By Ray Cooklis
Cincinnati Enquirer

If Shannon Robinson has his way, a West Texan making a run for the border will find the course about three miles longer. Robinson, a New Mexico state senator, wants to sue Texas to get back 603,485 acres - a three-mile-wide strip along New Mexico's eastern border - wrongly assigned to Texas by an errant survey in 1859.

Anyone who's been through the area knows it's nothing to send a postcard home about. "It's kind of vacant," Robinson allows, "but pretty."

So what's the deal? With apologies to our anti-war friends, it's all about the oil. His bill seeks compensation for lost "subsurface mineral rights, oil and gas royalties and income, property taxes and grazing privileges that New Mexico has not realized."

Then there's state pride over this long-simmering feud. When New Mexico sought statehood in 1910, the feds found that the 1859 surveyor set the 103rd meridian too far west. (Check a map: The New Mexico-Oklahoma border follows that meridian, but then there's a little westward jog when you hit Texas.) Texas' 1910 response: Drop the protest or no statehood. Lawyer Robinson says that was duress, which New Mexico has grounds to challenge.

The debate's getting shootin'-irons-at-20-paces nasty. "There is no doubt that the people's lives in that strip would be vastly improved because they no longer would be Texans," Robinson said on the state Senate floor. An Albuquerque Tribune headline last week screamed: "Waltz off our land, you Texas varmint."

Texans are less than enchanted with the Land of Enchantment. One angry woman from the Texas Strip wrote Robinson saying she'd be buried in New Mexico over her dead body, or something to that effect.

Shifting state borders are not unheard of. Pennsylvania bought the so-called "Erie Triangle" in 1792 to give it a lakefront port - that odd-shaped chimney at the northwest corner of the state, which had been seen as part of New York. It cost $151,640.25, which sounds like a tidy 18th century sum, but Pennsylvania slyly paid in continentals, making the real cost more like a pile of beads and trinkets.

So is New York suing for fraud? At this point, it would be silly - and so is Robinson's land grab. New Mexico lost the strip a century ago. It doesn't matter anymore. "I've always wanted a piece of Texas," Robinson says. He should mosey across the real border and scoop up a shovelful of dust.