Texas Almanac, 2002-2003 Page: 33
672 p. : col. ill., ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this book.
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History 33
Red River Boundary Settled - Again
by Mary G. Ramos, editor, Texas Almanac
The author wishes to thank William Abney of Marshall, chairman of the Texas Red River Boundary Commission, for
his careful review of this brief history of the Red River boundary disputes. Any errors are, of course, the author's own.Amid unhappy mutterings from landowners on both
sides of the Red River, the boundary between Texas and
Oklahoma was finally settled in 2000 after decades of
legal wrangling.
The Red River Boundary Compact, hammered out
during eight years of negotiations among representatives
of the two states, placed the border at the vegetation line
of the Red River's south bank.
Within the Lake Texoma area, the states agreed that
the boundary was the south bank of the river as it existed
prior to construction of Lake Texoma (construction
began in 1939). A map with Global Positioning System
coordinates was prepared and is on file with the Secre-
tary of State's Office of each state. The pact further
directs the Corps of Engineers to mark the Texoma-area
boundary permanently.
The compact was intended to help law-enforcement
officers and tax officials, among others, determine juris-
diction easily.
Some owners of river-front property along the
approximately 540 miles of Red River boundary line
had hoped that the pact would also help them settle
long-standing ownership disputes. Disputes occurred
when sudden changes in the river's course resulted in
land shifting from one state to the other. However, Will-
iam Abney, a Marshall real estate attorney and chairman
of Texas' Red River Boundary Commission, says a pact
is not needed to settle ownership questions. "Title to
land does not change when land shifts from one state's
jurisdiction to the other," he stresses.
Red River Disputes Have Long History
The history of the Red River boundary dispute is as
long and murky as the river itself. One of the main prob-
lems is that the Red River is, in the words of one Okla-
homa geologist, "a lot of loose sand with a little bit of
water." With a bed of unstable, sandy soil, the Red's fre-
quent floods cause the river to change course often.
Nonetheless, the Red River has been used as a
boundary since at least the 1700s, when it was accepted
as the dividing line between French and Spanish claims
in the New World. A Spanish royal decree in 1805
named the river the northern and eastern boundary of
the Spanish province of Texas.
The boundary dispute had its roots in the signing of
the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, also known as the
Treaty of Amity, Settlements and Limits, between the
United States and Spain. The treaty specified that the
eastern and northern boundary of Spanish Texas began
on the Gulf of Mexico. It followed the western bank of
the Sabine River north to the 32nd degree of latitude,
then proceeded "by a line due north to the degree of lat-
itude where it strikes the Rio-Roxo of Nacogdoches or
Red River then following the course of the Rio-Roxo
westward to degree of longitude 100 west ... then
crossing the Red River and running thence by a line due
north to the River Arkansas ..." The map used to docu-
ment this boundary was the Melish map of 1818.
But the Melish map was flawed. In 1858, surveyors
A.H. Jones and H.M. Brown determined that the 100th
meridian was 90 to 100 miles farther west than shownon the Melish map. And in 1852, Randolph B. Marcy
discovered that there are two main branches of the Red
River between Melish's 100th meridian and the true
100th meridian - the Prairie Dog Town Fork and the
North Fork (a third fork - the Salt Fork - lies between
the two).
Greer County Conflict
To complicate matters, the Texas Legislature estab-
lished Greer County in 1860 with boundaries that began
at the conjunction of the North Fork and the Prairie Dog
Town Fork, went northwest along the North Fork to the
100th meridian, then down the meridian to the Prairie
Dog Town Fork and back to the starting point. The con-
fusion generated by the Civil War caused the status of
the area to be ignored for a time. By the mid-1880s, cat-
tle raisers had moved into Greer County, and settlers
met in 1886 to organize the county government.
The governments of Texas and the United States
attempted to work through the conflicting claims over a
period of years. When President W. H. Harrison signed
the congressional legislation organizing Oklahoma as a
territory in 1890, the federal government pressed Texas
harder to settle the dispute over Greer County. The mat-
ter came before the U.S. Supreme Court in March 1896.
Citing the Adams-Onfs Treaty, the court ruled that the
Prairie Dog Town Fork was the correct fork to follow
west to the true 100th meridian. The south bank was
specified for this reason: When you proceed north up the
Sabine River and encounter the Red River, you strike the
south bank first. Further, the treaty states that at the
100th meridian, the boundary crosses the river, going
from south bank to north. The court further ruled that
Greer County was under the jurisdiction of the United
States, not Texas. Texas was forced to cede jurisdiction
of some million and a half acres to the United States.
The controversy deepened in 1908, when a great
flood shifted the river a half-mile into Oklahoma. In
1911, near Texarkana, another flood put a square mile of
Texas on the Oklahoma side.
Oil Discovery Complicates the Problem
Then Texas drillers discovered oil in the bed of the
river just north of Burkburnett in 1919, stirring up the
boundary conflict once again. Oklahoma claimed the
bed of the river. Their claim was based on documents
wherein the United States, at the time Oklahoma was
granted statehood, gave the state its navigable rivers.
Texas claimed that the boundary line was the median
line of the river, therefore, Texas owned mineral rights
to the middle of the river. Before it was over, the dispute
escalated into violence involving local law-enforcement
officers from both Texas and Oklahoma plus the Texas
Rangers. A bridge was burned and oilfield equipment
was destroyed.
On January 15, 1923, the Supreme Court issued its
decision, ruling that under the terms of Oklahoma and
federal laws, the river could not be classified as naviga-
ble. The court further ruled that the state line was the
south bank of the river, as had been decided in the Greer
County case, and that the United States owned the south
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Ramos, Mary G. Texas Almanac, 2002-2003, book, 2001; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth162510/m1/33/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.