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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (9697)	11/23/1997 8:05:00 PM
From: Steve Parrino	Respond to of 22053

Your question compelled me, as a native Texan, to poke around into the reasons for the statehood provision allowing Texas to split into five separate states. I've known about it for years, but never knew exactly why. This was interesting from the Texas Archives: Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas to the United States Approved March 1, 1845 "Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Congress doth consent that the territory properly included within and rightfully belonging to the Republic of Texas, may be erected into a new State to be called the State of Texas...New States of convenient size not exceeding four in number, in addition to said State of Texas and having sufficient population, may, hereafter by the consent of said State, be formed out of the territory thereof..." I suspect the provision was added because the Texas territory was so large that some people figured that splitting it up might be necessary for practical governance. Indeed, it was even larger then than it is now: "On the very day that Texas became the 28th state, the first battle of the Mexican War was fought. The outcome of that war established the Rio Grande as the border between the United States and Mexico. The state's current boundaries were defined as part of the Compromise of 1850, in which Texas relinquished its claim to half of what today is New Mexico and portions of Colorado, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Kansas in exchange for $10 million." So it must have been a size issue. During my lifetime I can't recall anyone making noise about splitting the state up. However, we have had those "eccentric" souls out in West Texas who were calling for Texas secession from the United States. A little too much mescal I'd say.