MURKY WAY TO SANTA FE
Border dispute has deep roots, with the city once capital of a large domain
Texans know Santa Fe. They know the spectacular reclining Buddha at Linh Son Temple on Texas 646. They marvel at the Pignataro Estate, the Moorish-style castle built by the widow of a Danish immigrant as a home for retired nuns. They know Indian Stadium, the football mecca where pre- game prayers were heard on Friday nights until 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such entreaties were unconstitutional.
I’m talking about Santa Fe, Texas, of course, the Galveston County community named for the Santa Fe Railroad when the community was founded in
1978. There was a brief moment, though, when the other Santa Fe, the centuries- old capital of New Mexico, also was Santa Fe, Texas. Most Santa Feans weren’t all that happy about such an arrangement, but Texans, newly annexed to the United States, insisted the venerable city was a twinkling facet of the newest star in the American constellation.
Since December 1836, shortly after the triumph at San Jacinto, the Republic of Texas officially proclaimed the Rio Grande from mouth to source as its southern and western boundary. Mexico always regarded the southern boundary of Texas as the Nueces River, rising in Central Texas and emptying into the Gulf at Corpus Christi. Claiming the Rio Grande as the boundary and grabbing the so- called Nueces Strip as a part of Texas opens up a huge amount of territory in the western part of the state.
The territory Texas claimed also followed a line running northward to the 42nd parallel in what is now Wyoming, a Texasstyle presumption that exceeded the territory allotted to Texas by both Spain and Mexico when it was a part of those two countries. Claiming Santa Fe, Albuquerque and most of eastern New Mexico, as well as the 42ndparallel panhandle, Texas also claimed parts of Tamaulipas and Coahuila as drawn by Spanish decrees of 1805 and 1811.
Washington had a more modest notion about its newly annexed state. During the Mexican War, the Army of the West under Gen. Stephen W. Kearny rode into Santa Fe and established a civil government for the territory of New Mexico. Texans complained, arguing that the federal government was treating New Mexico as conquered foreign soil when in reality Kearny’s troops had occupied Texas territory.
Secretary of State James Buchanan assured the Texans that the arrangement was merely temporary and would not affect their claim to all territory east of the Rio Grande. Not interested in waging a war on two fronts, the Texans turned their attention back to Mexico and waited for war’s end to press their claim.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war and established the lower Rio Grande, not the Nueces, as the international boundary, with Mexico relinquishing all claim to territory north and east of the river. The U.S. got NewMexico and what would become the vast American West, but the question of how far Texas extended to the north and west was left hanging.
“In the minds of most Americans, its western margin merely melted away somewhere into the unknown immensity leading to the Pacific and the newly discovered California gold fields,” Stephen Harrigan writes in “Big Wonderful Thing,” his history of Texas. “To Texans, that line was clear, and theirs forever by right of conquest. It was the Rio Grande, which meant that Santa Fe was part of Texas, along with half the territory of New Mexico.”
Also left hanging was the slavery issue. Under the proposed Wilmot Proviso of 1846, slavery would be prohibited in any territory the U.S. acquired as a result of the war with her southern neighbor. The slave states, determined to prevent the spread of free-soil territory, opposed the proviso. So did U.S. Sen. Sam Houston, who argued that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had managed the slavery issue well enough for nearly three decades and should be allowed to continue. The Wilmot Proviso died in the U.S. Senate, leaving threat of civil war to loom like a dark cloud.
Tied into knots over the slavery issue, Congress also dawdled over the boundary dispute. Texas did not. On March 15, 1848, state lawmakers created Santa Fe County, with boundaries that encompassed most of the empty, arid plains and mesas of eastern New Mexico. Texas informed the U.S. it was sending civil authorities to Santa Fe to take over local government and asked for assistance from Kearny’s troops. Outrageous Texas audacity was the talk of Santa Feans who gathered as they had for ages on the old Plaza.
When Judge Spruce M. Baird, a lawyer from Nacogdoches, rode into the old town to assume his duties as county judge of Santa Fe County, Col. John M. Washington told him he might as well go home. As commander officer at Santa Fe, he would oversee local government until President James K. Polk ordered him to do otherwise. Actually, Polk already had ordered Washington to assist the Texans, but the colonel pretended not to get the message, hoping he could hold on until the new president, Zachary Taylor, took office. Taylor, the Mexican War hero, knew Texas, and Texans, and was not inclined to support the claims of the Lone Star State.
The White House tenure of “Old Rough and Ready” lasted only 16 months. After a supper of raw vegetables and cherries, with glasses of iced milk as a chaser, he took ill and died. The new president, Millard Fillmore, was no more inclined to support the Texas claim than his predecessor had been. He told Texas lawmakers that if they forced the issue they would be regarded as trespassers. Baird, the would-be county judge of the would-be county of Santa Fe, stuck around anyway. He set up a law practice and in 1860 was appointed New Mexico’s attorney general, although he was forced out of the state a year later because of his Confederate sympathies.
The Texas boundary dispute finally was resolved back in Washington, thanks to the Compromise of 1850, a series of bills designed to hold the troubled nation together. As a result of the Compromise, California joined the Union as a free state, while the people of Utah and New Mexico were allowed to decide for themselves whether slavery would be permitted.
Texas agreed to give up its dream of an expansive Rio Grande border. Its boundary line would follow the Rio Grande from the mouth of the river as far as El Paso before doubling back to the east between the 103rd and 100th meridians. For agreeing to take less land than she claimed, Texas received $10 million in U.S. indemnity bonds. Texans, keenly aware they needed the money, voted in a special election to accept the agreement, and the legislature, meeting in special session, approved it on Nov. 25, 1850. The unmistakable shape that is Texas was set, presumably for all time.
In 1912, the centuries- old capital of Nuevo Mexico would become the capital of the 47th state added to the Union. Sixtysix years later, New Mexico’s neighbor to the east would get a Santa Fe, one she could officially call her own.