PLSO The Oregon Surveyor Nov/Dec 2018

24 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 41, No. 6 went. When Joe Polly and a searching par- ty came in a week later, they found one horse on top of a huge felled log, high off the ground, close beside the trail, the last mighty leap of an animal in terror. The oth- er horse had made it to a small opening, and no more. But they looked for days before they found the mailman. He had hidden in a small gully. They found him, his clothes and skin burned away, reclin- ing against a log, a short piece of steel rod held firmly in his hand. It was the inside part of his buggy whip, with the rattan burned off.” Further south, near the Honor Camp he writes” the fire tore down the hill and paint began to blister on the fifteen buildings that comprised Yacolt. Some of the elder folks looked at the terrifying spectacle and said it was the end of the world, sure enough. The entire popula- tion went to a nearby creek and stayed there all night. Next morning, they found Yacolt blistered here and there, but intact. Themain fire had stopped less than a half mile from the settlement and had been hot enough to make paint run from that distance.” Holbrook continues, “No man who has stumbled through the thickwarm ashes and over the blackened windfalls in the wake of a devastating forest fire has failed to be struck by the scene. It is un- forgettable. The stark silhouettes of trees, the stumps like sable tombstones, the acres as far as the eye can reach all bar- ren and smoking.” (See figure 2). With those scenes in mind, consider the prospects of finding wooden survey evi- dence remaining in such an area. It is hard to get too optimistic about finding cor- ners or accessories after they have been subjected to the blow-torch effect of ma- jor fires like those mentioned above. Yet, through quirks of nature, it has still sur- vived in isolated situations. Some of those in the Yacolt Burn are recounted here. Figure 2: View looking south- easterly from the “mesa” on top of Bell Mountain, 1969. US Deputy Surveyor C.A. Homan was awarded Contract 415 to subdivide Town- ship 4 North, Range 4 East, W.M. in 1897. Special instructions were added in 1899 by the GLO (after all the corners had been initially set) to replace the wood posts with marked stones wherever possible. “George”, mentioned earlier, had found a section corner in the southeast quarter of the township. He recovered a couple BT snags and found the original marked stone. That area was one that had small outcroppings (maybe 100 feet in diam- eter) of solid slab rock here and there. One such opening happened to be next to the corner in question. While walking through it, George noticed a wood post on the ground. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be the original wood post set in 1897 that had been removed and thrown away after replacing it with the stone. Through a quirk of topography, the winds bearing the firestorm either lifted a bit right there or a whirlwind siphoned the heat away. Whatever the cause, it allowed the post to remain intact, right where Homan had tossed it, the scrib- ing still distinct and only slightly charred and case-hardened for the next 70 years. George had brought it back to the office and showed everyone, me included. It was indeed a rare find and I regret to report that he later gave it to an inmate (go fig- ure) and that inmate and the post have long since disappeared. If I had beenmore alert, I would have taken it into “protec- tive custody”. Brilliant and enlightening biographies of C.A. Homan, John Trutch, and Robert Webster appear in Jerry Olson’s soon to be published book, “Surveying North of the River.” It is a voluminous compila- tion of all the deputy surveyors who had contracts in Washington, preceded by a synopsis of the development of the GLO in the Oregon Territory, starting in 1853. It also lists the contracts for each surveyor as well as pictures of themand their grave- stones. (“Surveying South of the River” is a similar compilation for Oregon surveyors and is about 90% complete.) Many who have retraced old Deputy Surveyors will no doubt be interested in learning more about those individuals whose footsteps they have attempted to follow.) Go to www.olsonengr.com and click on “Jerry Olson’s Books” or “Surveying History” on the upper right corner of the homep- age.; then click on “General Land Office Surveyors of Washington”; then click on “Biographies F to L” (for Homan) and “S to Z” for Trutch and Webster. T3N, R3E, W.M.; Northeast Corner of Section 12, Clark County, WA Onemorningafter arrivingatwork, “George” announced that he had been up on the “1410 Road” yesterday and had talked to a local surveyor who was locating the boundaries of a private quarter-section surrounded by state lands. This fellow (I don’t recall his name) had purported to have found the Northeast corner of Sec- tion 12. “George” expressed doubt about this since the corner was a wood post with 4 very small Hemlock BTs (6”, 5”, 7”, 5,”) like the township corner a mile to the north, described above, and marked by John Trutch that same day (June 20th of 1857). He asked if I wanted to go with him to check it out, which I readily agreed to do, not knowing enough to be a bona-fide skeptic yet. We stumbled into the area and walked down an old cat road on a north slope in a bowl-shaped depression. Just be- low the road was a new ribbon on a small hemlock about 8” diameter. Upon closer inspection, the tree had visible scribing on a half-healed face along with the oth- er 2 1857 BTs. It was incredible that this and two other similar hemlocks marked by John Trutch were still alive, yet still so small. Their survival against incredible odds was, like Homan’s BT mentioned above, probably a function of topography. The corner was in a gentle swale with a high- er, rolling ridge running northerly several hundred feet to the east, protected from the east wind that was pushing the fire westward on that stifling hot September day in 1902. The humidity was reportedly near the vanishing point, yet the heat of the fire was diverted slightly upward and over the relatively short dog-hair stand of hemlock in the swale, that was so thick, I remember it was hard to squeeze between the trees on that October morning in 1967. T4N, R3E, W.M.; Northeast Corner of Section 25, Clark County, WA In 1972, I left theWashington Dept. of Nat- ural Resources and commenced working for Hagedorn Land Surveying, a very small company that later became Hagedorn, Inc., from which I retired in December of 2009. During almost 38 years of private practice, I was involved in many differ- ent aspects of the survey profession, but always gravitated towards retracement-ori- ented jobs when possible. In 1973, I was tasked with subdividing Section 30, T4N, R4E which lies in the Dole Valley area of Clark County and within the infamous Yacolt Burn. The west line of Section 30 runs across the steep eastern slopes of a large “mesa” called Bell Mountain. Set- tlers had not started homesteading this area until the early 1880s. Consequently, their clearings in the forest and lacka- daisical view of fires, left smoldering all Featured Article