Quote:
Originally Posted by DriveYourCarDownToTheSea
The railroads were important, but a lot of surveying got done out of railroad-owned land, too. As long as people were going to settle somewhere, somebody had to determine parcel boundaries. The surveyors who did all this work are almost the unsung heroes of western settlement IMO.
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They're not heroes to me. They were doing what they were paid to do. They were the vanguard of the expansionism and manifest destiny that was coming. They probably weren't bad people in and of themselves but it was what they represented. There was no heroism in that as far as I am concerned.