ANNUAL REPORT of California SURVEYOR-GENERAL 1863 Post Gold Rush County Reports. TITLE: Annual Report of the Surveyor-General of the State of California for The Year 1862. Houghton, Surveyor-General of California, et al. PUBLISHER: Sacramento, California: Benjamin P. DESCRIPTION: 148 pages, folding chart. CONDITION NOTES: VERY GOOD. Some peeling to spine. Pages clean, except for a couple of pages with light foxing. Chart properly folded with a small stub tear. Want to see the mother of all land rushes underway? Read the reports from the various California county surveyors touting their bounty, counting their cattle, and bickering over boundaries (in the two appendices). A report to Leland Stanford, Governor of California in the 12th year of statehood, compiled from correspondence by county surveyors and assessors, as well as state civil engineers. State and County Boundaries. Canals, and Drainage of the Sacramento Valley. An additional report on Irrigation by Civil Engineer Calvin Brown serves to detail the growing realization of the state’s unique climate, and its unusual dependence on seasonal water flow for agricultural abundance in the absence of a cold winter. Reports on Railway construction and Flood mitigation round out the statewide portion. Inally, two appendices include reports by each county’s surveyor and assessor giving insight into the state’s resources and the degree to which agriculture has progressed and survey/boundary issues have been resolved… Very readable and fascinating. Each county official was required by state law to report, but some submitted a short, very subjective descriptive letter, and others submitted full tables of statistics. Others, such as Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Bernardino submitted no letters, though some of their data appears on statewide tabulations. San Diego’s data appears nowhere. Is this a wartime measure, or is it a matter of insignificant population or agricultural yield that keep the Southern counties out of the Surveyor-General’s report? Listing and template services provided by inkFrog.
