Distinctly Montana Magazine

63 w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m V INCE LONG AND I HAD BEEN TEACHERS AT BILLINGS SE- NIOR HIGH SCHOOL FOR NINE YEARS WHEN WE MADE THE HIKE TO THE PRINCIPAL MERIDIAN OF MONTANA, THE STATE'S INITIAL POINT. He taught technology classes, and I taught English classes. We both coached the cross-coun- try team. One day, he was reading Montana history and found a reference to initial points. He wanted to visit the Montana initial point. In June 2005, we went to a race in Missoula, and on the way back, we turned south off I-90 at Three Forks. While I drove, Vince used my handheld GPS unit to direct us along a gravel country road to the base of the hill. We hiked up the hill in twen- ty minutes and found the U.S. Land Office survey marker on the stone at the top. Until I saw that marker, I was sure we were hiking on the wrong hill. It seemed too small, too insignificant to be the point from which the entire state of Montana was surveyed and recorded. But the small hill, just a couple miles south of the tiny commu- nity of Willow Creek, was indeed the initial point for the fourth largest state in the country. We laughed about the improbability of that hill being such an important site. Looking east, a fence line extended from the hill straight ahead for miles. We didn't know it at the time, but we later learned that the fence line, the base line for the Montana Initial Point, con- tinued east for more than 150 miles, becoming Grand Avenue in Billings, the street where we went to work every day at Billings Senior High School. In the distance were dozens of peaks more prominent than this nondescript bump on the high plains, lining the horizon. Why here? Why not use one of those more significant mountains? t t t In mapping out an expanding country, geographers could have used one initial point, perhaps in New York or Delaware, the first state, and measured every other piece of land from there. That would have been easy using today's technology, but in the late 1700s and early 1800s, when the country was heading west at record speed, the need to mark land and identify holdings out- paced the survey crews. Private claims to land in the thirteen colonies were based on metes and bounds, the system used in England. The first person to claim land in an area usually picked the best farmland and wrote up a description. He might define his land as going from a river to a large rock on a hill, then to a big tree, and finally back to the river. There was generally nothing square or neat about it, and the next person along would pick land and write an equally odd-shaped, complicated description. By the time the idea to use a grid system of rectangles, often credited to Thomas Jefferson, came about as part of the Land Ordinance of 1785, land in the original states was claimed and recorded. The ordinance created the Public Lands Survey Sys- tem (PLSS) to plat any land claims west of the colonies. To start this program, surveyors selected a Point of Beginning, the spot where Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio meet on by STEVE GARDINER

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