Other areas that required extra care were those that seemed to have historic value. From 1849 to 1869, thousands of people traveled the Oregon and Mormon Trails through this region. Camp Guernsey has received praise for its comprehensive survey of cultural resources. Approximately 1,000 sites have been documented related to early settlement on the land, emigrant travels, and Native American Indian tribe activities.
The crew found many of the original corners, said Fletcher Koos, the project surveyor. But as they worked on the northern boundaries of the property, they saw increasingly large variations between where modern GPS technology said the corners should be and where early surveyors had placed them.
“ Over a 3-mile span, the markers could be 600 feet from where they should be,” Warden said.“ It was taking us six weeks to redo the earliest survey – and those surveyors completed the area in question in three days. That’ s when I started to speculate that the earlier survey was fraudulent. The surveyors were getting paid by the mile, and that’ s rough country.”
Wade Johnson, a master planner for the CFMO,
participated in some of the surveys of the Camp several years ago and was not surprised that the crew found discrepancies.“ We knew there were going to be challenges,” he said.“ The original Bureau surveys were not accurate.”
As crew members looked into the history of the surveys, they became increasingly convinced that the early work was misleading – at best.
“ A couple of the townships were surveyed by members of the Benson Syndicate, an organized crime operation that defrauded the government of millions of dollars in poorly executed or not executed surveys in 10 Western states,” Koos said.“ We suspected that some of the lines were not run when the notes were in total disagreement with the area we were surveying. One example was a couple of miles that crossed the river a couple of times. The river is in a very steep canyon, and it would be very dangerous for a crew to climb down the cliff. In the notes they called the land as level. Other examples put the river location a quarter-mile off.”
Clabots said she received nearly daily communication from Ferneding throughout the project, so the news of the
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