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.