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The Powell Survey Kanab Base Line
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 37, 1969, No. 2
The Powell Survey Kanab Base Line
BY ROBERT W. OLSEN, JR.
AS THE PIONEERS ADVANCED into the American West and towns began to replace Indian villages, there grew a need for accurate knowledge of what the country was like and what it contained. This need led the federal government to sponsor several organizations which systematically
Mr. Olsen, past contributor to the Utah Historical Quarterly, was historian at Pipe Spring National Monument and is now historian at the Whitman Mission National Historic Site, Walla Walla, Washington. explored the West. The U.S. Geological Survey developed from and replaced these organizations.
The organization that explored the southern half of Utah was the Powell Survey, led by Major John Wesley Powell. One usually associates Powell with the first navigation of the Colorado River, but he was a man of wide interests and activities and accomplished much more than the river trips for which he is chiefly noted. Powell was a man of science, a great oganizer as well as a pioneer in the field of geology. He ultimately became head of both the Geological Survey and Bureau of Ethnology.
This article is concerned with part of the work done by the Powell Survey before the creation of the Geological Survey. It will discuss the first base line measured in the area bounded by Colorado on the east and the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the west. From it Powell's section of the United States, southern Utah and northern Arizona, was systematically explored.
But first a word of explanation. A base line is a line of known length across a stretch of country. From this line the countryside can be measured. The principle is one encountered in geometry. If you know the length of one side of a triangle and two of its angles, you can calculate the length of the other two sides. In this context the base line is the known side, and from it the members of the Powell Survey could project triangles to prominent land features. Then the sides of the triangles projected from the base line could be used as known lengths to project new and larger triangles to more distant land features. These triangles were not small. The base line was nine miles long. Extending from it the sides of the triangles reached out as much as twenty or thirty miles. Under right conditions they could be as long as sixty miles.
The systematic exploration by Major Powell began in the spring of 1869. Starting from the bridge of the Union Pacific Railroad, he and his men boated down the Green River to the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers. He then continued down the Colorado, through Glen Canyon and Grand Canyon to the mouth of the Virgin River. Early in the trip, however, the group lost one of their four boats loaded with equipment and food, and the trip turned into a race with starvation. They had to reach the mouth of the Virgin before their food ran out. Thus, the 1869 trip was too hurried to yield the results Major Powell desired.
Powell led a second expedition down the Green and Colorado rivers beginning April 22, 1871. He and his men followed the same route as the 1869 group except they broke off the river trip at the mouth of the Paria River (later called Lee's Ferry). Here they began to explore Powell's section of the country on horseback.
Kanab, Utah Territory, was the supply base for the second expedition. The first part of December of 1871 found all the regular members at or near Kanab. These men were Powell himself, A. H. Thompson, W. C. Powell, F. S. Dellenbaugh, F. M. Bishop, E. O. Beaman, J. K. Hillers, S. V. Jones, and A. H. Hattan. Thompson was astronomer and leader when Powell was not in the field. Beaman, Hillers, and W. C. Powell (Major Powell's cousin) were involved in photographing for the expedition. Bishop and Dellenbaugh were topographers and drew maps. Jones was a topographer and Hattan was the cook. All were involved in triangulation at one time or another, and all worked on the base line.
During the first week in December 1871, Thompson and Powell made a preliminary reconnaissance to find a site for the base line. Eventually they decided the land directly below Kanab would do. The approximate location was determined, and Thompson set up an astronomic transit at the midpoint. By sighting on Polaris, Thompson could determine true north-south and adjust for the exact location of the base line.
Near the midpoint of the line, Thompson and some of the men put up tents and set up other equipage that made life in the field tolerable. This tent camp was six miles due south of Kanab across the border in Arizona. It was west of Highway 89A today.
It was on December 14, 1871, that Thompson began using his transit. His entry for that day reads: "Took transit to the Gap to locate meridian line. Sent Mac to some 'buttes' down the Creek to put up a flag. Captain, Bishop, and Jones at Kanab getting things ready." The "Gap" is Kanab Gap, the break in the Shinerump Cliffs (Chocolate Cliffs) that begins three miles south of Kanab. The "buttes" are the red hills just west of where Fredonia, Arizona, is today. The transit was placed somewhere near where Highway 89A goes through Kanab Gap. From this place both the north segment of the meridian line, toward Kanab, and the south segment, toward Fredonia, could be seen. For the next while there was stormy weather and no work could be done. Finally, on December 23 Thompson got a quick look at the stars. He said of this observation that "before I could use it, it commenced snowing and raining. Drove two stakes, however."
There was another aspect to the preparation for measuring the base line. Bishop had the job of making the wooden rods that would be used for measuring. He worked at Fort Kanab where Beaman and W. C. Powell had established themselves and were working on the pictures John Powell would take to Washington, D.C, in a few months. A couple of days later Bishop was making plumb bobs. He first had to make molds in which he poured the molten lead.
Christmas Day the whole party celebrated. The women, Mrs. John Powell and Mrs. Thompson, made plum pudding and other holiday foods. W. C. "Clem" Powell went to the camp, six miles below Kanab, from Fort Kanab to eat dinner. He was "about an hour going down; found camp on the bank of the creek about a couple of miles through the Gap. Found the boys all well and enjoying a big tent with a stove in it." The John Powell family and the Thompson family each had a tent also.
Finally, the day after Christmas the actual measuring began. They put up a flag at the north end, about a mile from the center of Kanab as it is today, and started measuring south. For the first few days progress was slow. They only measured a few hundred yards a day.
The measuring equipment consisted of three wooden rods held by frames or trestles. These rods were fourteen feet long with pins at each end. The rods and trestles were set up in line, and adjusted by sighting along both ends, using the steel pins. Two rods were always kept in place in case of an accidental movement. They were leveled by use of a plummet. Every hundred feet a wooden stake was placed in the ground, and a wire was put in the top of it. The place for the wire was determined by a plummet at the end of the measuring rods. The wire in the stakes was the line. The trestles had legs that we • adjustable, which would make it easy to allow for elevations or depressions in the land.
While his crew worked with the three rods and trestles between the north end of the base line flag and Kanab Gap in the north segment, Thompson went south on the second day of the new year, 1872. At the Gap camp near the transit, he placed a rock and roughly plotted the line toward the red hills and the flag that had been put on one of them December 14. The rock would be the north end of the south segment of the base line.
On January 7 Thompson decided to secure Kanab men to measure the base line. Charles Riggs and Thomas Stewart were hired, and Captain Pardyn Dodds was to be in charge. This heralded a new phase in the operations of the expedition. It released the regular members for triangulation and other jobs. They would move from the base line area to prominent land features and triangulate back to the base line. In this way these features would be related to the base line, and larger triangles would be projected.
The south segment was completely roughed out on the twelfth of January. Thompson placed a rock at the south end that day. A couple of days after this, while Dodds and his Kanab men continued working on the base line, Thompson and some of the other men were on a trip that took them to the Kaibab Plateau and beyond to House Rock Valley and the Paria Plateau. They went fifty miles to the southeast, setting up triangulation stations and thereby extending the system of triangles. They were back the night of January 27.
A week after he returned from the trip, Stephen V. Jones in his diary: "To Kanab this afternoon. Rode with Mrs. Thompson. Then [illegible] and McEntire triangulated around red mounds below camp. Dodds is measuring from 1500 to 3000 ft. [of base line] per day." The red mounds are the "buttes" near Fredonia today.
February 6 Jones and Dellenbaugh began observing the sun at the north end of the base line to find the latitude there. They found the north end to be 14,863 feet north of the Thirty-Seventh Parallel, the Utah- Arizona border. Kanab was in Utah by just a hair. They went down the line on the eighth and put up a flag where the Utah-Arizona border crossed the base line. After more measuring, remeasuring, and a short side trip Thompson could say in his usual laconic way: "Finished 'Base Line.' " This was on February 21.
At this point the expedition broke up the Kanab Gap camp, went to the west end of the Kaibab Plateau, then via Pipe Spring to the Mt. Trumbull area, and then to Berry Spring — ten miles above Washington, Utah, on the Virgin River. Using this as a base camp, they moved out in small parties to triangulate. The expedition was back in Kanab the first part of May. Toward the end of May they started in a northeast direction from Kanab toward the Dirty Devil River country and the Henry Mountains. The group reached the mouth of the Dirty Devil and were back at Kanab the first part of July 1872. On still another extended trip — down the Colorado from Lee's Ferry to the mouth of Kanab Creek Gulch and back to Kanab — the men of the Powell Survey were extending the system of triangles from the base line at Kanab.
The last bit of measuring on the Kanab base line by the 1871-72 Powell Survey was done in September 1872, just after they trudged out of the deep chasm of Kanab Creek Gulch. They ran the line from what had been the north end into Kanab. Thompson had an astronomic pier built. This was the new north end, and was a structure of rock, "two feet wide and four feet long and two feet high." Thompson set up an astronomic transit on the pier, and a tent was erected around the whole thing. From here, time signals were exchanged with the observatory at Salt Lake City by way of the Deseret Telegraph. The purpose of the pier, the transit, and the exchange of signals was to relate Kanab and the base line to the rest of the United States.
On November 30 the 1871-72 Powell Expedition was disbanded. Most of the regular members journeyed to their homes in the East. Dellenbaugh remained with Thompson at Kanab to help finish the original draft of the map that was later published. Dellenbaugh says
No base line structure built in 1871-72 has survived. The process of cutting and filling by the forces of erosion in Kanab Creek have wiped out some, and the hand of man destroyed the rest. The land forms remain — the flat area south of Kanab over which the base line was measured and the Gap and red mounds or "buttes" near Fredonia, Arizona.
The pier Thompson constructed survived for a time. But when the Kanab public square, which contained the pier, was changed the pier was found to be in the middle of a proposed street. It was destroyed to make room for the street.
Two structures exist today that date from 1878, the date when the base line was remeasured by G. K. Gilbert and his crew. They found the site of Thompson's pier, measured seventy-six feet east to the corner of a tithing lot, and put up a rock monument. In the top of the monument they placed a stone with the information seventy-six feet east of the base line incised in the top of it. This, of course, means the monument was seventy-six feet east of the base line and the pier. Although this monument was torn down, the engraved stone was saved. It is now in an historical marker near the site of the pier. The other structure is at the south end of the base line, some distance from the original end, where Gilbert and his crew built a monument of stone in 1878. It can be found, somewhat altered from its original appearance, three miles south of Fredonia, Arizona.
The accomplishments of the Powell Survey are impressive. By hard work and scientific insight these men explored southern Utah and northern Arizona. They were pioneers in the true sense of the word. They recorded their findings, and eventually the blank areas of Powell's section of the United States were filled in with exact information. The systematic and scientific exploration, carried out in some measure by the 1869 Green and Colorado rivers voyages, was confirmed, elaborated, and detailed in 1871-72. Accuracy was achieved when the 1871-72 group measured the base line and began triangulating from it; exact distances and relationships could be calculated and plotted. With the exchange of signals in September of 1872, Powell's area was integrated with the rest of the United States.
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