.THE FIRST DAY'S WORK 23 



necessary to give Wallace a better sight on the 

 stadia. Brown undertook to hold down this job 

 until the rest of us had been tried out as cruisers. 



We watched the first shot of the season with in- 

 terest. Wallace set up the plane table directly over 

 the section corner Jackson showed us and fast- 

 ened a blank township plat on the table with thumb 

 tacks. He wrote the number of the township we 

 were in at the top and marked down in its proper lo- 

 cation on the sheet the section corner by which we 

 stood. We knew now where we were on the map as 

 well as on the ground. 



From this point we were to trust Wallace. He 

 understood the system of township mapping and 

 surveying and as often as we would work over the 

 edge of any plat on the plane table with the baseline, 

 the sheet would be removed and the plat for the par- 

 ticular township we were about to enter would be 

 substituted. Thus at the end of the season, Frazer 

 told us, the course of the baseline would be repre- 

 sented by a zigzag line (each zig or zag a shot of the 

 instrument) running across township after town- 

 ship until the cruisers, working out from it, had cov- 

 ered the whole Black Range area. 



It is well to state here that in properly surveyed 

 country, where all or most of the section corners are 

 established, this problem of a baseline need not have 

 bothered us at all, for in that case we could have 

 based our work on the survey, starting each day at 

 an established monument and "checking in" for ac- 



