I guess there’s one good thing about packing stuff up; you tend to stumble across things you forgot you had… Recently, on the LIW (Literary Society) yahoogroup, someone asked how Pa and other homesteaders knew the boundaries of their claims, meaning: how were the claims marked?
In the case of Kingsbury County, Peter Royem – the head surveyor back in 1874 – described in his handwritten survey field notes the section markers he placed at the section corners: “Drove charred stake and set post 4 ft. long 2 in. wide, 1 ft. in ground in mound 4 ft. diameter, 3 ft. high.” In addition, he identified the orientations of north, south, east, and west in relationship to this marker with “4 pits 18 in. sqr. 1 ft. deep with stake 2 ft. long 2 in. sqr.” in line with the corner stake. Homesteaders used these mounds of dirt and charred stakes to determine the boundaries of their claim.
I don’t know much about surveying, but distances in survey field notes were recorded in measurements such as chains and links. A chain equals 66 feet; it contains 100 links measuring .66 ft. each. Obvious physical features of the land were also drawn on the original survey map; these include sloughs, lakes, Indian mounds, etc.
It is assumed that travelers in search of a claim “back then” were much more aware of their surroundings than we tend to be today. In By the Shores of Silver Lake, I always wondered how Charles Ingalls was so familiar with the Silver Lake railroad camp area, such that he could point out distances and landmarks in the area to the family as they drove to the camp for the first time. The answer must be that he had been to the area before…. but when? How often? Just how much of Kingsbury County had he explored in the two or so months since he had left to work for the railroad?
Pa knows how far they are from camp. He knows about the Lone Cottonwood. He knows about the Twin Lakes, and he knows that Spirit Lake lies nine miles northwest of Silver Lake, beside which the railroad camp was build.
When I was driving in the country recently, I got to thinking about how Laura wrote that she could see the “lights of Silver Lake camp” as “tiny lights pricked through the dark” when Pa says they were eight miles from the actual camp. Even with today’s pollution, city lights bouncing off the clouds, whether the moon was full or not, could Laura really see lantern/candle light from eight miles away at night? There is, of course, a law of physics that applies to this; it’s called the inverse-square law of brightness. It’s this law that tells us that the brightness of a light decreases as the square of the distance from it. Energy twice as far from the source is one-fourth as intense. Energy ten times as far away is 1/100th as intense.
After sitting here way too long wondering how bright and many the Silver Lake camp lights had to be for Laura to see them, I started to think more about the stars. The fact that we can see the stars tells us that of course there is light intense enough for Laura to have seen eight miles away. Duh. Laura saw camp lights. But she also saw stars!
The stars hung low and bright and Laura could see them clearly as soon as the sun set. “The whole night was a glittering of stars. Close overhead and down on all sides great stars glittered in patterns in the dark…” (See By the Shores of Silver Lake, Chapter 7, “The West Begins.”) Wow.
When you look up at the sky on a clear night, how many stars can you see? Check out www.darksky.org for information on light pollution. Don’t just wish that you could go outside at night and really see the stars? Do something about it.
