5.2 Indian Cessions, State Boundaries & the Original GLO Surveys

The cessions that opened Mississippi

Acreages are commonly cited approximations. The dates, parties, and survey districts are the points exams test.

Treaty lines as survey boundaries. Each cession boundary was run as a line on the ground, and the rectangular surveys closed against it. Where a township line or section line met a treaty line, the deputy set a closing corner and the sections along the line became fractional. When you find irregular fractional sections in a band across a county, check whether an old cession line runs there. Choctaw treaty reservations, such as the individual reservations allowed under Article 14 of the Dancing Rabbit Creek treaty, also appear in the land records as tracts located by legal subdivision.

Mississippi's state boundaries

The Board's suggested reference The Survey of Mississippi's State, Indian, and Township Boundaries treats state lines as part of the same story:

• South: the 31st parallel (Ellicott's line, 1798–1799) from the Mississippi River east to the Pearl River, then down the Pearl River to the Gulf. That is the Louisiana line for the "Florida parishes" area.
• West: the Mississippi River. The boundary with Louisiana and Arkansas follows the river's thalweg as it moves by accretion and erosion, but it stays in the old channel after an avulsion (Section 10.2).
• East: the Enabling Act of 1817 set the Alabama line as a line from a point on the Gulf, a short distance east of the Pascagoula River's mouth, north to the northwest corner of Washington County, Alabama, and then direct to the mouth of Bear Creek on the Tennessee River.
• North: the Tennessee line, run near the 35th parallel. The Chickasaw Meridian's base line is near it.

Mississippi became a state on December 10, 1817, which is the date its title to the beds of tidal waters vested under the equal-footing doctrine (Section 10.3).

How the GLO surveyed Mississippi

Surveys were made by deputy surveyors under contract to the regional surveyor. For the lands south of Tennessee, that office was created by the Act of March 3, 1803, and Isaac Briggs was the first appointee. Deputies were paid by the mile and hired their own chainmen, axemen, and markers. The pay system encouraged speed. Instructions from the surveyor general and later the printed manuals (1855 onward) set the procedures: run township exteriors, then subdivide into sections, monument corners, and record everything in field notes that the surveyor general reviewed before the plat was approved.

For a retracement surveyor, the practical consequences are:

• The field notes and the approved plat are the primary evidence of what was done (Section 6.3).
• The instructions in force at the time of the survey determine how it should have been done: sequence, corner materials, and accessories. You interpret the original work by the rules the deputy followed, not by modern ones.

Instruments

Gunter's chain

Chains wore and stretched with use and were checked against standards periodically. A stretched chain makes the recorded distances shorter than the true ground distances, so a retracement with modern equipment finds lines longer than recorded. In rough country, deputies often used a half chain (two poles, 33 ft) and still booked results in full chains and links.

Compass. Early Mississippi lines were run with the open-sight magnetic compass, corrected for declination determined by observation. Magnetic surveys carry systematic errors: secular change over time, daily (diurnal) variation, and local attraction from iron-bearing soils. That is why retraced lines often bend at original corners and why record bearings are poor evidence compared with monuments. Solar compasses and transits came later.

Original monuments and accessories

Most original corners in Mississippi's timbered country were wooden posts marked with notches or the section numbers and referenced by bearing trees. The deputy recorded each bearing tree's species, diameter, bearing, and distance in links, and scribed it (for example, "T5N R2E S14 BT"). Line trees standing on the line were hacked, and trees near the line were blazed. In open prairie, deputies raised mounds with pits beside the post. The accessories, not the post, are what modern surveyors usually recover: a stump with a healed-over blaze, an axe scar, or an old tree matching the field-note call (Section 6.3).

The rule that original corners control (43 U.S.C. § 752)

The Act of February 11, 1805, now 43 U.S.C. § 752, sets the rules every retracement starts from:

1. Corners marked in the surveys returned by the surveyor general are the proper corners of the sections or subdivisions they were intended to designate. Quarter-section corners not marked are placed as nearly as possible equidistant between corners on the same line.
2. Lines actually run and marked are the proper boundary lines, and their lengths as returned are held to be the true lengths. Lines not actually run are ascertained by straight lines from established corners to the opposite corresponding corners. In fractional townships without opposite corners, they run due north–south or east–west to the watercourse, Indian boundary, or other external line.
3. Each section's returned contents are held to be its quantity for disposal.

The U.S. Supreme Court applied the same principle in Cragin v. Powell, 128 U.S. 691 (1888): the government survey, once approved, is not subject to correction by the courts. A retracing surveyor restores where the original corner was placed, not where it should have been, even if the original is off by chains.