Chaining Oregon: Surveying the Public Lands of the Pacific Northwest, 1851-1855

... is a 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 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 inevitably having to work and survive within the political and social whorls and eddies of a frontier democracy, the surveyors themselves, navigating 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.

About the Author:
Kay Atwood is a resident of Ashland, Oregon, and Chaining Oregon is her latest book dealing with the human and environmental history of the Pacific Northwest