Chaining Oregon: Surveying The Public Lands of The Pacific Northwest 1851-1855, by Kay Atwood

It goes without saying that surveying is not a sexy subject, but it is one of vital importance. It was not by accident that, in contested frontier areas, that surveyors found themselves highly in danger from restive native tribes who realized that the people squinting into the expensive and esoteric equipment to survey lines on maps were ominous signals of impending land ownership on the part of settlers. Given that the history of American growth and expansion was largely driven by issues related to land ownership, improvement, and speculation, surveyors were figures of immense importance in the growth of the American republic. A surprising number of American heroes, ranging from such people as George Washington, Daniel Boone, Abraham Lincoln, and the more obscure but certainly able figures in this particular book, took upon themselves the sometimes dangerous and often difficult task of surveying land to allow for the orderly growth of American settlements throughout the territory of the United States. If people do not tend to think of such figures as being of signal importance, that is due to their lack of understanding of the fundamental realities of land, much in the same way that people celebrate tactics but ignore logistics, so too they often celebrate exploration or farming or raising animals (and certainly road and railroad building and architecture and construction) but ignore the land surveying that made all of these things possible and profitable.

In an age where everything seems to be political, to the detriment of enjoyment of nearly every aspect of contemporary life, it is perhaps little surprising that in an age as contentious in the United States as the decade before the American Civil War, in a territory subject to intense political rivalries both locally and in Washington DC, that the Oregon territory (which was later subdivided into several states, only two of which had begun to be surveyed during the span of time covered by this book, namely Oregon and Washington), that there would be intense political rivalries regarding who would be given contracts to survey land in particular reasons. There are numerous reasons why this was the case. A friendly surveyor could define land in an advantageous fashion for someone who was already resident in an area being surveyed. Surveyors themselves could profitably moonlight as private surveyors and profit off of claiming land for themselves and others as a result of their professional knowledge and access, and with surveying and registration came a whole suite of elements of the power of government, including political representation, taxation, public education, road building, and the like. Depending on who was hired to survey depended networks of political patronage, power, and profit, and all of these things tend to attract controversy and conflict. We should not be surprised that these things existed then.

If this is a rather ordinary book, it is about an excellent and vitally important subject, and comes as part of a family of books that seeks to uncover the surveying work done throughout the United States in the 19th century that set the stage for the demographic and economic growth of the nation. This particular book is a relatively short one of about 200 pages long. It begins with a foreword, a preface, and an introduction that show the author aware of her sources as well as deeply interested in conveying to the reader the signal importance of surveying in the history of American settlement and expansion. The book is then divided into eleven chronological chapters that tell the development of the core regions of both Oregon and, to a lesser extent, Washington, between 1851 and 1855. First, the author describes the journeys of the original surveying crew to Oregon in spring 1851 (1) and their arrival in Oregon after an adventuresome journey (2). The author then talks about the laying of the Prime meridian of the state (3), which took place in the summer of 1851, as well as the work of defining townships and sections in the Willamette Valley in Fall 1851 (4). This is followed by a detailed discussion of how Oregon and Washington were mapped out chain by chain during the cold and wet winter of 1851 through the summer of 1852 (5). The author turns her attention to battles of patronage politics in fall 1852, when there was a change in regime in Washington DC, with a change of ruling party (6). This is followed by a discussion of the work of the surveyor general in Winter and Spring 1853 (7), as well as the removal and replacement of key figures of the surveying team through the rest of 1853 (8). The author turns her attention to the extension of the Meridian to the south to the often ignored southern part of Oregon whose settlers complained about bias in who got their lands surveyed (9) and claims recognized. This is followed by a discussion of the chaining of the Rogue River Valley (10), as well as the departure of many key surveying figures back to America–namely the East and Midwest where they had come from (11). The book ends with an epilogue that discusses the later fate of the various people discussed earlier in the book, as well as notes, a selected bibliography, and an index.