The Imaginary Line: A History of the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1848-1857 (review)

2??8Book Reviewsgi The Imaginary Line: A History of the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1848—1857. By Joseph Richard Werne. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2007. Pp. 272. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliographical essay, index. ISBN 9780875653389. $34.95, cloth.) Somewhere on the frontiers of North American history scholars may still explore , discover, survey, and interpret topics that have remained (despite the best efforts of past investigators) largely uncharted. Such is the case with this groundbreaking study, The Imaginary Line: A History of the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, 1848-185J, by historian Joseph Richard Werne. With the skill and precision of a seasoned narrator, Werne takes his readers on a journey through the negotiations, machinations, and trudging task of delineating an international border that exists even today as much in the mind as on the map. In so doing he traces not only die work of well-known diplomats, statesmen, and their commissioners in the field but also the labors of the surveyors who actually braved the worst that the land had to offer in completing an achievement of truly epic proportions. Werner demonstrates convincingly that, in the end, any account of the U.S.Mexican boundary survey must first be a story about people. He is at his best in developing the characters and personages, Mexican and Anglo-American alike, who played central roles in shaping the crooked line that only symbolizes the greater cultural divide between two North American nations that must share a common border and a common future, despite their differences and conflicts in the past. He reveals new details mined from previously neglected manuscripts in the Mexican national archives as well as records from collections in the United States. In so doing he explains with verve and clarity that the surveyors, soldiers, scientists, engineers, statesmen, and diplomats who played important roles in this story were witnesses "to the beginning of a boundary controversy, not the end of one" (p. xiv). Never before have the activities, work, and motives of members of die Mexican Commission, headed by Gen. Pedro García Conde, been so carefully examined . While the author thus succeeds in filling an important void in our collective understanding of the making of what is still a controversial international boundary , he also navigates with skill through the hardships, privations, and difficulties experienced by die surveying teams of both countries. The impartial heat, the daily experience of thirst, hunger, and choking dust storms, the unforgiving nature of the deserts and mountains of the southwestern borderlands all posed obstacles enough for the most courageous of souls. Coupled with these daunting challenges were the ever-present threat of Indian depredations, the confusion resulting from political instability within Mexico, and the mistrust kindled by the fierce ambitions of United States officials to secure a soudiern railway route to California. In the end, Werner aptly observes diat "the border does not divide these problems into two parts, but rather molds diem into one" (230). In sum, just about anything that anyone, whether academic or layperson, might want to know about the struggle to define and redefine the U.S.-Mexican 92Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly boundary is in the book. That said, the author still leaves a few questions unanswered , and none more vexing than the issue of the flawed 1 847 Disturnell Map of the United States and die mystery ofjust what U.S. Commissioner John Russell Bartlett did or did not know about its troubling inaccuracies. For the resulting compromise known as the Bardett-García Conde line of 1850 (32o 22' nordi latitude), which initially placed the soudiern boundary of New Mexico some 42 miles north of El Paso, only led to furdier diplomacy and die eventual Gadsden Purchase of 1853. Werner has offered scholars and laymen alike a work that should stand for years as the most definitive study of a topic so relevant to our time and worthy of continuing examination. Like die shifting channels of die Rio Grande, the unpredictability of both history and nature remind us that the border, albeit a largely imaginary one, runs through the center of a troubled and sometimes tragic story—a story without an end—that...