4 CORNERS - IS IT OR ISN'T IT?

If you’ve ever been on a vacation and stopped at the 4 Corners Monument – that place in the middle of nowhere that purports to be the point where the corners of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado touch – you may have thought you could add all four states to the list of states you’ve visited. But you may have been wrong! Or, if you read the right explanation you have been right. Confused? There is a real answer, according to the government, that says wrong is right. (So what else is new?)

There was a tiny insignificant little article in the newspaper Thursday morning about the 4 Corners Monument that says this Monument is not where it is supposed to be. Seems like all these years vacationing people have had their picture taken with one appendage touching in each state’s quarter, thinking they were doing a remarkable feat, when in actuality the Government’s placement was off by over 1800 ft.

When I read the headline and first paragraph, I thought to myself, “My gosh, if you can’t believe where the government says a boundary is, what CAN you believe?” (The next thought was something on the order of, “Well, can you believe ANYTHING the government says?” and quickly I thought that sounded very jaded so I erased it from my mind.)

But there seems to be a logical explanation for it, although I had to do some searching to find out the “real” answer. Taken from an Associated Press article that was much more detailed than the one appearing in the LA Times, here is what they say:

The marker of the only location in the U.S. where the boundaries of four states meet was placed almost dead on in 1875, said Dave Doyle, chief geodetic surveyor for the National Geodetic Survey, which defines and manages a national coordinate system.

Still, Doyle said, the marker showing the intersection of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah is just a relative smidgen east of where it should have been placed: 1,807.14 feet, to be exact. That's about the length of six football fields.

But Doyle calls the placement a "home run" given the limited tools surveyors had to work with back then. "Their ability to replicate that exact point — what they did was phenomenal….”

So here, the government says it’s a little off, but that’s ok. In 1875 the government finalized the boundaries based on a statute that created Colorado’s western boundary and they mandated the surveyors to use the measurement as taken from the old Naval Observatory in Washington DC. That calculation yields the 1800+ foot disparity.

But today we don’t measure things from that Observatory. We measure from Greenwich – and using today’s standard (from Greenwich), the monument is about 2.5 miles off.

To complicate matters, somehow the Supreme Court got involved in this measurement, which is way too detailed to even investigate.

However, apparently once the marker was placed, the spot became “legal” and “final” and not subject to change. There are 4 states involved and 2 Indian tribes – and apparently no one wants to get into a pushing and shoving match to move the marker anywhere.

"Where the marker is now is accepted," Doyle said. "Even if it's 10 miles off, once it's adopted by the states, which it has been, the numerical errors are irrelevant. It becomes the legal definition" of the Four Corners.

That made me laugh! So the government says since the marker is fairly close to being accurate, we are going to make it be accurate, even though it isn’t really. It kind of makes sense. Maybe like a parent issuing an order and then when asked by their child why, answering “Because I said so!”

Isn’t it amazing what strange things can turn up in a newspaper? Even stranger, I know, is that something like this can get my research juices going so early in the morning?

I find there are two extraneous leftovers from this informative little article and from the picture of the marker above. One is the pesky Supreme Court involvement (“How?” & “Why,” my inquisitive nature yells out). And the other is reading a notation on the monument pictured above that says “Cadastral survey.” What on earth is that? I never heard of such a thing. That answer may just appear in another blog down the road. A Cadastral Survey, something everyone should know about, right?