Border Battles: Should Part of Oregon Join Idaho?

There is a petition circulating in Wallowa County right now which would relieve the county commissioners of an obligatory two meetings per year to consider the advisability of moving Oregon’s state border to make us—and several other Oregon counties—part of Idaho. I’m told we need about 280 signatures to get it to the ballot, and organizers say they want 500 to make sure it does.

This should not be a great problem, as the first time around, when several Eastern Oregon counties overwhelmingly supported the measure, it passed in Wallowa County by a mere seven votes. I don’t know how the required meetings have gone in other places, but there has been no big hubbub about them here, and my guess is that more opponents than supporters of this border change have showed up for the meetings.

But it raises the question of borders. And right now, there is talk of expanding our national borders to include Greenland. That’s a different kettle of fish, you say, yet in my brief lifetime we’ve added two states (Hawaii and Alaska) and turned down statehood for Puerto Rico.

They were already territories, I know, but they had not been our territories forever, and there was opposition as well as support for Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico becoming first US territories, and then US states. The staters won in Alaska and Hawaii, lost in Puerto Rico.

The machinations that went into acquiring territories, and in the many cases, making them states, are varied and complicated by wars, money, and dealmaking. President Polk was the champion president in terms of expansion — annexing Texas, and adding huge parts of the Southwest, including California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of several other states with the Mexican War.

In our Northwest, Polk gained the “Oregon Country, which included Washington, Oregon, and part of Idaho. He was unable to get the border set at 54’40” — remember “54’50 or fight” — and had to settle for the 49th parallel as our country’s northern border. Keep in mind that the U.S. currently claims five major inhabited territories: Puerto Rico, U.S.
Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands. I don’t know of efforts to advance statehood for any of the above.

If President Trump has his way on Greenland, there has been no talk of statehood. (Greenland is considered by the international community as a territory belonging to Denmark, with a gradual loosening of colonial controls and advance of self-government.) Trump has not announced a status for future Greenland, nor even advanced ideas of how it might be governed from Washington.

I am not sure of how this all applies to Oregon and Idaho, but wanted to point out that borders are made (and changed) by humans, and the inhabitants of the lands are often minor characters in the decisions and reconstructions that come with changing borders. Even in the small matter of states, where languages, currency, a constitution and body of law are held in common, changes in borders make for substantial changes in individual lives. The fights over slave and free states got us a Civil War!

If parts of Oregon were severed and became parts of Idaho, issues of taxation, medical law, and land-use planning would immediately become matters of concern. We erstwhile Oregonians would have to get used to a sales tax of 6%, although adjustments in property and income taxes would likely make for reductions. Land use laws would loosen considerably. When former Oregon state rep Mark Simmons came to Enterprise to promote the Idaho idea, he allowed that some land-use laws might be grandfathered in to reduce the impacts of the free-wheeling Idaho regulations and the suburban sprawl of Boise to the Oregon border.

Finally, we would see some major changes in health care, as Idaho’s strict limits on abortion have caused many OGBYNs and family physicians to leave the state. Personally, I think that there are more important things to warrant our attention than the
Idaho-Oregon border and a U.S. acquisition of Greenland.