Note IV'-15 — Chapter IV · OBSERVATIONS ON NEW SPAIN.[IV'-1]

New Mexico, as long as it was a province of New Spain, could not be satisfactorily bounded, for the simple reason that its boundaries were never clearly defined. Pike's ascription of lat. 44° N. sends it up to the shadowy border of "the Oregan"—that No Man's Land till Lewis and Clark descended the Columbia to the South Sea. This is no place to open the celebrated quarrel over boundaries that hovered in the air like clouds on political paper; suffice it, that when the Oregan became an undisputed possession of any nation, it already belonged to the United States. Away from the Pacific coast, Spanish dominion never exceeded 38° N. in fact, whatever it may have been on paper at any time. Shortly after Pike's time, i. e., from Feb. 22d, 1819, an intelligible theoretical boundary was agreed upon by the United States and Spain, though it was never run upon the ground. This line, aside from any question of the still unsettled boundary of Texas, ran from the Red r. to the Arkansaw r. on the meridian of 100° W. from Greenwich, up the Arkansaw to its source, thence due N. on whatever the meridian might prove to be to lat. 42° N., thence on that parallel due W. to the Pacific. Spanish Nuevo Mejico was quietly captured without resistance by the U. S. Army of the West under Kearny in 1846; formally ceded in 1848; organized as a U. S. territory in 1850; its southern boundary changed by the acquisition of the Gadsden purchase and definitely established in 1853; Arizona detached on the W. in 1863 along the meridian of 109° W.; eastern boundary, the meridian of 103° W.; present area, 122,460 sq. m.; pop. in 1890 given as 153,593. Thus, to all intents and practical purposes, Pike's "New Mexico" is our New Mexico and Arizona, and thence indefinitely northward. Present Arizona has an area of 112,920 sq. m.; pop. 59,620 by the census of 1890. In December, 1863, Governor John N. Goodwin and Secretary Richard C. McCormick, with other new Territorial officials, entered into possession on the ground, and formally proclaimed their functions. They proceeded to establish the capital on Granite cr., a tributary of the Rio Verde, and named it Prescott, for the historian, after having deliberated whether to call it Audubon, for the ornithologist. The log house built for the gubernatorial, secretarial, and all other functions was there when I last saw it, in 1892, and still the residence of one of the original party, Judge Fleury, who in the course of time exercised his versatile talent in every capacity, from cook to acting governor. Arizona is thus politically in its 32d year now (1895). Its historic period dates from 1540 or 1536; the prehistoric compass of time, since it was first inhabited, is very likely not exceeded by the Christian era—to judge from recent exhumations in the valley of the Gila, revealing a cluster of cities 6 m. long. Those who named the present capital Phœnix builded better than they knew—the name, I mean, not the mud hovels and wicker-work jacals which adorn some portions of that new center of political intrigue to which were lately shifted the inevitable dissensions that arose between the northern mountaineers and the southern deserteers.