Book Review/Chaining Oregon
Chaining Oregon:
Surveying Public Lands of the Pacific Northwest, 1881-1855
By Kay Atwood
McDonald & Woodward Publishing Co.
Paperback $27.95
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
Kay Atwood of Ashland, Oregon has timed the release of her new book to coincide with the 150th celebration of Oregon statehood, but the content deals with the unbelievable effort to survey a wilderness territory — including what is now Douglas County — long before statehood.
The unusual title comes from the link chain symbolizing a rugged era, when surveying tools and techniques were literally defining America. The chain was a precision part of a surveyor’s equipment and, as such, had to be calibrated and adjusted frequently, yet was sturdy enough to be dragged through rough terrain for years.
The surveyor’s chain is sixty-six feet or four poles long, and is composed of one hundred links with a tally mark at the end of every ten links.
The obstacles the surveyors faced is revealed in great detail in the book which begins when Oregon Territory’s Surveyor General John Bower Preston and his cadre of engineers began this monumental task in 1851 at a time when settlements in what later became Oregon was a helter skelter occurrence. There was little precedent for the legal description of private landholding.
Congress had declared Oregon a territory in August of 1848 and began encouraging settlers and 6,000 emigrants arrived by 1850 swelling the population to almost 12,00 people. On Sept. 27, 1850 Congress passed the Oregon Donation Land Act to further promote settlement of the Oregon Territory. That act allowed 230 acres for any white male over 18 and included an unprecedented addendum allowing the settler’s wife to claim 320 acres in her own name. "Reputedly, this was the first federal legislation to grant women property rights," Atwood said. "The provision guaranteed an influx of women into the territory."
But still the settler’s claims were little more than deeded guess work measured in trees, streams and hills. In some cases, the acreage was more than they could farm and wanting to divide and sell the land, they pressed the government for an official survey of their claim boundaries.
Atwood reveals that one day after the Donation Land Act passed in Congress, President Millard Fillmore appointed William Gooding as Oregon’s first surveyor general, however Gooding declined. On Nov. 22, 1850, President Fillmore named John B. Preston, 33, a civil engineer and an attorney, to the post. Preston organized a staff carefully and set up an office in Oregon City in a rented space. On May 28, Preston gave James Freeman contract number one, the first federal survey of the Willamette meridian south to "the Umpquah (correct spelling) Valley, and estimated 210 miles." Contract number two went to William Ives to survey the Willamette meridian west to the Pacific Ocean and east to the summit of the Cascade mountains.
The contract offered Freeman and Ives $20 a mile for the surveys. The two men had to finance their own expeditions, because they could only be paid after Preston certified that the contract had been satisfactorily completed.
Atwood’s extensive research on this book has much detail of the early days of Douglas County, including when part of the county was called Umpqua County. One anecdote she includes is when Preston takes a three week trip to the Umpqua Valley with Nathaniel Coe, the newly appointed Oregon postal agent to appoint postmasters for Umpqua County, a region that would eventually become part of Douglas and Coos counties.
Another interesting anecdote is about Jesse Applegate complaining to Preston about errors in the surveys. Applegate also suggested that the Umpqua Mountains presented a barrier for "the true horizontal distant on a straight line across the range … by the ordinary mode of measurement." Applegate described the iron-laced rock that foiled the magnetic compass and the dense forests that "rendered the solar compasses useless" and concluded that "to extend the surveys across the steep ridges between the Umpqua and Rogue valleys would be impractical."
Atwood’s book is a treasure throve for historians seeking information about the early settlement of Oregon. It puts flesh on the work of these brave surveyors and brings their legacy out of the shadows and into the deserved light of scholarship. Atwood used the surveyor’s personal diaries, letters and field notes to achieve this masterpiece of writing by weaving personal detail into the broader content of the book.
She commends Preston for his pioneer work in surveying Oregon. Preston was eventually replaced as Oregon’s first Surveyor General by a political patronage decision when a new president took office.
It came at a time when he was grieving over the death of his young daughter.
"Chaining Oregon" is a comprehensive history of Oregon and as Atwood notes, "these surveyors were not lured to the Oregon territory by a longing for gold or for a lust for adventure. They were trained engineers and scientists gifted to the artist’s power of observation."
(Bill Duncan is the editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column for The News-Review. He can be reached at bduncan@newsreview.info.)