Post by Diane Merkel on Jun 22, 2007 9:05:58 GMT -6
This may be very useless information, but I thought I'd offer it for anyone who is interested in land surveys.
Article: www.amerisurv.com/content/view/3915/
The Treaty of Laramie in 1868 created the Crow Indian Reservation and established its eastern boundary as "...commencing where the 107th degree of longitude...crosses the south boundary of Montana Territory; thence north along said 107th meridian to the mid channel of the Yellowstone River..." By 1891, the G LO had established the 107th meridian on the ground, using the best equipment, methods and techniques available at the time (this was 12 years after the Battle of Little Big Horn). Beginning in the 1920s, discrepancies in the actual location of the line versus the theoretical the location became known. To address these discrepancies, over the years federal legislation was periodically introduced, but failed to pass.
This was no small discrepancy: one 24-mile long parcel was 900 feet wide at one end, and 4,300 feet wide at the other. Moving the line by congressional mandate had accomplished something that flies in the face of one of our most cherished guidelines: an original monument has no error in position. So when I read about the legislation that applied to Missouri, I groaned; surveying problems can't be solved simply by legislative fiat. Granted, the Montana legislation is different than the Missouri legislation in that the first one "cured" a "problem" in the original work, whereas the second one merely recognizes that a discrepancy exists between the work of two federal agencies and enacts a cure for specific landowners.
Article: www.amerisurv.com/content/view/3915/
