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REVIEWS
CHAINING OREGON: SURVEYING THE PUBLIC LANDS OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST, 1851–1855
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by Kay Atwood
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| The McDonald & Woodward Publishing Company, Granville, Ohio, 2008. Illustrations, photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 279 pages. $27.95 paper. |
| When the U.S. Congress first declared that the fertile lands of the Oregon Territory would be surveyed and donated to settlers with valid claims, the destiny of the Pacific Northwest was set. Author Kay Atwood describes in detail how the rectangular survey of the Territory, prescribed by the 1850 Donation Land Claim Act, became etched on maps and the land itself. Through painstaking research of the first surveyors' hand-written field notes, diaries, and correspondence, she documents the perseverance of those who meticulously measured America's new lands. |
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Atwood's detailed account of the surveyors' personal, political, and physical struggles during the years from 1851 to 1855 fills a significant gap in Oregon's early cultural and environmental history. She argues: "The surveyors' isolation and the complexity of their occupation have kept us from fully recognizing the heroic qualities that enabled them to persevere and the magnitude of their contribution to Oregon's settlement" (p. 2). The surveyors' story was waiting to be told, and Atwood has done it well. |
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Chaining Oregon goes deep into the lives of the surveyors across a thin but significant slice of time in Northwest history. Atwood plumbed the depths much as the surveyors plunged deep into "ravines choked with fallen timber" to accomplish their work (p. 36). For those interested in this aspect of Oregon's cultural and environmental history, the book has much to offer. Perhaps its best contributions for landscape reconstructionists, ecologists, and wildlife biologists are its maps and rich bibliography. General readers will find it engaging and informative, while historians will appreciate the archival research contributing to the physical and political conditions of this time. As a historian of science, I wanted more detail on the survey methods and equipment. Although the author includes fine renderings of the solar compass and theodolite, she shortchanges descriptions of their function and use. |
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Why the title Chaining Oregon? It refers to the sixty-six-foot-long Gunter's chain that was stretched along each section and township line, thereby "chaining" a "heretofore 'wild' land by the superimposition of the Enlightenment's Cartesian grid," as historian and archaeologist Jeff LaLande explains in the foreword. The surveyors' lines did not follow the easy contours of established Indian trails. They followed the mathematical and astronomical dictates of the Cartesian grid — across steep canyons, acres of thick brush, and wide, marshy floodplains. |
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Atwood was exceptionally thorough in her archival research — not just the surveyors' original notes and maps, which are now easily available on the U.S. Bureau of Land Management cadastral survey website, but their letters, administrative correspondence, newspaper articles, personal diaries, and family archives. She reached across the country and into Canada to find the documents that would piece together the lives of the first Oregon Surveyor, General John Preston, and his four primary deputy surveyors, William and Butler Ives, George Hyde, and James Freeman. She found that their family connections and political affiliations often intersected with awards of prime survey contracts, timely payments, and public support or admonishment of their work. |
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Readers of this chronologically organized account, however, may sometimes feel the thread of an interesting story has abruptly ended, only to be picked up several pages later when the time is right. Atwood's description of Preston's political struggles as Surveyor General and patronage of favored deputy surveyors is intriguing, but it was frustrating to have the story interrupted by less related activities simply because the timeline called for it. |
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One weakness was Atwood's tendency to glorify the surveyors who "helped to sustain the continuum of western expansion, shape the mid nineteenth-century landscape, and promote growth" (p. 4). In doing so, she may have unwittingly woven a far too positivistic account. What about the Native people? Although Congress authorized negotiation of treaties for removing them from their lands, it was not until 1857 that treaties were ratified and the Grande Ronde and Siletz reservations established. Indians were forcefully sent to the reservations to make way for the flood of emigrants. Atwood thoughtfully considers the ultimate impact of white settlement that "shattered centuries of Indian culture," but, overall, she gives light treatment of the Indians' plight (p. 185). Some may find her march-of-progress approach to this story disconcerting. |
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The first surveyors were faced with a formidable task. Their ability to do it well was extraordinary — despite clouds, rain, and trees obscuring the sun by which they established true North, the unruly vegetation their axe men relentlessly cleared, and the destruction of corner stakes and mounds by cows. But they were obliged by oath to make precise measurements for, as Surveyor General Preston proclaimed, "... on the truthfulness will depend the value of the Surveys" (p. 35). Kay Atwood brought their truth forward to our time — demanding our respect for her work as well as the maps and land boundaries we take for granted today. |
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| TINA K. SCHWEICKERT
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| Oregon State University |
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