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Explanation:
what did the united states believe to be the southern boundary of the new state of texasFor centuries, America’s borders were up for grabs.
European nations staked claims on paper while tribes claimed the ground itself, but the border remained a work in progress, an imaginary line, until troops clashed and treaties settled the question.
In 1849, after the Mexican-American War, the United States sent teams of surveyors, soldiers and laborers to mark this new line in the desert, which sounded simple but proved difficult. The teams struggled as the Southwest seethed with conflict.
A line had been drawn, but the History has blurred the details, but the tale hangs on a boozy dispute, angry words, a scuffle and a gunshot. It was October 1849. Commissioner John B. Weller and surveyor Andrew Gray had been sent to the border of the United States and Mexico to mark a line that existed only on maps, and the work was not going well. Some say Weller struck Gray in the jaw; others say he tried to strangle Gray. In both accounts, Gray shot Weller in the thigh.
The border survey, less than a year old, was a mess.
The dispute was one of many problems that cropped up while the U.S. struggled to define its southern border after the Mexican-American War. It was not the first time the United States had experienced border problems. They began as soon as settlers started moving west.
In 1801, for example, the border was fluid, changing, a work in progress. There was no official border, just a big muddy river on the edge of Louisiana, “that part of North America lying between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains,” Stephen E. Ambrose writes in “Undaunted Courage.” All of it was "up for grabs."
For three centuries, England, France and Spain had claimed various pieces of North America by sending soldiers, settlers, trappers and merchants to plant flags, move goods and buildFor three centuries, England, France and Spain had claimed various pieces of North America by sending soldiers, settlers, trappers and merchants to plant flags, move goods and build forts. They drew up maps, signed treaties and made plans, but their hold on these lands was weak. Americans had already streamed over the Appalachian Mountains and settled the Ohio Valley. A few had crossed the Mississippi, “most of them illegally,” Ambrose writes. What would happen next was not clear.
The U.S. was largely unsettled, one in five Americans was a slave, Western tribes still controlled their homeland and nothing traveled “faster than the speed of a horse.” It “seemed unlikely that one nation could govern an entire continent,” Ambrose writes.
