> Evidently you haven't deemed anyone advanced just yet. That or you enjoy controlling the conversation at your speed and doling out data when it suits your needs ...
The problem as originally posed contained enough info to give an answer if a person were familiar with the circumstances of 1850's Texas surveying. It wasn't a trick question, but required just looking at a series of documents and seeing the obvious, that a date had apparently been changed.
> What I think is that Karma can be a "B" and I'd rather go look for a corner than presume it not being there.
I think once you get some surveying experience outside of East Texas, you'll have a new appreciation of the actual situation in much of West Texas where looking for obviously non-existent marks is a snipe hunt. The better use of one's time is figuring out what the original surveyor probably actually did and focusing on finding those footsteps first before the snipe.
It has been my experience that the field notes in large expanses of West Texas are often created to support the requirements of the land claim and contain voluminous wholesale fabrication. The field notes do not necessarily reflect what occurred on the ground in and many cases the crews were moving so fast that they were only surveying block lines. It surprises me greatly when some of the later re-surveyors (I think I found kelsey doing this often) were particularly adept at finding pit and earth mound or other evidence on interior section corners where the alternate records (the field books) clearly show no monuments were ever set. If you were to spend time looking for interior section corners on T&P surveys, I would consider that a foolhardy waste of effort. Either through your own experience, knowledge passed on through mentors or fellow surveyors, you are able to learn how a particular surveyor handled his projects. The evidence is in the records and in the dirt. My 2¢.
AN
> The field notes do not necessarily reflect what occurred on the ground in and many cases the crews were moving so fast that they were only surveying block lines.
It varies from surveyor, but the better ones left clues as to which lines they actually ran in the descriptions of corners they made and through calls for topography. When most of the 200 section block calls for "stake & mound" at the survey corners and you hit a line of corners with descriptions like "rock mound 4 ft. high on side of hill" or "stake & mound near south side of arroyo", then the odds are usually very good that the original surveyor ran a line that connected them in some way, typically either running along section lines or diagonals through sections.
The typical scheme was to traverse some easy route through the block or on the block exterior, building a sufficient number of monuments that some future surveyor would be able to fully monument the block if anyone ever showed up interested in buying the land that the railroads had ended up with. It was a rational scheme because in much of West Texas a section of land is a useless quantity for ranching purposes. It took tens or hundreds of sections to make a ranch and land was typically sold in quantities of that size.
The field books of the State Surveyors who were set to the task of resurveying some of the West Texas blocks that the State recovered from the G.H.& S.A. Rwy. Co. are instructive. Those surveyors were first-rate, chosen for their competence, working under the direction of the Commissioner of the GLO, and their field notes call for "stake" or "stake & mound" at corners their field books show they didn't mark and didn't even get within a mile of. They were marking roughly half the corners and protracting the remainder, but with the fictional flourish of inventing some non-existent somethings at the protracted corners.
I'm surprised that ...
> no one has commented on the signatures. The John Lamon signatures are in at least two (if not 3) different hands.
>
> Does that mean any thing? Or was it just some clerk entering documents and putting in the signatures himself?
The chain carriers typically didn't sign the field notes (metes and bounds description). They had been paid off and were usually somewhere else when the field notes were drawn up by the surveyor. Their names were required by law, so they got written in by whomever prepared the notes for filing. The last three are all in Charles de Montel's handwriting. I don't know who wrote the first.
Well, if that's true, Commissioner J.T. Robison was recycling old material. He wrote those lines in his Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office for 1924-1926. :>
Charles DeMontel
Did some reading on your "suspect". Quite an accomplished Texan.
Apparently lived (and died) just down the road in Castroville. And I'm assuming that was named for his buddy Castro. Found a pic of the "Charles DeMontel Home" in Castroville, Medina County, Tx.:
Being the only one in my family that isn't from Texas I fall short of having a good grasp on the history. But it always makes for good reading.
Charles DeMontel
> Did some reading on your "suspect". Quite an accomplished Texan.
> Being the only one in my family that isn't from Texas I fall short of having a good grasp on the history. But it always makes for good reading.
Somewhere in my collection, I have a postcard that Charles de Montel wrote about going off surveying. I'll have to dig it out.
One of the reasons why San Antonio is such an interesting place is because so many German immigrants settled there who had the advantage of knowing what cities looked like and how institutions of public life were organized. If all of Texas had been settled by immigrants from Tennessee, I suspect we'd all still be living in log cabins beside mud streets.
Germans in South Texas
My father graduated in 1939 from Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. I've got his Annuals around somewhere. You should see names of the students, almost exclusively German.
His story was that was he learned to speak German at the pool hall.
Germans in South Texas
> My father graduated in 1939 from Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. I've got his Annuals around somewhere. You should see names of the students, almost exclusively German.
There were German schools in Texas once upon a time. Popular sentiments stemming from WWI dampened enthusiasm for them and for German-language newspapers such as "Texas Vorwaerts" that circulated here also.
This is what I use, hope it helps you or someone
In Texas, the handwriting from that time period would be in Spanish, using somewhat different letter forms.
It would be interesting to study the variations in handwriting in 19th century America to see whether regional differences exist. The folks who learned to write in Germany usually kept a distinctive style of script throughout their lives, and probably that was retained to an extent in the writing of their Texas-born children if they were educated at home or in German-language schools in Texas.