Please see my insertions.
Lowell G. McManus
Leesville, Louisiana, USA
----- Original Message -----
From: "aletheia kallos" <aletheiak@...>
To: <BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2006 4:13 AM
Subject: Re: [BoundaryPoint] Re: stretching the quest for a real
stretchable latex tripoint to stretch
> yikes lowell
> my question now as always is indeed just about the
> tripoint
Thanks for the clarification of your question. You have my original
answer and my later revision in light of Haggard.
> & i am often amazed & amused at how you keep losing
> track of or overlooking or forgetting or neglecting or
> belittling & thus ultimately denying that the
> multipointing & trypointing are the actual point of bp
>
> while all the other stuff is just the background for
> that
> or less
>
> & your sudden abandonment now of your former authority
> nardini in favor of your newfound authority haggard is
> not without its difficulties for you too
>
> for haggard at least plainly states right up front
> that the boundaries of the neutral ground have never
> been officially described & that as a matter of fact
> only the sabine river & arroyo hondo were mentioned in
> the herrera wilkinson agreement
I agree with Haggard here too. None of this is de jure. Like him, I
have been trying to discover out the practical de facto boundaries of
this de facto Neutral Ground. In BP post 14285 two years ago, I wrote:
"Many sources agree with THE HANDBOOK OF TEXAS in saying, 'The
boundaries of the Neutral Ground were never officially described beyond
a general statement that the Arroyo Hondo on the east and the Sabine
River on the west were to serve as boundaries.' However, I have seen a
few other sources that give a complete delimitation. Perhaps this was
subsequently developed pursuant to the Wilkinson-Herrera agreement." So
it does appear. Wilkinson and Herrera (negotiating only through
subordinants anyway) mentioned only the streams where the single main
road crossed into the Neutral Ground from either direction. It is in
notes exchanged among others that there emerged a fuller description of
the two-dimensional zone that came to be mutually understood as neutral,
in which settlement was officially prohibited, and which was patrolled
at least once by a joint US-Spanish military force. When the local
Spanish commander and the American land agent both write letters to the
American territorial governor in substantial agreement as to extensive
specific boundaries, then the effect is that the de facto Neutral Ground
has acquired a set of practical limits beyond the few words in the
Wilkinson-Herrera agreement.
> & he admits all the rest of what he says about these
> boundaries
> including the map he ultimately reconstructs & or
> adopts
> cannot be said to be accurate
>
> & if you are really in agreement with haggard then you
> must realize this too
All that Haggard or I was trying to do was map the general area mutually
understood between the local American and Spanish officials to be
neutral.
> nor does his or anyones supposedly finding the lost
> bayou pierre settlement in bayou pierre lake make any
> difference to the actual delineation of the neutral
> ground boundary
> nor consequently to the identification of the latex
> tripoint
Well, Haggard did not make up the Bayou Pierre Settlement out of whole
cloth. According to his sources (in the mouse roll-overs of his
footnote references in the full verison of the SHQ article) it was
Commandant General Nemesio Salcedo in a letter to Governor Claiborne who
said that the limit of the Neutral Ground ascended Bayou Pierre as far
as that Spanish settlement, and it was Land Agent Peter Samuel Davenport
in a report to the Congress who said that it went from such settlement
in a straight line to the geocord confluence on the Sabine. If one
believes at all in a commonly accepted set of bounds for the practical
effect of the Neutral Ground, then the Bayou Pierre Settlement (well
north of the source of Arroyo Hondo) must be part of the picture.
> so to that extent i agree we have made great progress
> here
>
> but i still think all we can say with any assurance is
> that our latex tripoint if any is still somewhere
> north
> or actually rather somewhere west
> & only perhaps somewhere northwest
> of the arroyo hondo source
> on or near the sabine red watershed line
>
> in fact i might go so far as to suggest now
> directly across the grain of all conventional wisdom
> that there is no basis in fact for extending the line
> north at all from arroyo hondo
> but only west
> & thus no better tripointing stretch or stitch to be
> made with any authority than that of nlat 31d47m30s
> directly to the sabine red watershed line
>
> but it is just a suggestion in any case
> for my actual belief is still that this tripoint cant
> really be said to have ever existed in fact
Yes! That is exactly why I resisted drawing it on my map in 2004 and
only ventured an estimation yesterday at your continued insistence upon
having a tripoint. The de facto Neutral Ground was created by the local
authorities in Natchitoches and Nacogdoches precisely because no de jure
location for the international boundary was yet fixed by their superiors
in Washington and Madrid. That section of the boundary north of the
Neutral Ground was just as unfixed, but it didn't matter as much because
there was nobody there yet. The Adams-de Onís Treaty of 1819 resolved
all uncertainty with a de jure boundary from the Gulf of Mexico to the
"South Sea" between Oregon and California.