62 CLASSIFICATION OF THE PUBLIC LANDS. 



10-acre or even 24-acre tracts, may be recognized in land classifica- 

 tion. 



This general plan, where properly carried out, is simple and effec- 

 tive and has furnished a satisfactory basis for land records and titles 

 for more than a century and a quarter. Its execution, however, has 

 not in all localities been satisfactoi'y. For a great many years the 

 work was done by contract under State surveyors general, despite 

 the repeated and urgent requests of many Commissioners of the Gen- 

 eral Land Office for authority to do the work directly. In earlier 

 years the contracts were sometimes distributed as rewards for po- 

 litical services, and the inspections were not always of a character 

 to guard against the acceptance of inadequate surveys. Some of the 

 contracts were obtained by honest men who did their work well, but 

 others fell to inefficient or dishonest contractors who made poor sur- 

 veys or none at all, although they prepared township plats which 

 were submitted under oath as to their accuracy and which were ac- 

 cepted. In the older fraudulent surveys of this type all sorts of 

 errors and omissions are encountered. In certain localities no monu- 

 ments can be found and there is every reason to believe that the lines 

 were never run. In other localities the work was done so carelessly 

 that the corner posts are found far from the proper locations. The 

 General Land Office, under the contract system, required that monu- 

 ments were to be made of stone wherever it could be procured, but 

 the use of wooden posts was permitted in other places. In some lo- 

 calities where advantage was taken of this permission the stakes set 

 were so small or so poorly fixed in position as to constitute merely a 

 nominal observance of the requirements, and many of the stakes thus 

 set have disappeared. 



"Within recent years the Land Office has adopted the plan of mark- 

 ing corners permanently by deep-set iron posts and has been au- 

 thorized by Congress to make surveys directly instead of by contract. 

 These modern surveys provide a highly satisfactory basis for land 

 titles, and some of the special surveys made on the Indian reserva- 

 tions by a combination of cadastral and topographic methods are 

 models of complete and satisfactory base mapping. 



For purposes of land classification it is imperative that the data 

 procured by the geologist shall be tied to the land net because his 

 classifications must be expressed in terms of the public-land surveys. 

 Furthermore, these identifications must be exact, because it may oc- 

 casionally be necessary to estimate values of the public lands in tracts 

 of 40 acres, 10 acres, or even 2^ acres. It is obvious that in such cases 

 the land lines must have been accurately run and the corners suffi- 

 ciently well established to permit undoubted identification. In a few 

 places classification has been impossible because the land lines could 

 not be found and the official surveys could th^efor^ npt \>& idejaUfied, 



