The text below is reproduced from a handwritten document that slipped out of a book of maps at the Minnesota Historical Society. Its authentication remains in progress.

I die happy seeing the completion of the Minnesota land survey, and the dissolution of the Office of the Surveyor General. He surveyed himself out of a job. We all did, the great work of our lives. It took five decades. But holes were chopped through the state that cannot be filled. I discovered a flaw in the measurements in the summer of 1855 when we were still just a territory. And I have knowledge of the disappearance of my hated competitor as he fell between the parallels, in the woods of what is now northeast Duluth.

Many surveying companies were employed by the Surveyor General. Mine was one and I was sworn in as a deputy surveyor. Rough work. We camped away from home for months, in 10-man teams: axe-men, chainmen, cooks, and muleskinners. Our families didn’t know if we were alive or dead until we returned (or failed to) for the winter break.

Murderous threats kept us well armed. We could be shot on sight as land stealers pushing natives out. Even the white backwoodsmen thought we were stealing their already-stolen land. Tin-shack crackers in bearskin caps threatened us with their grandpas’ flintlock rifles, after learning our surveys redefined them as squatters instead of settlers. It didn’t matter to us if they now owed back taxes or rent, we just reported the data so adjudications could be made. We didn’t have to believe in the rules as long as we believed in math.

I’d fought hard to be a deputy surveyor in the cut-throat market. I out-distanced my hated competitors except one, and now our teams were neck-and-neck. I hated him for being from the east coast instead of Minnesota. I hated him for his fancy-stitched cream silk suits and his excessively polished brass instruments. I hated him for using expensive red paint to make blazes while paying his men slave wages. We didn’t have to see each other much as we moved north, covering our assigned landscapes with a grid of six-mile squares, fixing the territory in space. But we did occasionally meet at intersections in the deep woods, cutting narrow survey paths to get lines-of-sight through our instruments.

Plotting the twists and turns of Amity Creek in the humidity and mosquitos, my axe-men hacked through tangles of wild roses. Then the chainmen laid their 66-foot chains which scaled up into miles of ten-dollar acres. I reduced the creek’s heathen curves to a series of Cartesian line segments, immortalized in maps submitted to the Surveyor General.

The axe-men cleared small trees and brush as we plotted a north-south meridian. The cut would later expand to become Jean Duluth Road. We’d already made the base cut from the east which became Carroll Road. Meanwhile my hated competitor advanced from the west, cutting toward us at the intersection point. That was 50 years ago and the area remained thick forest. Of course now it’s been clear-cut to rebuild San Francisco, and the remains of my hated competitor have come to light.

He underestimated the Northwoods and he underestimated me. I made it a point of pride to be faster than he was. He would start a survey only to find I had already made the cuts and left my marks. He coined the term “what in blue blazes” in reference to how I outfoxed him. He would have no choice but to leapfrog up the line and start over. In those rare cases where he beat me to a zero point and I found his red marks, I trained my chainmen to paint over them with blue, and to obliterate his marks with my own. As long as I was faster in submitting maps to the Surveyor General, I would get priority and the pay for the job. My hated competitor never figured out how I did it. What he didn’t know, and what he would have realized if he’d been a local, was that the Surveyor General was my second cousin. Whatever maps I submitted got approved. Sometimes I got priority even when submitting late. But in the main it was a contest of whose axe-men hacked grids through Minnesota the fastest.

My hated competitor disappeared in 1855 just before he completed his final 66-foot span to the meridian. He never closed the map. Later it was closed by fiat of the Surveyor General but human hands never took its measure. Some asked if my hated competitor slipped through that gap as through a gate, over the last uncharted line into free space.

His fate was ultimately ascribed to a bear attack despite no evidence. But his ostentatious elk-hide bag turned up in Amity Creek. It contained the vintage silver astrolabe he never would have parted with unless something happened to him.

I can confirm the presence of a large black bear. It foraged along the creek and used our cuts as trails. We’d inadvertently increased the beast’s range, pointing it right at us. We returned from raiding my hated competitor’s camp one night – stole their underwear drying on the clothes line — to find the bear had eaten our roast. “Squirrel stew tomorrow, boys,” the cook said.

These debacles slowed down the great work. The state could have been surveyed in only 40 years but we kept having to resupply in costly diversions. The venture was turning out to be less profitable than I imagined. I blamed my hated competitor and I suppose around that time I thought of how I could get more work if only he ceased to exist.

I got a message to him, to meet me at a point of hours and seconds with nothing around but woods. My message said I had a lucrative business proposition that must remain between us as gentlemen. I knew he would keep our rendezvous to himself; he assumed it pertained to contemporary rumors of North Shore precious metals. He imagined I’d found a vein of something and indeed I had.

Arriving at the coordinates I’d given, he saw by the light of dusk that the sun had set in the wrong location. I’d sent him off the map. Checking his compass, he realized the soil concealed an iron ore deposit beneath his feet. He was no longer sure from what direction I would arrive as the needle spun. In fact I was behind him, raising an axe from a place no one knew existed.

An index of Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.