Chaining Oregon

by Kay Atwood

Chaining Oregon 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 Chaining Oregon , Kay Atwood has brought the surveyors, their work, and their legacy out of the shadows of history into the deserved light of scholarship. Chaining Oregon 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.

Genres: History

280 pages, Paperback

First published June 25, 2008

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having wondered for a few decades just exactly why the Willamette Stone is where it is, "Chaining Oregon" provided the answer. The Willamette Stone is the origin point for the Willamette Meridian and the Willamette Baseline, the basis for the survey of the Oregon Territory as mandated by the Donation Land Act of 1850. I already knew that.
I have been to this small park countless times in my life. WHY it existed was known to me. Why it was WHERE is was located I finally learned from this book. Learning the answer to that was the impetus to read "Chaining of Oregon." I own a copy of the "Atlas of Oregon" whose maps are cited in this book, but until now I had never sought the answer as to why the stone was located in that place. This book provided that answer.
The Willamette Stone State Heritage Park is a small park located in Portland's West Hill's/Tualatin Mountains with a path from Skyline Boulevard to a small flat area in the woods containing a bench, a US Geodesic survey marker and a plaque describing the Township and Range system.
"Chaining Oregon" is a dry but very interesting history of the initial survey of the Oregon Territory,specifically its interior western valleys, describing the physical difficulties and the politics behind the endeavor. The author gives an excellent accout of the basics of land surveying and the physical and political difficulties of executing those duties by the men contracted with that project.
For me, the insight that a man could emigrate to the Oregon Territory in 1851 as a young twenty something professional, execute his contract and THEN return to "the States" that disabused me of the notion that the Oregon Trail, taught to me as a youth, was a one way ticket. It had never occured to me that one might "return" to the East or "the States" as the narrative describes.
As it is all of the surveyors who survived, leave Oregon and return East.
Any casual student of Northwest history will find this informative.

[Rogue Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atwood read through the field notes of Oregon's first surveyors, those who laid the original plats that defined the landscape for the Donation Land Claim and Homestead acts. The surveyors' accuracy is remarkable given the difficulty of the work and the meager financial reimbursement. Atwood's writing brings me the closest I've been the land I live on now as it was in 1851. Thanks to Chaining Oregon, I learned that a copy of Ives and Hyde's field notes are at the Jackson County surveyor's office, and I can actually see them for myself.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A detailed recounting of the first U.S. surveyors to start recording and documenting the lands of Oregon and Washington. Some nice historical detail about life in the territory in the mid-19th century and an interesting, if basic, introduction to surveying technique in that period.

[Daniel Frontino Elash]

history of so. oregon cadastral surveys. whodunit.


copies: p. 193-202, partial surveys of area from wc to gp.