Walking the Line
They were more than the sum of their parts, 19th-century surveyors, the unheralded vanguards of the Old West who established original geographical boundaries and retraced and identified existing borders in accordance with legal descriptions. Part-astronomers, part-geologists, part-engineers, these mapmakers were also arbitrators when land lines were in dispute. Wars have been fought and people killed over boundary disputes in which the surveyor was often the common denominator.
