On the 1858 GLO survey status map...

[jrbouldin]

I've recently been trying to track down evidence of pre-Benson Syndicate frauds, which equates to pre-1878 or so. It's clear that serious schemes were in place no later than JR Hardenbergh's tenure as S-G which covered 1871-73, not to mention some even worse schemes that Hardenbergh apparently resisted, depending on who's story from that time that you believe. Benson got his start under Hardenbergh in the summer of 1872, with a large batch of mineral surveys (I said 1873 in my earlier post).

What about earlier possibilities?

Below is a link to the official 1858 GLO survey status map for the state, included as part of the annual report of the Surveyor-General, James W. Mandeville, who was about 14 months into his tenure at the time. I know nothing whatsoever about Mandeville.*

Of note is that 1858 is 19 years before the 1877 Desert Land Act was passed, with a goal of promoting the settlement of arid lands having perceived reclamation potential, via irrigation, and 20 years before passage of the Timber and Stone Act, which allowed purchase of lands deemed valuable primarily for either of those commodities. With the exception of mineral surveys, GLO surveys were still driven very largely by the agricultural potential of the land without recourse to large-scale irrigation projects that were beyond the capacity of individual settlers, or even groups thereof, to execute.

When I look at this map I see vast areas of the Mojave and Sonora deserts of SE CA that had already not only had its meridian, baseline and standard parallels surveyed, but most of it's township boundaries as well, and in many cases, even subdivided into sections. This includes some of the most desolate land in the state, or even in North America for that matter, having zero potential for agricultural (or timber) production even under irrigation: Death Valley; Panamint Valley; the Mono Craters and the vast sagebrush flats N, E and S of Mono Lake; the vast, bone-dry no-man's land W and NW of Tulare Lake, etc., etc.

Then, looking at parts of northern CA, including large parts of the Sacramento, Napa and Sonoma Valleys (beyond the zone shown marking "swamp and overflowed" wetlands), almost the entirety of the Sierra Nevada, Southern Cascade and Interior Coast Range foothill oak woodland rangelands, and various other highly-productive-as-is lands, not to mention the tremendously valuable timber lands just a little higher up in all those belts, and I see that many of them had not yet even had township lines put in, and of those that had, many had not yet been subdivided, and so were completely unavailable to actual settlers except via pre-emption (this is the pre-Homestead Act era). Or perhaps, via various possible mineral claim schemes.

So I have to wonder how such a state of affairs is explainable without reference to some type of large-scale land surveying fraud scheme, especially when I see enormous numbers of desert townships in and near Death Valley surveyed by a single surveyor--Henry Washington--who reportedly made over $40,000 in 1850s dollars in so doing, from 1856 to 1858 [the area labeled as "Dry Lake" straddling the 5th SP north, SBM, is Death Valley]...

Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VRwz5x ... sp=sharing

* There is a largish island in the Delta known as Mandeville Island, and the Stockton deepwater shipping channel next to it in the San Joaquin was known as the "Mandeville Cut". What relationship these might have to him I have no idea.