The Hayden Survey of 1875

The camp must have resembled a hastily thrown-together ranch rodeo just outside of Denver.
A choking dust cloud, complete with the sweet and fruity aroma of horse manure, hung over a remuda of 90 mules with one or two horses added, to give the wild bunch a level of sophistication it didn’t deserve.
Forty men trying to fit the beasts with packsaddles and panniers loaded with food, bedding, rifles, expensive land-surveying equipment, ancient, bulky cameras, and other scientific instruments were an entertaining spectacle.
Some of the animals behaved, but most of the mules had inherited their personality traits from the ass end of their pedigree rather than the more urbane horse side of the family.
Add to that the reality that only a tiny fraction of the men involved were considered top hands at handling unruly beasts; most of the group were highly educated city boys, complete with crisp diplomas from time-honored institutions like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, in a wide range of subjects from geology to biology, to civil engineering.
Fortunately for the academics in the group, the men who came along to provide for the day-to-day needs, such as moving camp, cooking meals, wrangling mules, fighting off hostile natives, and taking care of all things temporal, were competent at every task assigned to them.
They had met at a place christened “Camp Hayden,” in honor of their leader, Ferdinand V. Hayden, commissioned in 1875 by the United States Department of the Interior to survey the Four Corners region.
Hayden was trained as a medical doctor, but his passions were for the natural sciences, with geology as his first love. He was chosen to lead the expedition to this remote corner of the country, which was thought to hold abundant mineral resources awaiting exploration.
The Civil War had been over for ten years, and the country had grown tired of the messy reconstruction in the South and shifted its focus to the prospects of economic expansion in the West. Yet few knew with sufficient confidence what economic resources were there.
There had been a rash of surveys of the region in the decade preceding the war. Still, the information they collected, while applicable, lacked the detail needed by the expanding nation.
The Department of the Interior asked Hayden to provide a comprehensive description that could be used by the group of people who were soon to become the region’s first settlers.
In the decade following the war, four expeditions became known as The Four Great Surveys. The Hayden Survey was one of them.
The other three were led by Clarence King, who explored along the 40th parallel; George Wheeler, who examined the land surrounding the 100th meridian; and John Wesley Powell, who studied the Colorado River Gorge.
Of these four surveys, the Powell and Hayden Surveys figure most prominently in the history of the Four Corners.
Aside from being a capable scientist, Hayden was an astute observer of the political landscape in Washington and the western territories where the survey was to take place.
He knew that to succeed, he not only had to describe the land and inventory its resources, but he also had to create usable maps with accurate elevations and spatial descriptions.
Four years earlier, Hayden had learned in his survey of the land, that is now Yellowstone National Park, that acceptance of his findings depended as much on how he communicated them as on the conclusions themselves.
To this end, he took great care to select a group of professionals who, in addition to their scientific credentials, could write well and had sufficient connections with prominent newspapers to ensure their written reports were published widely.
William Henry Jackson, a well-known early photographer of western landscapes, joined both Hayden surveys. His photographs gave the world a peek at the actual places surveyed and the people encountered.
The fieldwork was to be completed in one season from June through August of 1875. To succeed, the group of 40 men and twice that number of animals were split into five teams, each assigned to a different place and given tasks appropriate to the men’s talents and the areas they visited.
The physical challenges they all endured were severe. Sleeping in wet bedding, drinking muddy water, or trying to find any water at all were nearly daily occurrences, as well as running for their lives.
The group encountered indigenous people whose families had called this area home for generations, as well as Hispanic immigrants who had been here for more than 200 years.
Most of those they met were friendly and treated them well. However, some locals saw the surveyors as a precursor to further restrictions on their use of the land from which they had taken livelihoods for as long as they could remember.
Future articles in this space will feature stories from the Hayden Survey, including a skirmish with a band of Utes and Paiutes north of Monticello, how they influenced place names, and others.
These stories were inspired by the book, “Mapping the Four Corners,” by Robert McPherson and Susan Neel.