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On Aug. 1, 1876, Colorado became a full-fledged state of the Union. On that account, Aug. 1 used to be a state holiday and state offices were closed.
However, the state came under pressure to make a holiday of the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Our budget-conscious legislators did not want to give state employees another day off with pay, and so the official Colorado Day holiday was abolished and state employees got King Day in its place.
The remnant Colorado Day is tomorrow, the first Monday in August, and so far as I know, the entire celebration consists of free admission to all 41 state parks.
But it is also an excuse to examine our peculiar
boundaries as one of those big square states out
west.
After the Mexican War, but before there was a Colorado, the area was divided among Utah, New Mexico, Kansas and Nebraska territories. Then came the gold rush of 1859, and the pioneers created the extralegal Territory of Jefferson. It was somewhat larger than the current Colorado, but it was also a rectangle.
Why just use arbitrary lines on a map, based on latitude and longitude, instead of natural features like rivers and divides? Perhaps because that's how Thomas Jefferson liked things; he had once proposed that the Northwest Territory of his day -- what became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota -- be divided into rectilinear territories in preparation for statehood.
Jefferson Territory faded away in 1861 when Kansas became a state and Colorado Territory was established with our current boundaries.
So we can theorize that Colorado is a rectangle in honor of Thomas Jefferson, who proposed the straight-line government surveying system that chopped the American landscape into sections and townships. If you climb the mesa above San Luis, the oldest town in Colorado, and look out over the fields, you'll see that those settlers from New Mexico divided the landscape quite differently -- long, narrow plots that fronted the creek, rather than the compass-aligned squares you find in most of the rest of our state.
But why this particular rectangle that extends from short grass prairie across high mountains to slickrock deserts?
I've never found an answer. My guess is that it happened
with the Pikes Peak or Bust
gold rush. Pikes Peak is
a prominent landmark. It's close to the center of Colorado,
which is near Wilkerson Pass in Park County. My guess is
that they just drew a box with Pikes Peak in its center,
more or less.
Despite appearances, our borders are not exactly straight lines, even if you adjust for the curvature of the earth. Our western boundary is supposed to be the 32nd meridian of longitude west of Washington, D.C., and it should be a straight north-south line. But if you look at a detailed map, you'll see that the line veers a little west, before resuming its northern course, for a few miles just north of the line between San Miguel and Montrose counties.
That's the result of errors made by an 1879 survey that started north from the Four Corners. One mistake was discovered by another survey in 1885, and another persisted until 1893. But by then, both Colorado and Utah had accepted the crooked boundary, and so the flawed border has remained in effect.
There's a similar irregularity along our southern border, the 37th parallel, with about a mile of diagonal boundary sitting southwest of Chromo in Archuleta County.
There were surveys in 1868, 1874, 1900 and 1903 that
didn't quite agree. In 1919 New Mexico sued Colorado over
the boundary. The U.S. Supreme Court held in 1925 that, in
essence, the practical boundary
that people had been
observing would serve as the political boundary, even if
the law said it had to be the 37th parallel.
So it takes three straight lines, not one, to draw our
southern boundary. And three to draw our western border.
Add in the two lines for north and east, and you need eight
lines for Colorado. We're not so square after all; as it
turns out, for 131 years, we've actually been one of
those big octagonal states out west.
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