The night a customer tried to redraw a state border on a napkin

I work at a bar in Portland, and about 5 years back this guy comes in with a pile of old road maps. He starts laying them out on the counter and says the Oregon-California border is drawn wrong. He pulls out a pen and starts redrawing it on a napkin, claiming some surveyor messed up in 1853. Another customer got into it with him, and they argued for an hour over where the line should actually be. I kept the napkin after he left. It's a sloppy mess of a drawing with a big X through half of California. Now every time I see a weird old map at a thrift store, I buy it. Has anyone else picked up a map that came with a story attached to it from a stranger?

2 comments

2 Comments

camerona796d ago

Ha! I totally get why you kept that napkin, but honestly I think the guy was onto something. The border surveyors back then were working with crappy tools and sketchy landmarks, and there's a ton of documented evidence that early state lines were just plain wrong in places. Do you really think the people who drew maps by hand on horseback got every mile perfect? California and Oregon both have weird jagged sections that could easily be off by a few dozen miles. I'd bet money that napkin was closer to the truth than the official line. Plus, if the border was actually wrong, it would mess up property deeds and tax records for hundreds of thousands of people today. That's a big deal, not just a bar argument. Maps are opinions made by humans, and humans screw up all the time.

joseph_hart6d ago

Remember reading something a few years back about how the original Oregon Territory line was actually drawn using a misread of an old Spanish map... something about a river that didn't exist where they thought it did. So @camerona79 you're probably right, those guys were working blind compared to what we got now with GPS and all that. And yeah, messing with property deeds would be a nightmare, people get real touchy about their land lines. But here's the thing, even if that napkin was closer to correct, nobody's gonna redo the whole border now. Too much money and too many lawsuits involved... easier to just live with the mistake, you know?