To celebrate National Surveyor's Week next month I'm working on an article for our historical society newsletter about surveyor Levi D. Wiest (1859-1934). He came to Bend Oregon in August 1900 when the population was 21 people to work for Alexander Drake, the town's founder. Drake had secured Carey Act rights to irrigate a big portion of Central Oregon. Prior to his arrival here, Wiest had worked in Sheridan Wyoming from 1889 to 1899 and surveyed over 200 miles of irrigation canals. In the five months from December 1900 to May 1901 he surveyed the Pilot Butte canal system shown on the attached 1901 PDF map. 29+ miles of canals, laterals and ditches. There were no prior surveys of the area except for GLO plats, the first USGS quad maps of the area is from the 1920s. Central Oregon is a tortured volcanic landscape, sloping from south to north, with ridges, buttes and sporadic pressure ridges.
I imagine the first couple of months Wiest was here he reconnoitered the area to see where the water would flow from its diversion point on the Deschutes River 4 miles south of Bend.
Is anyone familiar with how they did this? It seems like running random levels or triangulation work or plane table work would take forever. Did they do their initial scouting using barometers for this type of work in unmapped wilderness? No radios, maps, tri stations, GPS, etc. It boggles the mind.
Image 1 - Wiest (left) and partner in Wyoming in the 1890s:
Image 2 - Present day Central Oregon Irrigation District. The 1901 Pilot Butte canal runs from south of Bend to Redmond. The canal was soon thereafter extended north to irrigate lands in the Terrebonne area (Redmond and Terrebonne owe their existence to the canals... they were just raw sagebrush and juniper scablands when Wiest started his work:
Image 3 - me working on canal construction circa 1904 before I took up surveying:
Addendum: And by my question of "how'd they do that", I mean the initial scouting of where to put the canals in the first place in an unsurveyed land, not how they ran the centerline surveys of the canals to be built once they figured out the routes they'd take. And then there's the question of identifying the lands that were downhill from where the canals would be and could be irrigated by gravity flow. Those lands would then be put in segregations lists, open for homesteading
The US Reclamation Service - now Bureau of Reclamation for the Minidoka Project in the Burley-Rupert area of Idaho. They performed plane table surveys of the entire area. The dates on the plane tables of the water surface of the Snake River were 1902 and 1903. The project itself started with the construction of Minidoka Dam (finished in about 1906). The original plane table sheets are in the files in the local Reclamation office in Heyburn, ID.
They hired some of the long since retired Roman Aqueduct builders/designers.
Water rights in the Sheridan Wyoming area were widely adjudicated prior to statehood in 1890. These rights known as Territorial Rights are the most valuable. The first such right I've heard of was 1873, although I believe it was probably mostly in Montana. I have not confirmed that it was real, possibly it was somehow backdated since that's 3 years before Custer's Last Stand an on the same drainage. 1880 rights are the earliest I've dealt with, although in southern Wyoming the earliest right is 1868. By the 1890's ditches had filled the foothills and valleys in the area. Wiest could have worked on any number of large construction projects, yes it boggles the mind when you see ariel photos of the canals and ditches and understand this was mostly completed by the late 1800's. Many of the "improvements" added later such as concrete ditches have proved to be lacking compared to the original construction.
The original plane table sheets are in the files in the local Reclamation office in Heyburn, ID
Wow. Those would be fantastic to see. A potentially great historical resource as regards old roads, settlement, etc. If that was done here, and such sheets still exist, no one will ever see them because the current irrigation district has all of their old maps, photos, etc. in "the vault" and nobody ever gets access to the vault.
Wiest could have worked on any number of large construction projects
I snooped around a little trying to find any references to Wiest and irrigation projects in Sheridan County (where he was County Surveyor for a while in the 1890s) but didn't pursue it very far since this is more a bio of him, written for old gray haired historical society members rather than for surveyors. Looking at the dates, I think the "Highline Ditch" may have been engineered/surveyed during his time in Wyoming. But I had to climb out of that rabbit hole in order to get the bio jazz done by deadline.
"I snooped around a little trying to find any references to Wiest and irrigation projects in Sheridan County (where he was County Surveyor for a while in the 1890s)."
Counties didn't have much to do with water rights, that was and still is the State Engineer's office. Elwood Mead was the person that set up much of Wyoming's water system. Unfortunately, although Wyoming is often touted as having the Gold Standard in Water Rights the state's computer program is lacking. Looking for some old records is possible, if you have lots of time you can get set up on the SEO's website and give it a shot.
I'm not sure this answers your question of where to start, but it describes the initial survey of a canal route. https://drive.google.com/file/d/14aKqCUfkLrE7xb0WCmagXMTtKwVQxCQk/view See page 371-391. I think I may have worked with one of the Engineers on that project:
@mike-berry, often wondered that myself. I suspect once they decided on the diversion point it was try and follow a gradual contour, but did they have any clue where they would end up?
From around 1966-71 we had a place on the bank of the Swalley canal north of Bend, it was a thing of marvel watching the water flow. This was a little over a mile north of Cooley Road and that area where dirt world now is was our playground, we could walk out back cross the Swalley and eventually cross both what we called the Redmond Canal (Pilot Butte) and the Madras Canal (North Unit) during the winter, good times as a kid and of course walking along the tracks because we didn't know any better.
Quite a bit of old junk and history out in that area, found a lot of old cans from what I assume were camps for those building both the Oregon Trunk RR and the canals including about five gallon cans that I am told held black powder. Blasting those canals out of basalt is/was crazy, but they got it done and the water flowed for miles. Those early water projects in Central Oregon really opened the area up. A lot of small acreages got their water that way, we even drank ditch water for our domestic use, filled our cistern and dumped in some bleach, seriously! Now you know what happened to me during my formative years 🙂
SHG