapping France. NASA chose the family name for the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, which is currently sending back data and pictures for the Saturn and Titan Mission. I spent more time explaining that my last name originally had no "e," that "Passy" was the original French spelling, and that Frederic Passy was a French economist and peace activist who won the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 with Jean-Henri Dunant, who founded the Red Cross, and blathered on some more.

Turns out that wasn't her interest.

It doesn't smell right, was basically what she told me.

Huh? was pretty much my response.

It sounds like a consulting firm and there is no one named Cassini who is involved. Some people might think you're trying to pull one over on them, was the gist of her feeling.

Coming from any other friend I probably would have blown this off. After all, I had envisioned more employees than myself in the future, or subcontracting certain aspects of the work -- the associates -- and wasn't sure that using the name of a famous dead guy (Cassini) would be a problem. I can name one or two other companies that use the name of dead guys who don't actually work their. I don't think Cassini's descendants have been out trying to pull their name off the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft and I never heard of anyone walking around NASA asking for the Cassini guy to interview but I haven't verified that with the folks at NASA. I also don't remember reading about Ben Franklin's descendants asking for their name to be pulled off company nameplates across the country. I could be wrong on that.

But this was, after all, a former Wall Street Journal reporter so I told her I would test her reaction, which is what I am doing here and inviting comments. I also took the company name out of prominent display in the blog name and added more disclosure in the introduction. My altruistic purpose for including it there in the first place was an attempt to distinguish it from the hundreds of other borderland projects that have to do with immigration issues.

Incidentally, the way I found out about the Cassini family's involvement in the mapping of France was reading Graham Robb's fascinating book, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War. The map-making of the Cassinis is also discussed in an older map classic by Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps. And finally, an English language account cited by Robb is worth checking out if you are interested, Cartography in France, 1660--1848, by Josef W. Konvitz.

Seeing With New Eyes

The Borderlands Project is one way of looking at the world around us through different eyes. The idea is that by actually traversing the borders themselves we'll have viewpoints that are different from just imagining the borders. The project also encourages the gathering of data of all kinds, waypoints and routes, reporting on issues connected to the borderlands, stories about the people who live there, the animals, plants, even the rocks and soil. As the project progresses all of this data together will produce a map, what author William least Heat-Moon called deep mapping. It is possible to visualize this in many ways: with words, drawings, photographs, even sculpture, and plays, academic research.

I just ran across one of the most amazing examples of the power of seeing things differently at a website called Visual Complexity . There are some 600 "maps" there that use data in a very graphic approach. Click through the different examples and I think you'll see what I mean.

Visualizing An Acre-Foot of Water

Aaron Million, the man talking about piping water from the borderlands around Flaming Gorge in Utah, or alternatively the Brown's Hole area of Colorado, to the Front Range cities like Ft. Collins, Denver and Pueblo, says the pipeline will move between 165,000 and 250,000 acre-feet of water. How much is that exactly?

An acre foot is one acre covered by one foot of water. An acre is 660 feet by 66 feet or 43,560 square feet. A football field is 300 feet by 160 feet, not including the end zones, or 48,000 square feet so it can give a good visual approximation.

This isn't nearly as spectacular as the stuff on Visual Complexity, but it does give a simple visualization of how much water Million is talking about. The Colorado River Compact divides 15 million acre feet of water per year to various western states. The graphic was prepared by Passy Cassini & Associates.

Water - Even When It doesn't Rain - Reigns

A random sample of acquaintances (they are used to being subjected to my quirky polls) shows only the vaguest notion of where their tap water comes from. In my years publishing community newspapers I have found this to be the norm. Water is something most of us take for granted.

But water doesn't get to your tap without a mind-boggling amount of planning. In the arid western U.S., that is multiplied exponentially. Unfortunately most regular folks, if they have any notion about how cities get their water, base it on Roman Polanski's 1974 movie Chinatown. They know there is subterfuge and money involved and big spans of time - which in todays world means anything over four years.

Actually, water systems are developed over decades, quarter- and half-centuries. Years have been added to the total since the 70s addition of environmental regulations. Building a major new dam or reservoir is a 50-year project with many hurdles to clear along the way.

In the meantime people keep coming to places in the western U.S. that had precious little water in the first place. And they expect water to come out of the tap when they turn it on. (A side note: water experts, but not usually the general population, understand the water 80/20 rule of thumb: Agriculture uses, on average, 80 percent of any water supply.)

The big river systems have traditionally been original water sources. These rivers and their feeding watersheds also don't fit neatly within state borders. Even when a river itself is the borderline, feeder streams enter from both sides.

The instrument of choice to deal with this has been the "compact," a multi-state or multi jurisdictional instrument used to share the water. The compact that holds sway in the proposal to pipe water from Flaming Gorge to the Front Range cities of Colorado is the Colorado River Compact. Within that are two major subdivisions, the Upper Basin, dealing with Colorado, Utah, wyoming, New Mexico and Arizona; and Lower Basin, dealing with California, Arizona and Nevada. The Wikipedia article linked above contains reliable information in its general overview of the compact. The Bureau of Reclamation lists the various laws relating to the system's rivers.

When you walk the borderlands rest assured that anytime water crosses your path, there are a depth of stories and some very interesting people to meet.

GPS Glitches - Anyone Know What Gives?

I'm hoping someone out there will at some point be able to explain the apparent GPS glitches regarding where state borders show up on Garmin's MapSource software. My on-the-ground Map Points do not agree with the location for those borders in MapSource. For instance, MapSource shows the Wyoming/Utah border point where US Highway 191 crosses just east of Flaming Gorge at N41 00.718 W109 25.397. My on-the-ground map point, reading the border from my Garmin Colorado 400t at 80 ft. showed it at N41 00.718 W109 25.534, a difference of about .1 mile. That's a lot.

When I marked the border near the "notch" of Wyoming and Utah my on-ground reading was N41 00.519 W111 02.814 and MapSource shows the point at N41 00.553 W111 02.726, a difference of 206 feet north/south error and again, about .1 mile error east/west. So, any geocachers out there know what's going on here? I'll see if I can track this down myself but I would appreciate any help.

Water, Water Everywhere? Not in the West

Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area straddles the Wyoming/Utah border. Its reservoir runs some 91 miles and holds almost 4 million acre feet of water behind the dam on the Green River. The Green, with headwaters in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains, flows east from the Flaming Gorge Dam and crosses into Colorado, turns south and re-enters Utah via the spectacular Canyon of Lodore. Butch Cassidy frequently camped in this area, known as Brown’s Hole or Brown’s Park, as did other rustlers and outlaws of lesser renown. Aaron Million, though, wasn’t interested in rustlers.

Million is behind a $4 billion plan to pipe water from the Green River to the Front Range population centers of Colorado. The best in-depth balanced article on Million and his plan that I’ve run across was written by Allen Best in October 2006 for ColoradoBiz Magazine. I will do my best to outline pertinent pieces of it here as we go along.

Million has a big dream for solving one of the longest standing problems in the arid West, where water has and still can cause wars. He has been campaigning and presenting for almost five years now and has – as is usual with water issues – many supporters and many foes. This is one of those major issues that needs deliberation, careful thought and exploration. Just the kind of thing for borderland walkers to bring out in posts about their experiences.

What Am I Seeing?

It’s just a guess but I’m betting most people who track this site or decide to participate by walking and reporting on some borderlands areas are map freaks. What can be better than a good map? So any info on various map types would be a welcome addition.

You don’t have to be a veteran map freak to know that there are maps that can give you all kinds of information, show not just where you are but what you’re seeing. Of course, the right map for the right job is a good idea. I only mention this because my geologist father-in-law often tries to navigate with his geology maps when we are on road trips. We have had near-death experiences looking for "the road that goes through this Ordivician outcrop."

I mentioned “Ecoregions” in an earlier post. At first glance Ecoregions appear to have similar boundaries with topographic groupings – where the boundary line is drawn to group similar topographic features.

Ecoregions, as the name obviously suggests, group by ecosystem similarities and include things like plant and animal life, soils and also topological features that together have connected impacts on a localized area’s unique existence. The Environmental Protection Agency uses these spatial boundaries to direct and monitor research and actions that affect the environment.

There is an obvious and stark contrast to anyone who walks the state borders between those often straight-line borders and the borders of ecoregions.

Here is the main link to Ecoregion Maps in pdf format. Note that print versions are available.

State Ecoregion Maps
Colorado
Idaho
Nevada
Utah
Wyoming