The Herald And News

WANDERING ISLANDS.

Those of the Rio Grande Made Trouble For Us With Mexico.

The wandering islands of the Rio Grande in their migrations from side to side of the water course have caused years of diplomatic correspondence and discussion between the United States and Mexico. The refusal of certain small bodies of land to remain permanently attached to one or the other of the river's banks deprived them of a fixed legal status as either Mexican or American territory and brought about their participation in many illegal adventures, which in turn led to misunderstandings between the two countries.

In no river is spirit more evident than in the Rio Grande. Along its sinuous route below Rio Grande City it pushes its way through miles of level sand in its final reach for the gulf, twisting and doubling upon itself like a sea serpent. In 1848 it was fixed upon as the boundary line between the United States and Mexico. The boundary was to be the "middle of the river, following the deepest channel."

But the river possessed characteristics that had not impressed themselves upon the framers of the convention as possible causes of friction between the people living along its banks. In addition to its eroding power, exercised through long months of low and mean water, it could during flood periods leap with torrential force across a narrow neck of land at the base of one of its long loops and cut for itself a new channel. Through such avulsive action of the river Texas soil would sometimes become Mexican, and on occasions a plantation occupied by jacals and Mexican citizens would overnight find itself a part of Texas.

An example will serve to show both the extraordinary actions of the river and the difficulties in the way of any satisfactory adjustment of conflicting interests. A certain Josiah Turner began to farm the Galveston ranch, on the Texas bank. Eight years later he was surprised when 221 acres of Mexican land came across the river and attached itself to his ranch. An arrangement was effected by which he became the owner of this land. Six years later the river cut off a piece of Mr. Turner's land and took it to Mexico. Twenty-one years later the river made up its mind to repay the farmer for what it had taken from him and so carried back into Texas a piece of land far larger than the tract originally lost.

The Mexican owners claimed possession, and a new convention dealing with the questions under dispute became necessary.

Brigadier General Anson Mills, U. S. A., appointed to represent the United States, recommended that the "cutoffs" be forever eliminated from the boundary line, all those occurring on the right of the river to pass to the jurisdiction of Mexico, those on the left to that of Texas. The inhabitants, if any, should retain their citizenship in the country from which they had been so suddenly and violently detached, or they might acquire the nationality of the country to which they were now attached. Any cutoff exceeding 650 acres in area and having a population of over 200 souls was not to be considered a banco, and the old bed of the river should remain the boundary. A convention embodying his recommendations was finally ratified by both countries. Thus the great turbid, silt bearing river is left to pursue its way untrammeled, but the terrors so long synonymous with its name have through the operation of this equable arrangement become a part of the storied, romantic past.