Read Online The Coyote's Bicycle by Kimball Taylor - Free Book Online Page B

and the river, the men designated the initial point. It was October 10, 1850. A journalist from a London newspaper sent to cover the western demarcation of the epic border survey noted that the Mexican delegation displayed a “remarkable degree of gravity”—some described them as weepy—as they gazed north into the 525,000 square miles of country lost to Mexico at the close of a war that lasted one year, nine months, one week, and one day. The Americans on the other hand were drunk with victory.
    My favorite image of the border is a lithographic plate based on an illustration made by Boundary Commissioner John Russell Bartlett in 1852. Having missed the founding phase of the survey, Bartlett traveled back to the inaugural point at the Pacific. He encountered the eight-ton white marble obelisk Congress commissioned from a stonemason in New York. It had been shipped by sailaround Patagonia’s Tierra del Fuego, up the Humboldt Current to San Francisco, and down to San Diego, then dragged across the sloughs and erected on the mesa by captain Edmund L. F. Hardcastle. Until then, the boundary was celebrated only with a pile of stones. Bartlett discovered the new monument framed by a grove of Shaw’s agave in bloom. This particular species shoots a panicle, a spear that looks something like a giant asparagus, six feet up. The tip then flowers in yellow and pink. Beyond the monument and the agave spears, Bartlett illustrated a placid ocean and the hummocks of the Coronado Islands. In his diary, he wrote that the white obelisk “is seen from a great distance on land as well as by vessels at sea.”
    Bartlett has been described as bookish. Many in the commission found him an absentminded and foolhardy dawdler. This could be due to the fact that he used the appointment to fart around the American West like Don Quixote—once stalling survey work for forty-four days so he could return a maiden, who’d been captured by Apaches and traded off, to her small Mexican pueblo. His dedication to the art of illustration, however, was not a priggish hobby but an official element of the commission’s charter. Scientific information concerning the almost unexplored territory was to be recorded and collected, and sketches of native people and species were to be made as the surveyors carved out the line. The compilation of illustrated birds, reptiles, and plants that emerged from the field is a chronicle both elegant and otherworldly. One plate depicts white-robed Tohono O’odham people harvesting bulging red cactus fruit from giant nopal limbs by the use of long, forked sticks. Alien, stylized landscapes at the precipice of change: I found the endeavor to hand-draw the wilderness a thoughtful and forward-looking gesture on the part of what was otherwise an infighting gang of scapegrace rascals. The marking of the two-thousand-mile border was an achievement every bit as profound as the dredging of the Panama Canal or the spanning of the Golden Gate. But the men attached to the Boundary Commission went on tobecome the direct inspiration for Western cinema’s most notorious thieves, rapists, and murderers. Some became Confederates. Some rose in the ranks of the Union. Some were hanged, some scalped—most deserved it. Things went afoul from the outset.
    Nearly all of this history is invisible—buried, paved over, or fenced off.
    Grizzly bear still roamed Southern California when the Arguello Adobe, the Mexican-California ranch house that anchored the original Rancho Tijuana, was erected on a small rise overlooking the bay. Assembled of handmade bricks, whitewashed, and laced with bougainvillea, the compound was the only structure between the Spanish presidio at San Diego and the frontier city that would rise to the south. It was once attacked by Indians—saved only with a concession of beef—and served the Arguello descendants from the Mission Period through the gold rush and California