There’s a 60-foot wide strip of land that runs through three states along the length of the United States border known as the ‘Roosevelt Reservation.’ The federal and tribal lands that form the 632-mile long strip account for about a third of the 2000-mile long US-Mexico border. All the rest is Texas.
Teddy Roosevelt, pragmatic visionary that he was, saw a need to keep an eye out towards the South and leave some maneuvering room, as there were already problems with bandito incursions and smuggling going on across the borders.
…In 1907, Theodore Roosevelt in a Presidential Proclamation (35 Stat. 2136) established the reservation in order to keep all public lands along the border in California, Arizona, and New Mexico “free from obstruction as a protection against the smuggling of goods between the United States and Mexico”.[2][3][4] Texas was excluded…
