COGenWeb

More notes on lines these pages already print.

LaPlata, the eighteenth name

Counting the Parent column of the county table by hand turns up eighteen rows reading exactly Original County: Arapahoe, Boulder, Clear Creek, Conejos, Costilla, Douglas, El Paso, Fremont, Gilpin, Huerfano, Jefferson, Lake, LaPlata, Larimer, Park, Pueblo, Summit, and Weld.

The front page's Formation of the State of Colorado section, already quoted in full in wave one's note on that list, names seventeen counties for September 1861, not eighteen. LaPlata is not one of the names it gives, even though its own row carries the identical two-word label the other seventeen share.

Matching the two lists name for name

Setting the front page's seventeen beside the table's eighteen Original County rows, every front-page name has a matching row: Arapahoe, Boulder, Clear Creek, Costilla, Douglas, El Paso, Fremont, Gilpin, Conejos in place of the front page's Guadalupe, Huerfano, Jefferson, Lake, Larimer, Park, Pueblo, Summit, and Weld. That is seventeen matches, name for name, once Guadalupe and Conejos are counted as the one name the front page's own parenthesis treats them as.

LaPlata is the eighteenth row marked Original County, and it has no counterpart on the front page's list. The front page does not mention LaPlata anywhere in the formation paragraphs wave one quoted, not even as a later addition or a renamed county the way Guadalupe is folded into Conejos.

The table's own link for the LaPlata row does not even point at a cogenweb.com page the way every other county link does; it points at usgenwebsites.org/COLaplata/, a different domain entirely. That link detail sits separately from the Original County question, but it is one more way this particular row looks unlike its eighteen-row neighborhood.

LaPlata's own Created year and seat

The table gives LaPlata 1861 as its Created year, the same year as the other seventeen. The year matches. The label matches: Original County, word for word, the identical two words used for Arapahoe and the rest. Only the front page's own naming sentence leaves LaPlata out of its list of seventeen names for that year.

Durango is LaPlata's County Seat in the table. No county seat is given on the front page's formation section at all, for any of the seventeen names it does list, so Durango is not itself a point of comparison between the two pages either way, only a fact this table alone supplies, the way every other County Seat cell in the table is also a fact only the table itself carries.

The table gives LaPlata no coordinator name at all, only the external usgenwebsites.org link in place of the County column's usual cogenweb.com address. Whether that external site still names an active coordinator of its own is not something the county table's own row states one way or the other, since the row's Coordinator cell simply reads OPEN FOR ADOPTION like thirty of the table's other rows.

A table that counts eighteen where a sentence counts seventeen

Both pages can be accurate on their own terms. The front page's sentence is introduced as the first territorial assembly created the first seventeen counties in September 1861, and then names seventeen, no more and no fewer. The table is a different document, built later and separately, marking Original County on whatever rows its builder judged to belong in that category, independent of the front page's own earlier sentence.

Whether LaPlata's 1861 date and Original County label are themselves accurate to an outside historical record is not something either cogenweb.com page settles. What is checkable from the pages alone is narrower: the front page's named list and the table's labeled list do not have the same membership, and LaPlata is the one name present in one and absent from the other.

Fremont and El Paso, inside the same eighteen

LaPlata is not the only row in this eighteen whose year raises a question. Fremont's Created year is 1859 and El Paso's is 1874, both still labeled Original County alongside the sixteen rows that genuinely say 1861, a mismatch covered in full in a separate note in this wave. LaPlata's own year, 1861, does not share that particular problem; its issue is absence from the front page's list, not disagreement with its own table year, a cleaner kind of gap than Fremont's or El Paso's own year mismatch.

Three different kinds of gap, then, sit inside this same eighteen-row group: LaPlata, present in the table but absent from the front page; Fremont and El Paso, present on both pages but carrying table years the front page's own September 1861 does not match. The label Original County covers all three kinds without distinguishing between them, printed identically on all eighteen rows regardless of which kind of gap, if any, sits behind a given name.

Fifteen of the eighteen Original County rows have neither problem: their names appear on the front page's own list, and their table years read 1861 without exception. LaPlata, Fremont, and El Paso are the three names where one or the other check fails, out of eighteen names carrying the identical two-word label.

Where this leaves a reader of both pages

A reader who only read the front page would count seventeen founding counties and would not expect LaPlata among them. A reader who only read the table would see eighteen rows making the same two-word claim in sequence, with nothing marking LaPlata's row as different from the other seventeen beside it. Reading both, as this note does, is the only way the gap becomes visible at all, since neither page cross-references the other's count anywhere in its own text.

Neither page corrects the other. The front page was not revised to add an eighteenth name, and the table was not revised to drop LaPlata's label. Both pages, as captured here, still make their own separate claim side by side, years after whichever one of the two was written first.

This same habit of two pages making separate, uncross-referenced claims about the same set of facts runs through most of this wave: Greenwood's and Kit Carson's own mismatched dates, Fremont's and El Paso's years against the front page's seventeen, and Broomfield's named coordinator against the table's OPEN FOR ADOPTION cell, covered in the notes on Greenwood and on Broomfield respectively.

Questions

How many rows does the county table mark Original County?

Eighteen, counted directly from the Parent column: the front page's seventeen plus LaPlata.

Does the front page mention LaPlata at all?

Not in the formation paragraphs wave one quoted. LaPlata does not appear among the seventeen names given for September 1861.

Is LaPlata's Created year different from the other seventeen?

No. The table gives it 1861, the same year as the rest of the Original County rows; its gap is absence from the front page's list, not a different year.