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.
