[silver_pilate]

Haha...yeah, I guess I've been corrupted by the uniformist media.

What I don't understand is why Texas gave up so much of its territory just before it was annexed.

Texas use to include over 2/3's of New Mexico and slivers of Colorado and Wyoming. As the Republic of Texas had no real resources other than land (we have oil, but at that time, it wasn't in demand), and thus had become endebted to the United States for financing.

Another little fact on the side, when the original capital was burned, Texas didn't have money to pay for the building of a new capital. What we did have was land. The contractor was paid in the form of the XIT ranch, one of the largest ranches to ever opperate covering 3,050,000 acres of land. The ranch was twice as large as the state of Rhode Island, and the finances it produced were used to build the new building, which, by the way, is the only capital building taller than the US capital building (which is forbidden by law, but since we were a country when it was built, it doesn't apply).

Anyway, before Texas was annexed, it sold the United States what is now New Mexico, and its other holdings to the north in payment for debt. However, by law set down in the constitution, no state can be endebted to the government. Texas should have kept its territories with the forsight that when it was annexed, all debts would be dropped. Then everything really would have been bigger in Texas.



--nathan