I had been wanting to get to this location in the Black Hills for several years and finally made the stop last Sunday to get a photo of the bench mark that had a railroad station named after it.
http://www.penryfamily.com/surveying/usgsdw5020.html
I thought that was the capital of North Dakota.
Jerry,
In the notes L.F Gottschalk is noted as running the line from Tilford to Deadwood. Do you know if that would be the same L.F. Gottschalk that did surveying in Platte County, NE in the early 1900's? I think it is spelled the same from what I remember.
It very well could be the same Gottschalk since the L. Fred Gottschalk in the bio below seems to have moved around a lot and his schooling was surveying and engineering. There is a gap in his bio which could have placed him in the Black Hills in the late 1890's. I need to research where the USGS field crews were based during that era. I think the majority of the field crews were either in the Black Hills or in Oklahoma in the mid to late 1890's.
Notice his surveying time in Kentucky: "...much trouble was experienced with moonshiners and mountain natives, who are a lawless people, being wholly without moral consciousness."
