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I thought every map from 1890 showed Wyoming's borders wrong until I checked the survey notes
I collect old US state maps and for about 3 years I assumed any map with a crooked Wyoming rectangle was just a sloppy printer. Last week I picked up an 1893 Rand McNally atlas at a library sale in Cheyenne for $4 and noticed the northwest corner was off by what looked like 20 miles. Turns out Wyoming's border along the 45th parallel was surveyed in 1874 with a chain that was wearing out, so the line drifted north the further west they went. I had been blaming the cartographers this whole time when the actual surveyors were the ones who messed up. How do you all tell the difference between a printing error and a real survey mistake on these old maps?
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bettyhunt29d ago
The part about blaming the cartographers for years really hits home because I've been doing the same thing with a couple of my old Kansas maps. Here's an angle I haven't seen brought up: check whether the map has other states sharing that same border line, because if the drift shows up on Nebraska and Colorado too, that points to the surveyor's chain rather than a printer. A printing error usually shows up as one wonky line on one map, but a bad survey repeats itself across every map made in that era.
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