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April 8, 2004 Plains Folk: Surveyor Thomson
The explorers and surveyors of history are not the men they used to be. Time was the descendant of Europeans in the colonized countries of the world lionized those brave souls who marked off previously unknown lands, opening the wilderness to settlement. I remember in college reading the books of William Goetzman and others who celebrated exploration. Indeed, on the Northern Plains today, we plan to profit handsomely from the commemoration of the Corps of Discovery. The innocence is gone, however. In the first place, we now recognize it may be a little ridiculous to natter on about the hardiness of white explorers who managed merely to traipse across country that natives, with kids and old folks in tow, routinely traversed without incident. Moreover, we now also are aware of what historians call the "imperial gaze" of explorers and surveyors, their covetousness coupled with arrogance. Still, as the descendant of European colonizers, I've always been fascinated with tracking the explorers. I claim some right of discovery as the first scholar to pin down the route of George C. Sibley exploring the Central Plains in 1811. In these and other investigations I learned that once you get all the documents in hand, you have to give yourself over to time in the field, sometimes afoot, going over the ground. This is not unpleasant duty, although sometimes strenuous. Lately I've had the opportunity to do similar work in grasslands 11,000 miles from my prairie home, in Central Otago, New Zealand. I've been retracing the steps and words of a surveyor named John Turnbull Thomson through a district known as the Lindis during the last days of 1857. This time I've learned that whereas some work calls for boots on the ground, when you're sketching in the broad strokes, a helicopter is mighty handy. First, the documents. Thomson recorded his work in two field books, one containing his daily diary (in nearly indecipherable pencil scrawl), and the other containing his theodolite readings. A theodolite was a sighting device that surveyors in the 19th century set up on high points and used to measure the angles of triangles connecting known and unknown points. They measured distance and located things by triangulation. A third key document is the map that Thomson subsequently produced. The field books are still in the government land office, the map in a branch of the national archives. I think I'm the first scholar ever to match up Thomson's diary entries, his trigonometric calculations and his map. (See, now I'm even talking like an explorer.) I know I'm the first one to pin down just where he went through the district I'm studying. I've got photos, and I've got coordinates. All of which would have taken way more time than I had to spend in New Zealand except for the kind assistance of Russell Emmerson, proprietor of Forest Range Station. Russell took me out in the same chopper he uses for mustering sheep and set it down on several of the very peaks where Thomson took his triangulations. Viewed from such vantage, Thomson's panoptic (another one of those new historian's words) depiction of the country makes visual sense. A few months after Thomson, the pastoralist Jock McLean, looking for sheep range, would follow Thomson's directions into the district, stand on Grandview Peak as had the surveyor, and sketch out the boundaries of the massive sheep station known as Morven Hills. The beauty of such scenes is ineffable. I've posted views (as well as snaps of Tarras Church, subject of a previous column ), at: http://www.plainsfolk.com/weblog/blogger.html ### Source:
Tom Isern, (701) 799-2942, isern@plainsfolk.com
Click
here for a TIF photo of Tom Isern that is suitable for printing.
Click
here for a TIF photo of Tom Isern wearing a hat that is suitable for printing. |
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