The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 39, July 1935 - April, 1936 Page: 257
346 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Jackson's Neches Claim, 1829-1836
it appears there was some confusion and redundancy in nomen-
clature, but nowhere does it appear that the Neches had ever been
called the "Sabine."
The American speculators of the Southwest, anxious to have
the extensive territory (with Nacogdoches as center) between the
Sabine and Neches and south of Red River come into the posses-
sion of the United States-though preferable would be the acqui-
sition of all of Texas-, found grounds easily in this ancient con-
fusion in nomenclature for their assertion that the iNeches was
the real Sabine. And so they came to find it easy to claim and
perhaps to imagine, quite contrary to actual fact, that the Neches
was the more considerable of the two streams and must for that
additional reason have been the river intended as boundary by
the negotiators of the Florida treaty-as if Adams and Onis did
not know what they were doing when they ran the line according
to the Melish map ! John Sibley, an old resident of Natchitoches,
Louisiana, who had some expectation of being appointed by Presi-
dent Monroe as one of the joint commissioners to survey the treaty
boundary with Spain's commissioners, wrote on October 29, 1821,
privately :
There will be a difficulty about the River Sabine. The Main
Branch is the Nechez, which is beyond Nacogdoches. The treaty
obliges the Commissioners to begin in the Sea at the Mouth of
Sabine & keep up on the West Bank. By the old maps it lost the
name of Sabine from the Junction of the Nechez which is about
sixty miles from its mouth. & the Branch that Modens [moderns?]
calls Sabine used to be called the Mexicano River. Should we be
able to fix the Netchez as the Boundary it will give us an acces-
sion of a tract of country of abount one hundred miles by three
report to the Mexican government in November, 1827, on the Louisiana-
Texas boundary question (published as a pamphlet in Mexico in 1828;
reprinted in Louisiana Historical Quarterly, I, 21-43), in which he speaks
of the "Sabinas or Mexican River" some leagues east of Nacogdoches.
Jedidiah Morse, in his American Gazetteer (Boston, 1804), also evidently
refers to the Sabine when he speaks of the "Mexicano River or Adayes, in
Louisiana," for he adds: "Fort Adayes stands on its north-eastern side,
20 miles from Natchitoches."
As of possible interest, it may be noted, incidentally, as the probable
origin of the name of the later short-lived "Fredonian Republic" in Texas,
that Morse in the 1804 edition of his Agmerican Gazetteer (Introduction
and Appendix) suggested and argued at length for "Fredonia" as a new
and more suitable name for the United States, a "generic name" which
"shall honourably distinguish our country from the rest of the world,"
being more eloquent of our political principles than "America" or
"Columbia."257
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 39, July 1935 - April, 1936, periodical, 1936; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101095/m1/283/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.