Visits to the Border
BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE, there was an idea: an imagined demarcation, long contested but still undefined. So, in 1849, a group of surveyors—half Mexican and half American—set out to finally map the line dividing their two nations. It was, at the time, largely an intellectual exercise: careful measurements toward an ideal, and still more plan than physicality, more symbol than safeguard. But still, there was a need for some kind of map. Treaties, after all, had been signed; decisions had been made. It was time, finally, to formalize the space where one sovereignty ended and another began.
Topography was the easier part to understand: the Rio Grande and the Colorado River. Those generous, physical outlines of division. Gifts from nature, when first one country and then the next decided, finally, on the need for definition. More challenging, though, were the no-man’s lands that refused easy definition: New Mexico and Chihuahua, Arizona and Sonora. Canyons and the Tarahumara who lived there. Snakes and spines and lands so dry the memory of water barely existed.
The United States had appointed a man of letters to the task: John Russell Bartlett. He’d been easy to convince. Already, he was so charmed by it all: native men living in a wild, rough country. He wanted to see how the what it was like. Because knowing—as so many people in his country believed at the time—translated into ownership. From his studies, he would have known that in Spanish, the word , “to meet” a person or a place, can also mean “to know” them. So Bartlett had come to see the borderlands, to know them, and to lay a claim there for his country.
