Starting in 1785 the General Land Office Assumed Responsibility for the Sur- To Measure It has been said that "Good ences make good neighbors." -greement over boundaries, whether between Nations or inividuals, also make good eighbors; conversely, wars and xpensive litigation have resulted when boundaries were poorly efined or were in dispute. A clay tablet, dating back 5,000 ears, shows a map of a surveyed portion of the Kingdom of Assyria. References to the measure of land and to boundary markers are also found in the Old Testament, along with proscription of penalties for those who remove such markers. By the time the Colonies had gained their independence, there were deep concerns about the orderly development of the western lands, and the need to record titles and mark boundaries was clearly understood. As soon as the Continental Congress could turn its attention from the winning of the war, the matter of western lands received prompt attention. While all were agreed that the recording of land titles and the marking of boundaries of private lands was most important, they soon fell into controversy over methods and systems. The Southerners believed that a man should be free to go anywhere he wanted to find suitable land, and that once he found it, he should be allowed to lay out his holdings in any configuration he wanted to. This system, known as "metes and bounds," had been followed in most of the colonies and by the settlers in Tennessee and Kentucky. However, the New Englanders favored a rectangular system of survey with boundary lines running north-south and east-west. The debate was bitter, but the New Englanders prevailed, and the Ordinance of 1785 made the survey of public domain a prerequisite to settlement, and called for the rectangular system of cadastral survey. Cadastral survey has been defined as the art of creating, recreating, marking and defining of boundaries of tracts of land. When the Bureau of Land Management inherited the functions of the General Land Office, it became the Nation's final authority on all matters pertaining to the survey of the public lands. Once a survey has been made and accepted by the Bureau, the boundaries established become final. Our present system of public land survey still retains the basic elements set forth in the Ordinance of 1785, but subsequent legislation and regulations have added refine ments. Under the cadastral system the public domain is plotted into a grid of squares, each approximately six miles to the side, called "town ships." Before any measurement can be made, the surveyor must define an initial point for which he knows the exact latitude and longitude. From that initial point he runs two lines, one north-south, the other east-west. The north-south line becomes a principal meridian and is identified by a name-the Salt Lake Meridian, for example. The east-west line becomes the base line for that meridian. Working along the principal meridian and the base line, the surveyor sets township corners at sixmile intervals, and then, by extension, the tract is marked off into a grid. Each of the six-mile squares is a township of 36 square miles, or approximately 23,040 acres. Any specific township can then be located according to its relationship to the principal meridian and the base line that intersects it. The township is further divided into sections of one-mile squares containing 640 acres. Individual sections are identified by a numbering system that starts with section 1 in the northeast corner of the township and ends with section 36 in the southeast corner. The section can be further subdivided into quarter sections of 160 acres which became the basic unit under the Homestead Act of 1862. Quarter sections can be divided into 1/8 sections of 80 acres or into 1/16 sections of 40 acres. etc. (see figure 3) There are advantages and disadvantages in the rectangular system of survey. From the surveyor's point of view, it simplifies mapping and record keeping since lines are straight and corners are square. It also provides a simple but definitive means of identifying a given tract of land. From the settler's point of view, the rectangular system forced him to take undesirable land along with that he deemed desirable. However, this disadvantage may have been more than offset since there was less chance of boundary disputes and fewer cases of expensive litigation than there would have been under a system of metes and bounds. What may seem simple in theory often becomes difficult to execute. Marking boundaries with straight lines running north-south and east- Another problem is the curvature of the earth which causes straight lines running north and south to draw together as they approach the poles. For this reason a tract of land laid out along such lines is not quite a perfect square, and its angles are not quite perfect right angles. In such a measurement the line marking the north boundary of the section is slightly shorter than the line marking the south boundary (presuming of course, that you are in the northern hemisphere.) Now in a single section of land the difference between the length of the north and south boundary is so slight that it makes no real difference. But if the northsouth lines are extended far enough, a sizable distortion is bound to appear. For this reason, surveyors measuring along the principal meridian establish what is |