By some accounts Don Luis Mara Cabeza de Baca was a miserable fellow. One of Nuevo Mexicos ricos [rich], he claimed as his…
Category: Uncategorized
An Attempt to Regulate Surveying
When in 1917 a progressive New Mexico State Legislature passed an act to regulate the practice of surveying under which surveyors had to…
A Snowstorm On Dent du Midi
On the first day of September 1902, a 24-year-old Swiss surveyor stood behind his theodolite on the summit of 10,686-foot-high Dent du Midi,…
A Ghost Story
The following is a German legend which I found in a collection of folk-tales "Das Grosse Buch der Volkssagen" by Edmund Mudrak, upon…
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Every self-respecting surveyor knows that our first, third, and sixteenth Presidents had for a brief period in their lives been surveyors. But not…
Good Deal, Bad Deal?
Every literate American is familiar with the story of how the Indians sold Manhattan Island for $24. It has been told and retold…
Land Claims Act of 2001
Ninety-seven years after the Court of Private Land Claims (CPLC) completed its work to settle Spanish and Mexican land grants, the issue is…
The Mark Of The Wolf
I have long believed that surveying is truly the oldest profession, eons ahead of whatever is in second place. No other human activity…
The Surveyors of the Inca
The land where the condor soars between the towering peaks of the Andes would be the last place on earth to look for…
The Unsigned Survey (the original Tunnel of Eupalinos story)
Sometimes surveyors make mistakes, but while the blunders of other professionals such as doctors are soon dead and buried, ours tend to acquire…