TOM HENDERSON PULLS HIS PICKUP TRUCK off texas Highway 79 north of Byers, a small North Texas town near the Red River. He parks alongside a grassy bluff south of the long bridge over the river by a green sign that reads “State Line.” Since the south bank of the Red is supposedly the border between Texas and Oklahoma, you’d expect to see sandbars and muddy waters just ahead. But thanks to the forces of nature—aided by years of court rulings and lawsuits—the border is now half a mile south of the river in tall grass and woods. “I always liked that movie Red River, where John Wayne steps out of the river and says he’s in Texas,” says Henderson, whose family has farmed along the Red for a hundred years. “But he wouldn’t be in Texas now.”
Henderson is one of many landowners caught up in the politics of where to draw the line between Texas and Oklahoma. He’s also one of six people appointed in the summer of 1995 by Governor George W. Bush to a state commission charged with finally determining a permanent workable location of the boundary, which has been in dispute ever since the 1821 Treaty of Amity, Settlements and Limits set the Red River’s south bank as the divider between U.S. lands acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase and Spanish possessions in North America.
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Indeed, the long-held notion that the Red River is the legal border between Texas and Oklahoma is more perception than reality. ... All this has caused predictable confusion. “The tax collector often doesn’t know which state the land is in,” Abney says. “There are some instances in which land is not being taxed and others in which Texas and Oklahoma are both trying to tax it.”... Henderson says he has had little recourse when deer hunters in the public lands behind his property have trampled his fences and killed two of his cows, even carving the hindquarters off one. Although his land is in Texas, the land behind his back fence is part of Oklahoma. “So do I call the game wardens in Oklahoma, who have to travel thirty miles and find a bridge to cross to get here?” he asks. “It’s just not feasible for them to do it.”