Chaining Oregon : surveying the public lands of the Pacific Northwest, 1851-1855

This is the first comprehensive history of the early federal surveyors of the Pacific Northwest, the work they performed for the US General Land Office between 1851 and 1855, the contribution their efforts made to the westerly movement of American settlement, and the order they imposed on the land of the western valleys and adjacent mountains in what are now the states of Oregon and Washington. When Oregon Territory's Surveyor General John B Preston and his cadre of engineers arrived in the Oregon region in 1851, there was little precedent for the legal systematic description of private landholding, but when the last of these surveyors left in 1855, much of the western interior valleys of Oregon and Washington territories, from Puget Sound to the Oregon-California border, lay measured in the precise pattern of townships and sections that characterized the US Rectangular Land Survey System. While inescapably having to work and survive within the political and social whorls and eddies of a frontier democracy, the surveyors themselves, traipsing for months at a time across what was to them marginally or completely unsettled land, typically were out of view of the general public - and have frequently remained out of view of historians as well. With this book, Kay Atwood has brought the surveyors, their work, and their legacy out of the shadows of history into the deserved light of scholarship. The book is made up of eleven chapters, along with an Introduction and an Epilogue, notes, a bibliography, period photographs, and historic and contemporary maps. The work is both accessible and substantive; its flowing style will appeal to the general reader while its substance will be valued by historians, surveyors, geographers, archeologists, environmental historians, and others with interests in the people, the processes, and places that make up this work. The historic images provide views of the places that the surveyors worked, the tools that they used, and the maps that they made -- along with the elements of the landscape that they recorded as they went abut their work.

Author Notes

Kay Atwood is a resident of Ashland, Oregon, and Chaining Oregon is her latest book dealing with the human and environmental history of the Pacific Northwest

Foreword	p. vii
Preface	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Chapter 1 Spring, 1851: Out to Oregon	p. 7
Chapter 2 Summer, 1851: On Line in Oregon Territory	p. 31
Chapter 3 Summer, 1851: Meridian	p. 55
Chapter 4 Fall, 1851: Township and Section in the Willamette Valley	p. 75
Chapter 5 Winter, 1851 - Summer, 1852: Chain by Chain	p. 95
Chapter 6 Fall, 1852: Politics and Patronage	p. 117
Chapter 7 Winter and Spring, 1853: Surveyor General	p. 131
Chapter 8 1853: Removal and Replacement	p. 145
Chapter 9 1854: Meridian South	p. 155
Chapter 10 1854: Chaining the Rogue River Valley	p. 173
Chapter 11 1855: Back to America	p. 193
Epilogue	p. 213
Notes	p. 219
Selected Bibliography	p. 249
Index	p. 257

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