How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [93]
Young, in turn, prepared for war. Among those preparations, he directed Anson Call to locate a settlement on the farthest navigable point of the Colorado River. With Callville as the terminus of a string of Mormon settlements leading from the Salt Lake Valley to the Colorado River, landlocked Utah now had access to the sea via the Colorado to the Gulf of California to the Pacific.
Callville soon became a landing for food and mining supplies. It also served as a portal for immigrants recently converted to Mormonism by missionaries who had traveled to Europe, Latin America, India, Australia, and the Pacific Islands. These foreigners, arriving out of devotion to the Mormon Church as opposed to the United States, contributed to government concerns regarding an eventual Mormon nation.
Though the 1857–58 Utah War, as it became known, never erupted into full-fledged combat between the Mormon militia and the U.S. Army, over a hundred civilians died in various armed confrontations, and enormous amounts of public and private property were destroyed. Ultimately the Mormons accepted Buchanan’s governor in return for amnesty regarding destruction of government property. The federal troops soon left to deal with the actual present danger to national security: the formation of the Confederacy and the Civil War it triggered.
Continued growth and progress in Callville enabled the first steamship to arrive one year after the Civil War ended. Not coincidentally, that same year Congress redrew the boundary between the Arizona and Nevada Territories.
Callville before and after Nevada statehood, and after the Hoover Dam
When Nevada became a state in 1864, it inherited the southern border of the Utah Territory—the straight line continuing to California. To its south, the Arizona Territory also extended west to California, and thus encompassed the navigable lower end of the Colorado River. In 1866, Congress gave Nevada that portion of the Arizona Territory west of the Colorado River, including Callville (and a region in this otherwise arid environment that Spanish explorers had called “Fruitful Plains”—or, in Spanish, Las Vegas).
Congress may have been seeking to create future states more equal in natural resources. At the time, Nevada had recently exhausted its efforts to claim the crest of the gold-rich Sierras as its rightful boundary with California. It may have also been payback time for Arizonans, who, during the Civil War, had first created Arizona (extending across the southern half, as opposed to western half, of the New Mexico Territory) and been granted territorial status by the Confederacy.
Arizona was officially outraged and baffled by the land transfer. Its outrage was expressed in a resolution passed by its territorial legislature. “By this great river the Territory receives the most of its supplies,” it protested, “and lately it has become the channel of a large part of the trade of San Francisco with Utah and Montana.” The phrase “lately it has become” referred to the recently commenced steamship traffic at Callville. Its bafflement was expressed by state historian Thomas Edwin Farish when he later wrote, “For some reason, to this day unexplained, the greater portion of the land in this Arizona county [Pah Ute County] was ceded to the State of Nevada by the Congress of the United States under an act passed on May 5, 1866.”
Nevada, on the other hand, viewed the land transfer as perfectly logical. In its official state history, Beulah Hershheiser blandly noted that “the desired tract was a mining district; that Nevada was a mining State; and that the interests of the two sections were therefore identical.”
To guard the important landing on the Colorado from these controversies, the Army erected Fort Callville. It was occupied only briefly, since the town soon began to lose population. Commerce dried up owing to the arrival of