In the London Times today. Here's the partial link, scroll down under "Books" for full link (subscription required). Article quoted below.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section/0,,172,00.html Times Newspapers Limited The Times (London) July 17, 2002, Wednesday SECTION: Features; Times2; 17 LENGTH: 999 words HEADLINE: Measure for measure, how the American West was won BYLINE: Raymond Seitz BODY: WAGONS WEST The Epic Story of America's Overland Trails By Frank McLynn Jonathan Cape, Pounds 20; 510 pp ISBN 0 224 06009 0 Pounds 16 (p&p Pounds 1.95) 0870 160 80 80 MEASURING AMERICA How the Nation was Shaped by the Greatest Land Sale in History By Andro Linklater HarperCollins, Pounds 17.99; 336 pp ISBN 0 007 10887 7 Pounds 14.39 (p&p Pounds 1.95) 0870 160 80 80 On September 30, 1785, Thomas Hutchins, first Geographer of the United States, unfurled his Gunter's chain and started to measure America. This historic event by the banks of the Ohio River, not far from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is today commemorated by a small stone marker with a plaque that reads: "The Point Of Beginning". And it is from here, too, that Andro Linklater begins his marvellous tale of how the United States divided up its vast virgin lands and how the Western world ended up with two systems of weights and measures, the metric and the traditional. As a professor of Astronomy at Gresham's College in London, Edmund Gunter invented his surveyor's chain in 1607. With 100 links divided into four equal perches, Gunter managed to combine measurements based on the number four, as customarily used in England, with the simpler arithmetic of the more accessible number ten. Gunter's chain was a revolution for owners who wanted to know exactly what they owned. And thus the chain, which ran 22 yards in length, became the standard rule for mapping plats, and it has since dictated the dimensions of our background in everything from the length of a cricket pitch to a New York City block. But Gunter's chain had a more profound impact: it enabled the Anglo-Saxon world to transform land into property, especially in the United States, which, in the course of its independence, was to acquire 2.3 billion acres of additional territory, half to be sold off to individual ownership. Before this transformation could occur, however, the land had to be divided into transferable parcels. And so began the gigantic, rolling, gunterised survey of the American continent, leaving this huge nation divided into a grid of small squares from the Appalachian Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Thomas Hutchins was the first in a long line of surveyors to pull out his chain and head west. The creation of small-scale property also accorded perfectly with Thomas Jefferson's political philosophy. Yeoman farmers, he believed, would form the backbone of American democracy and give substance to the concept of popular sovereignty. While many frontier settlers did indeed benefit, so did the big time speculators, and land in America became the equivalent of shares on a stock exchange. So anxious was Congress to sell the new territory, however, that Jefferson's plan to standardise all the nation's weights and measures never got off the ground. He did succeed in decimalising the Spanish dollar and making it the new American currency; but his ingenious metric system ended up a doodle in the national archives. Immigrants from Europe had brought with them a ragbag of measurements from hattocks to fardels whose value varied from community to community, and it wasn't until 1836 that harmony finally emerged from this numerical cacophony (Britain didn't do much better: Parliament established the Imperial system in 1824). Meanwhile the French in their revolutionary zeal imposed the metric system (then based on a quadrant of a meridian) on everything they could lay their hands on, including the calendar. But, as Linklaker points out, the metric scale is an abstraction, while traditional measurements are based on a human activity. Once placed before a sceptical populace, the French system faltered and almost collapsed. It was ultimately rescued by the growing scientific and industrial demand for infinite precision, the metre's essential and universal strength. And so we have ended up today with the French triumphant in their metrification, the American schizophrenic with both systems existing side by side, and the British making their slow, fretful transition from one to the other. Weights and measures may sound tedious as a history book, but Linklaker illuminates a subject that is with us daily -driving along a highway, measuring out a recipe or looking at a piece of property. And even better, he writes with the exactness of the metric system and the wit of the traditional system. So what did Americans do with their land bonanza? For the most part, they crossed it, and this is the subject of Frank McLynn's story about the beginning of one of history's epic migrations. McLynn concentrates on the travails of the transcontinental pioneers in the 1840s along the Oregon and California trails. Spurred by the ideology of Manifest Destiny and captivated by images of a Western Utopia, Americans in their Conestoga wagons gathered at various jump-off points in Missouri to make the trek across the Great American Desert, as the prairie land was called, and to find new lives on the Pacific coast. With oxen, horses and cattle, they needed plenty of water and hove to the great rivers of the West: the Missouri and Platte, and then the Sweetwater/Columbia for Oregon or the Humboldt for California. But the challenge really came in heaving over the range of the Rockies. McLynn recounts the perils of the first trickle of overlanders, the horrors of the snowbound Donner party, which fell into cannibalism, and the extraordinary migration of Mormons to Utah in 1847. The discovery of gold in California the next year unleashed all manner of utopians across the plains, killing buffalo and pushing out Indians along the way. Almost 100,000 people made the trek at the close of the decade. The proliferation of wagon trains and the immensity of the geography sometimes makes McLynn's yarns hard to follow, and confusion is not helped by a tendency to the prolix. But the research of the author is impeccable and the achievement of the pioneers miraculous.
