good afternoon youtube i was taking a closer look at this 1895 historical topo map from usgs
so i was trying to see if i could find any information on these names here there was henry
ganette who was the chief topographer and then this fellow here richard good was the geographer
in charge and then topography was by a fellow named robert marshall and then it said here
triangulation by the u.s coast and geodetic survey they probably had these teams of the coastal and
geodetic survey people bringing their survey data back and then these three people here were in
charge of putting them together into a single map so i started searching here the first guy is henry
ganette and he was a famous geographer yes right here who was henry gannett he is often called the
father of american map making one of the founding members of the national geographic society
and then i guess he got into mapping when he went out to the yellowstone region apparently he then
eventually lobbied for centralizing the country's mapping functions into a government agency
and that was the usgs was officially formed and he was the first geographer of the united states
yeah so he was around until 1914 and quite a list of accomplishments in his career
so that was this henry ganette who was listed as the chief topographer so he was probably
in charge of the entire mapping project and then this second guy here richard good
and he was born 1858 in virginia and then he joined the army corps of engineers 1877
on the transcontinental railroad survey and he joined the u.s geological survey in 1884 in 1888
he actually worked on the panama canal project for a couple of years and then came back in 1889
joined the usgs and he was in charge of the surveys of the three pacific coast
states california oregon and washington and then there's this fellow robert
marshall and he worked with usgs and then in 1908 became the chief geographer
for usgs he was very instrumental in creating the idea of the central valley water project he wrote
quite a few articles talking about surveying in north carolina this one was surveying in kentucky
yeah a lot of interesting things you can find out about reading these old maps just this little
bit of text in the corner you have to realize 1895 they were doing all this survey work either
on foot or on horseback most likely and they probably had teams of a couple of people with
all the manual surveying you know transits and theodolites and chains and rods and
all the stuff to do the triangulation so this was all done by hand you know looking through
instruments trying to get elevations and angles and distances and put together a map like this and
at the time in the 1890s having a map like this a real topo map was probably just an incredible
thing for someone to have if they were trying to explore out in this country you know having
a map that showed where all the streams and hills and slopes and canyons were was probably just you
know a modern marvel when i first started working with this map i was literally looking at it on my
home computer trying to study a particular area of the map see what was there and then i would
go off on a bike ride and try to find something that was on the map or vice versa i would see
something on a bike ride and then i would come back to this map at home and try to see if i could
find what it was that i saw on a particular ride and then i finally figured out how to get the map
loaded into the avenza maps program on android and all of a sudden i could do this you could
see this 125 year old map on your device with live gps tracking data the full coordinates show
your location it would orient with the compass and show you basically exactly where you were
that was just mind-blowing when i got all that connected it was just like wow the one
problem you'll see here is center of this circle is where i was standing when i did this screenshot
and i knew where i was standing because i was on that part of this road the gps showed me up here
and that's something on the order of about a hundred yards maybe even 200 yards off so
these old topo maps are not terribly accurate so that's something you have to work with and at the
time i was just kind of figuring that out you know it's like i know i'm right here i walked up this
road to the first switchback and it's telling me i'm way up here and i knew i wasn't way up there
well that's some of the limitations of these maps but given that limitation
it's just amazing having this in your hand you can just imagine what these three people would
think of being able to do this with their map that they created 125 years ago
just amazing and yeah that's that is pretty neat so like i said this is avenza maps
this is the free version and i've downloaded the map and activated it for offline use because up in
this area there's no data connection all you get is oh resolution gps signal that's the circle is
the uncertainty so the the gps signal down in this canyon is not very good and then the maps
are also not very good so it's a little bit hard to use them but having this capability in your
hands is really neat if you have any questions about that post up in the comment section below
stay tuned for future videos and we're we'll be going up and down the this area here and up
this way looking for signs of these old roads and see what's left and as always thanks for watching
you