Gadsden Purchase 1854: Disturnell's Faulty Map and Santa Anna's Desert Sale

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After the Mexican-American War, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo drew the new border using a map published by New York businessman John Disturnell, copied from older Spanish maps. When surveyors went out with sextants and chronometers they found El Paso sat 36 miles further south and 100 miles further west than the map showed, leaving the Mesilla Valley, home to about 3,000 people, claimed by both nations. Railroad executive James Gadsden of South Carolina and Secretary of War Jefferson Davis wanted that flat ground for a southern transcontinental railroad, and rumors of copper, silver and gold near the Santa Rita del Cobre mountains raised the stakes.

The United States had also failed to honor Article 11, its promise to stop Comanche and Apache raids into Mexico, and Mexico claimed $40 million in damages. In 1853 Gadsden arrived in Mexico City authorized to offer up to $50 million for Baja California and much of northern Mexico. A broke and isolated Santa Anna, refused help by Britain, agreed to sell about 38,000 square miles for $15 million and cancel Article 11. The Senate, inflamed by the Kansas-Nebraska fight over slavery, cut the land to 29,640 square miles and the price to $10 million. The bitter sectional fight stalled any southern railroad until the early 1880s.

• Gadsden was an outlier in a South where most investors preferred to put capital into land and enslaved people rather than railroads.
• The U.S. Army had about 11,000 soldiers nationwide, nearly 8,000 of them on the southwestern frontier, and still could not stop the raids.
• Filibuster William Walker was trying to conquer Baja California on his own while Americans pushed a canal across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
• The poorly policed new border became a refuge for outlaws and rustlers, the world of the Cochise County Cowboys and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
• Economist David R. Barker argues that decades of military spending against the Apache outweighed what the region produced in taxes at the time.