Maps - we use them to figure our way around places, to get from one place to another. Or sometimes, highlight them to mark where we've been. But a gas station road map used as an integral part of solving an international border dispute? That's what a 1958 Esso Map of El Paso, Texas did. The 1958 Esso El Paso, Texas map that help resolve the Chamizal dispute. The central issue was the boundary between El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and the shifting Rio Grande. Background: Ending the Mexican-American War, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago sets the Rio Grande as the Texas/Mexico Border. Sixteen years later, in 1864, severe flooding changed the course of the Rio Grande around El Paso starting a century-long border dispute. The Rio Grande shifted southward, and an area of Mexican farmland known as the Chamizal Tract was now in the United States. An 1884 agreement between the two countries established that the center of the river's deepest ...
Because every road has a story.