It says that Trist was authorized to spend up to $30 million and that Polk really wanted more Mexican territory than the US wound up with, but accepted the treaty terms that Trist was able to deliver. The final price was $15 million, and the assumption of another $3 million in claims by Americans against the Mexican government. The article doesn’t say exactly, but to me it would be remarkable if Trist didn’t at least mention the possibility of more money for more land.
As the history books say, the boundaries wound up as they did, and both countries were unstable enough that both suffered through civil wars in short order.
This is slightly different than the OP asked for, but a lot of people don’t realize that the Mississippi Delta and the Mississippi River Delta are two different places, hundreds of miles apart.
I was a little surprised to see that the origins of the Missouri River are only some 25 to 90 miles from the primary origin of the Snake River – all to its west.
A river where the local soil contains whitish clays, silts, chalks, or similar materials often has a milky appearance and ends up being called the Milk River.
Salt Rivers/Creeks are similar. We have a Salt Creek in Oregon which, according to the Wiki article, got its name because there are salt springs alongside it, used as licks by the local fauna. There’s also one down in the OC, which now as mostly been channelized and/or developed over. The Spanish explorers originally named it, but I don’t know why they decided to call it that.
Yet our local 187 -mile-long Willamette beats #4 and #5 combined in terms of volume of water discharge. However, I don’t know if that would still be true if the Colorado and Rio Grande were still in their unaltered natural state.
I’ve always been strangely fascinated by the idea of rivers that just disappear into the desert (or otherwise). You can find images of places along NV’s Humboldt River–little towns with bridges over what looks like a decent sized stream. There’s the Rye Patch reservoir and water recreation area about halfway along its length. But in the end the Humboldt River just dies into the Carson Sink.
I think the reason for the confusion is the fact that the Mississippi Delta is not, technically a delta. It’s an alluvial plain, a place where a river has flooded repeatedly, depositing sediment each time. My guess is that it came to be called a delta because the sediment is similar to the composition of an actual delta, at the mouth of a river.
So much of the water in the Colorado is impounded or used for drinking and irrigation that there’s rarely anything left to actually flow into the ocean.
I long believed that the state of Michigan drained only into the Great Lakes drainage basin. But eventually thru map geekery I discovered it had a few acres, both in the UP and in the lower peninsula, that drained via the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico.
The UP area is by the north shore of Lac Vieux Desert, and drains via that lake and the Wisconsin river into the Old Muddy.
The lower peninsula area is by Critzer Farms via a drainage ditch at 41.77183651369163, -86.47211097102158 that eventually flows south into the Kankakee river and hence eventually into the Mississippi.
This is what I was mostly alluding to, although I am aware the Rio Grande also gets quite dry in places, during the dry season.
There is a fascinating video about the Colorado which I think was produced by National Geographic sometime in the 1970s. In the early '80sI used to watch it in Powell Library at UCLA when I had some time, and I’ve never found it anywhere else. You see steamboats on the Colorado and a lost port that used to be at the mouth, called Thompson’s Landing or Johnston’s Landing or something like that. Since then, I’ve never been able to find anything on that, either, but the video shows you images of derelict mooring posts and dockside fittings, all high and dry and sticking out of caked dry mud. And the photos look to have been taken relatively recently.
For the longest time, I thought “continental divide” actually meant something – like the high pass on Going to the Sun Road. Then, we were driving along I-10 in New Mexico and passed a sign that announced the continental divide, in an area that was completely flat desert in every direction. Seems it can be an abitrary distinction.
You were somewhere near Lordsburg when you saw the sign?
If you thought the continental divide is the line running down through Canada, the U.S., and Mexico where you can (theoretically) pour a glass of water on the ground, and half of it will flow into the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, and the other half will flow into the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of California, it does mean exactly that. But it doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily be traversing the crest of a mountain range when you pass over it.
The Southwest has many high, flat desert areas. The altitude of this region of NM is in the 4000s. The Rocky Mountains peter out in this area, and then start up again as you continue south into Mexico as the Sierra Madre. (Occidental or Oriental, I’m not sure which. Maybe both.).
There’s a shitload of little settlements along the final ship & river channel out to sea. Where, as the saying goes, it’s too thick to drink and too thin to plow.
The Eastern continental divide runs along a ridge in the little Atlanta suburb where I live. In the 19th c., a railroad laid tracks along it. Everything on the north side of those tracks drains into the Gulf of Mexico, via the Chattahoochee River. Everything south goes into the Flint, then into the Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, it’s a modest little ridge.