This is a detail of a map that shows something of the flavor of working within a system of metes and bounds land grants as we have in Texas. To give a sense of scale, this detail covers an area approximately 18 miles x 21 miles in extent. The green lines are lines that I've located over the years and have tied together using the CORS network and the Texas Coordinate System of 1983.
This particular map was compiled in 1839 in the office of the District Surveyor of Bastrop Land District to show the positions of the various surveys that had been made out of the public lands during the Mexican colonial period and afterwards. The grid of 4428 acre rectangles filling the upper left of the detail generally is that of grants made by the Mexican government, for example.
The road that traverses the lower part of the detail is the Old San Antonio Road, a Spanish road from San Antonio to Nacogdoches and many of the surveys fronting on it were made prior to the Texas revolution as well.
The catch is that the when this map was drawn, the relationship between the grid of 4428 acre rectangles at the upper left and the surveys along the Old San Antonio Road wasn't known very well.
In 1838, a surveyor named John Harvy attempted to fill in the space between the existing grants that had been made under Mexican sovereignty and to locate various land certificates upon that vacant, unappropriated land lying between. Mr. Harvy's work covered the land bounded by the yellow line. Most of the field notes for the various tracts he returned were dated May 24, 1838, with the rest either the day before or the day after.
Mr. Harvy's scheme was fine as a plan, but it later turned out that he had been grossly mistaken as to the locations of the 4428 acre rectangles in the upper left. They were about 3000 varas (1.6 miles) further West than he thought them to be and his calls for various lines and corners to tie to various of those existing grants were simply mistaken conjecture.
But, not unlike some (smaller) modern surveying mistakes, that wasn't discovered until more than twenty years later.
A recipe for excess, or vacancies?
Sounds like how things happened around here to a certain degree. I think the saving grace around here was finding the marked lines in the timber as opposed to location along prairie land.
> A recipe for excess, or vacancies?
Well, the adjoiner calls that were grossly mistaken conjecture didn't hold. So when the true positions of the titled leagues that were more than 3000 varas further West was discovered, that meant that in the 1860's and 70's there was a rush to cover the unappropriated public domain lying West of Mr. Harvy's 1838 surveys. Because most or all of that land was in prairie, as was most of the land upon which Mr. Harvey had located his surveys, the determination of boundaries often required resurveying. Sometimes, the resurveys added new problems such as conflicts. There were also some vacancies left for posterity to deal with.
This is typically where problems with the original land grants occur, i.e. between two systems of surveys run decades before the later fill-in surveys are located and in a setting such as in prairie where there tends to be confusion about where boundaries were run at some early date well before actual settlement.