This is a fairly interesting problem that I've been researching and writing up for the past couple of weeks. The Surveys Nos. 60 - 177 outlined in orange (excepting Surveys Nos. 70, 71, and 73) were all located in 1848 and patents were issued by the State of Texas.
Then, in May, 1874, Jacob Kuechler, Deputy Surveyor of Bexar Land District arrived with his survey party to locate a fistful of land certificates that he had apparently been instructed to locate adjoining the patented lands outlined in orange. Actually, in the case of Surveys No. 70, 71, and 73, while the lands were surveyed in 1848, no patent could be issued for the reason that a problem was discovered pertaining to the land certificate by virtue of which the surveys had been made in 1848. For example, in the case of Sur. 70, it turned out that the land certificate had already been located elsewhere, so the land that the 1848 surveyor had run out and marked reverted to the public domain. The same with Surveys 71 and 73 (within the green outline).
Mr. Kuechler had a head start on Surveys Nos. 70, 71, and 73. He could sit in the office and write up field notes based upon the work that the 1848 surveyor had done and this in fact is what it definitely appears that he did.
For the real work of his survey, though, he began at what he identified as the SE corner of Sur. 60 as marked in 1848 and he began running course and distance to establish corners with marked bearing trees in the positions indicated by the open circles. The diagram above reflects where Mr. Kuechler would have *thought* he'd made corners based upon the courses and distances he had run.
This being Texas, the units of this diagram are in varas, 1900 varas being nominally equivalent to a mile of English measure. The blue lines are the lines that Mr. Kuechler's original field book reflects that he actually ran. All of the other lines were protracted in the metes and bounds descriptions that he wrote for the numbered surveys outside the orange outline.
At the SE corner of Sur. 358, he called for that to be the SW corner of Sur. 69, believing it in fact to be, although he later reported that he had not located either of the bearing trees called for at the SW corner of Sur. 69 by the 1848 surveyor and had relied upon his own measurements of course and distance from the SE corner of Sur. 60 (that he had identified) to determine where the SW corner of Sur. 69 was.
Likewise, at the NW corner of Sur. 69, he later reported (and his field book confirms) that he had not identified the 1848 surveyor's corner, but had determined where he thought the corner to be by course and distance measurements.
Sadly, Mr. Kuechler was running with a huge systematic chaining error in 1874. What he reported as 1900 varas was almost certainly a distance that averaged about 2085 varas or more.
Oblivious to this, Mr. Kuechler calculated up his survey as if he had actually run the 2888 varas along the South line of Survey 60 and the 4675 varas along the South line of Survey 69, both as called for in the patents. Likewise, he based his work upon the idea that the West line of Survey 69 was 5561 varas in length as called for in the patent and that his traverse had taken him to a point that was 4675 varas S70°W and 5561 varas N20°W from where he'd thought the SE corner of Sur. 69 to be (but without finding any actual evidence of the 1848 surveyor's mark at the corner).
While his field notes for Surveys 321, 322 and 323 call for adjoiner with Sur. 69, can anyone see an obvious problem with those calls?
And this was the main result of Mr. Kuechler's work in 1874:
The pink area was the vacancy that he left between the earlier surveys made by another surveyor in 1848 and his new locations which he intended to adjoin the 1848 surveys, but failed spectacularly to do.
Note how Surveys 326 and 327 are cramped by the locations of Surveys 70, 71, and 73. While Kuechler himself wrote the field notes for 70, 71, and 73, he based them entirely upon the work of the 1848 surveyor and so fixed them in place based upon the corners of the senior surveys from 1848.
One particularly interesting problem posed by how Mr. Kuechler ran his survey and drew up field notes is how the north line of Survey No. 320 would be constructed once the positions of the east corners of Survey 320 as originally located by Kuechler were determined. As it turns out, Mr. Kuechler tied Surveys Nos. 348 and 320 together in his field notes for 348 and both are part of the same system. So the most proper construction of the north line of Survey No. 320 would be as a line run from the NE corner of 320 to the SW corner of 348 over 6000 varas distant.
Likewise, to locate the common line of Surveys 320 and 321, the most proper construction would be to place it on the line run from the NE corner of Sur. No. 321 to the NW corner of Sur. 364, also about 6000 varas distant. Kuechler's field notes for Surveys 364, 363, and 321 tie by their calls between those same corners that he actually marked on the ground and give the same bearing for their north lines, so that would be the construction consistent with the calls of the field notes that originally defined the positions of the protracted lines upon the ground.
Poor guy either didn't own or couldn't read and understand the Official Texican Cookbook for Surveying Wildlands.
Actually, the method that Mr. Kuechler was following in 1874 was not atypical at all. It was common for surveyors locating lots of land scrip in contiguous blocks to run a few location traverses upon which identifiable corners were made and to locate the remainder of the corners by protraction. Kuechler's zig-zag traverse routes appear to have been chosen to roughly follow roads and creeks. That was also a common scheme elsewhere in West Texas at the time. Surveying unclosed traverses was also common. A very thorough surveyor might run three sides of a four-sided tract.
Considering that a section of land was generally useless of itself and that it took perhaps ten or fifteen sections at least to make a ranch, not bothering to monument every corner made practical sense at the time.
What is unusual about Kuechler's work is how grossly erroneous his distance measurements were. A few years later, he and his party ran hundreds of miles of traverse in Far West Texas and located thousands of square miles of surveys by a similar method, also with similar chaining errors.
are you the only one who knows this?
> are you the only one who knows this?
Jacob Kuechler's chaining errors in his surveys for the Texas and Pacific Railroad Company in 1878 in the so-called 80-Mile Reservation West of the Pecos are fairly well known, in part as a result of a resurvey made by Paul McCombs just a few years after Kuechler's work and with Kuechler himself in attendance to identify the various corners he had marked upon the ground. J.J. Bowden has written a highly readable account of Kuechler's work, published as "Surveying the Texas and Pacific Land Grant West of the Pecos River", Monograph No. 46, Texas Western Press, El Paso, 1975.
In the case of the matter I describe above, it appears to me that I'm the first surveyor to fully document the facts with a copy of Mr. Kuechler's original field book in hand for reference. The GLO Official County Map contains some very large blunders in the compilation in the area of interest and is of very little use in showing what the actual situation is. This is somewhat remarkable since usually the GLO County Maps are fairly carefully compiled. In this case, I think that Jacob Kuechler's very bad quality chaining was just the gift that keeps on giving.
Jacob Kuechler (1823-1893)
BTW in case it is of interest, here's a portrait of Jacob Kuechler that appears to have been painted around 1883 or so, when Mr. Kuechler was about sixty.
Jacob Kuechler (1823-1893)
Maybe the poor chaining was like it was here for many cases. A lot of times the chainmen were recruited from the local gentry.
John Harmon
Jacob Kuechler (1823-1893)
> Maybe the poor chaining was like it was here for many cases. A lot of times the chainmen were recruited from the local gentry.
I'd have to say that the most likely explanation is that Kuechler was using a 10-vara chain that wasn't really 10 varas long. The excess is just too consistent to be attributable to any other cause that comes to mind. His vara averages about 36.57 inches, which is close enough to 36 inches to make my first guess that his chain was really 10 yards long.
