Page:Acts, Resolutions and Memorials, Adopted by the First Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Arizona.djvu/81



To the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States in Congress assembled:

Your memorialists, the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Arizona, respectfully represent that by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, between the United States and the Republic of Mexico, ratified in 1848, the boundary line between the two republics should consist of a straight line drawn from the middle of the Gila River, where it unites with the Colorado, to a point on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, distant one marine league south of the southernmost point of the port of San Diego; that in pursuance of said treaty the boundary line was run by the commissioners appointed by the two republics for that purpose; that in running the line according to the said treaty, the said boundary line crossed the Rio Colorado twice through a northern bend of that tortuous river, by which means a tract of land consisting of about one hundred and fifty acres south of said bend was thrown into the limits of the United States, thus leaving a small portion of the territory of the United States beyond the Colorado river, which separated it from every other portion of their territory. That when California was admitted into the Union as a State, in eighteen hundred and fifty, it was admitted with the same boundary on the south, as declared in her constitution, that was specified in the said treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and run by the commissioners aforesaid, the River Colorado separating the small tract of land before specified from the remainder of the State. Your memorialists further represent, that the organic act of the Territory of Arizona, approved the twenty-fourth day of February, 1863, declared all that part of the Territory of New Mexico situated west of a line running due south from the point where the south-west corner of the Territory of Colorado joins the northern boundary of the Territory of New Mexico to the southern boundary line of the Territory of New Mexico, should be and was erected into a territorial government to be called Arizona; that the boundary of New Mexico on the west, by the organic act creating that Territory, approved September ninth, 1850, was the boundary line of the State of California from the thirty-seventh parallel of north latitude south to the point of the Colorado River where said boundary begins, which was the line run by the