William A. Burt and the Upper Peninsula

by Alan S. Brown

Heavy black clouds filled the sky to the north, and chill winds carried a promise of snow. It was only a little past mid-September 1844, but to William A. Burt’s small party of government land surveyors it seemed that winter had arrived. Burt urged them to hurry with the work of running out the township lines in this rough tract of land. It was Lake Superior country where rugged terrain and uncertain weather seemed to conspire against any rapid surveys. But the work had to be pressed if Burt were to realize more than bare expenses on the contract he had agreed to the previous spring.

As though weather and terrain were not enough to contend with, Burt’s men were almost out of supplies and subsisting on three porcupines they had been able to take the previous day. But Burt was thorough. His lines and field notes must be accurate; there would be no shoddy work done under his name. He and his crew would not go back to base camp for supplies until the township lines were properly run.

Bad weather, difficult terrain, short rations—surely enough for the party to cope with. But there was more. The compass needle was fluctuating continually! An obvious solution was to used the highly accurate solar compass that Burt had perfected, which the United States government now urged its surveyors to employ. But clouds threatened to obscure the sun.

A cry from the compass man brought Burt to the front. Here was a “variation that will beat them all.” Burt looked at the violently moving needle and said, “Boys, look around and see what you can find.” In a short time members of the party found numerous specimens of ore that Burt immediately recognized as iron. After carefully noting several chunks of the ore, Burt recorded the find in his field notes, adding that spathic and hematite ores were abundant along this eastern boundary of T 47 N-R 27 W (township 47 north-range 27 west). In this matter-of-fact fashion he noted an event that changed the history of Michigan and its Upper Peninsula and proved to be of monumental importance to the United States.

William A. Burt and his party had officially discovered iron ore in Michigan. This discovery on what was to become the Marquette Range was followed by finds on the Menominee and Gogebic ranges. When developed, these ranges made Michigan the leading iron ore producer for the nation—a distinction held until the start of the twentieth century when the great Mesabi Range of Minnesota was opened.

Burt was a United States government deputy surveyor whose work took him into wilderness areas largely unknown even to the fur trappers. For more than twenty years he was one of a small group of men who ran the lines that divided the two peninsulas of Michigan into a checkerboard of townships and sections as prescribed by the Ordinance of 1785. Today almost all land titles and conveyances begin with the surveyors’ designations as to range and township.

When Burt came to Michigan Territory in 1824 little was known of the lands in lower Michigan above the third tier of counties. Knowledge of the Upper Peninsula had not advanced greatly from the time of the French Jesuit fathers, although Governor Lewis Cass had made a circuit of the region in 1820. Burt saw surveying as a necessary prerequisite to settlement and a profession offering a good livelihood and the esteem of fellow settlers. Although he had surveying experience in his native New York State, his prospects as a surveyor were not good in the Michigan Territory of the 1820s because surveys were much in advance of the course of settlement. Despite Governor Cass’s strenuous efforts to have more lands surveyed and put on sale, the federal government believed its efforts would be better justified in Indiana and Illinois where settlers continued to occupy lands the surveys had not yet reached.

The applicants for surveying far outweighed the positions available. So Burt busied himself in various ways in his home neighborhood of Mt. Vernon, Macomb County. A skilled craftsman, he soon developed a reputation for building first-class mills. He also impressed his fellow settlers as a dependable citizen and soon found himself serving them as postmaster and an elected delegate to the Territorial Council. A further measure of public confidence was shown in 1833 when Burt was appointed Circuit Court judge. These responsibilities occupied Burt and helped him feed his family of five sons—John, Alvin, Austin, William and Wells. A comfort to the judge and his wife Phebe, the Burt offspring also made their contributions to the development of Michigan and the Middle West when they joined their father as surveyors of the public domain. The Upper Peninsula knew them well, particularly John, who became a leading citizen and developer in Marquette.

By 1833 the federal government was ready to move forward with its Michigan surveys. Now Burt’s skills and reputation for dependability were in demand. Through the recommendation of a Michigan surveyor, Lucius Lyon, Burt was offered a contract to survey lands in Sanilac County. Several surveyors had refused contracts there because the lands seemed unworthy of agricultural settlement and presented extreme problems of swampy terrain and mosquito infestations. There were already reports that some of the deputies had turned in fraudulent field notes, and Burt was admonished that better work was expected from him than had “heretofore been practiced.”

Today it is easy for us to smile at the reports of rugged terrain and mosquitoes that were “ready to devour,” and we underestimate the rigors and hardships that faced deputy surveyors who moved into these lands with chain, ax and compass. But there was a great deal of truth in the statement made by Surveyor General Edward Tiffin when he noted that “None but Men as hard as a Savage who is always at home in Woods and Swamps [and who] can live upon what they afford (if occasions so require), who can travel for Days up to the knees in mud & mire, can drink any fluid he finds while he is drenched with water also—and has a knowledge of the lands [and] who are equally patient & persevering under similar hardships can make anything by surveying the kind of Country we have to Survey.”

Burt’s first contract was successfully completed. He had earned the confidence of the surveyor general, which brought him more work in Michigan and also in what is now Wisconsin. While he was running lines in that area, Burt first encountered what was to be a recurrent problem for all the government surveyors of that era: the frequent disturbance of the magnetic compasses by mineral attraction. These “aberrations of the needle” proved such a problem to Burt that he devised his famous solar compass as a means to obtain accurate township lines. The solar compass proved to be highly successful and was first recommended, then adopted, by the federal government for its surveys. Limited only by the fact that the surveyor had to be able to sight on the sun, the solar compass enabled deputy surveyors to run more accurate lines and saved its users valuable time.

In June 1840 Burt carried out an important assignment for Michigan and the federal government when he extended the principal meridian (84 degrees, 22 minutes, 24 seconds west longitude) across the Straits of Mackinac and on up to Lake Superior. In 1964 the Upper Peninsula Chapter of the Michigan Society of Registered Land Surveyors dedicated a marker at the exact spot in Sault Ste. Marie where Burt set the northernmost point of this Michigan principal meridian.

Burt received his introduction to the rugged Upper Peninsula terrain while running this meridian. The heavy brush took its toll on clothing, and as Burt neared the Superior shore, he wrote his wife that his “Coat and Pantiloons are most gone,” and requested that she make him a new outfit from the “strongest kind of Bedticking.” Years later, when he published a manual for surveyors, Burt recalled his own Upper Peninsula experiences and suggest that work in the field called for stout boots, heavy trousers and “flannel for underclothes…for all seasons and all kinds of weather.” He added that a large silk handkerchief “to tie over the ears and neck, is a good protection from flies and mosquitoes.

Once the principal meridian was established, the immense task of running the town and section lines of the Upper Peninsula could begin. Mile by mile, Burt, several of his sons, John Mullet and other United States deputy surveyors ran their lines and filled in the “unknown” portions of the map of Michigan’s north country. These surveys were made over extremely difficult terrain, which included the great Tahquamenon swamp, but Burt and his companions continued until in 1842 they reached the Chocolay River—the boundary of the existing Indian treaties.

By this time, the state had Dr. Douglass Houghton’s famous report on the geology of the Upper Peninsula, which described extensive copper deposits. The Indians were called in for a treaty that would open the lands to the expected rush of copper miners. Under the Treaty of LaPointe, the Chippewas ceded these valuable lands, and the task of surveying proceeded.

Applicants did not rush for these survey jobs; even experienced old-timers like John Mullett drew back from working this rugged country. Here surveyors often had to hire as many men to pack in supplies and equipment as to clear brush and sight town lines. Operating costs soared. Since the deputy surveyor paid all help from his own pocket, his chances of making much on a given contract were greatly reduced. Burt and his sons were willing to try, and they took contracts that others refused. Their expertise with the solar compass and their long experience in rough country were severely tested, but each contract was accurately completed and a small profit credited to the accounts. In due time their work brought them to the area where Burt made the official discovery of iron ore on the Marquette Range. Here Burt noted that roads would have to be built out to Lake Superior so that the ore could be exploited. He also called attention to the need for a canal around the rapids of the St. Marys so that the iron could reach the forges and smelters of the industrial regions.

Meanwhile the Copper Country needed orderly surveys, especially since hundreds of would-be miners and fortune hunters were staking out claims all over the Keweenaw and Ontonagon areas. In running the town and section lines in this copper region no man equaled William A. Burt’s work, either in miles covered or in accuracy. This despite the fact that even the veteran Burt found the work the most difficult he had ever attempted. The country was virgin wilderness; there were constant compass needle variations; and worse, “the thick forest prevents the rays of the sun falling on the Solar Compass in many places and in the early or latter part of the day high hills and knobs sometimes intervene between the instrument and the sun.” Burt drove his men on. When they reached the Portage River near present-day Houghton and Hancock he predicted that the future would see a ship canal for passage into Lake Superior and that at the “mouth of the river, on the right bank, is an eligible site for a town, and when the harbor is improved, as it deserves to be, will probably become a place of some importance.”

While running his lines in these regions, Burt was accomplishing something else of great value for Michigan and the federal government. He and the famous Dr. Houghton were making the first combined linear-geological survey ever attempted in the United States. The tragic drowning of Houghton in October 1845 prematurely halted the experiment. Burt finished up the contract, however, and his report on the copper region was widely acclaimed by government authorities. By this time the township lines in the western end of the peninsula were almost to the Wisconsin boundary, and Burt, tired and worn from what he described as his hardest surveys, was ready to leave field work to younger men. 
(click image for larger version of map)

He was not to get his well-earned rest, for Lucius Lyon, now surveyor general, had an important task for him. Would Burt undertake the survey of the remaining segment of the Michigan-Wisconsin boundary? It was imperative that this be done, and soon, for Wisconsin was about to enter the union and definite boundaries must accompany her statehood. Burt accepted the contract and left Detroit in May 1847 on board the Sam Ward bound for Saulte Ste. Marie.

By May 23 Burt and his party had reached L’anse on Keweenaw Bay. The next day they began the overland trek to Lac Vieux Desert, where the survey was to begin. The land in question was a stretch of rugged country lying between the Montreal River and Brule Lake. Burt and his party finished the work in just over one month, but the job was not without hardships and some excitement: they encountered Indians who at first regarded them as trespassers. Burt gave the tribesmen some presents and convinced them that their lands were not in jeopardy. The work continued. For this important task, Burt received $1,000, figured at the rate of sixteen dollars per mile, the highest rate ever paid on a Michigan public land survey. But, a contemporary noted it was a “small amount of money for a large amount of work.” Some 81 years later modern surveyors found only the slightest inaccuracies in the original Burt lines. (click image for larger version of map)

In his last public service to the Upper Peninsula and the people of Michigan, Burt completed a preliminary site survey for the Soo Canal and advocated its completion. When Burt died at his Detroit home in 1858, the canal had operated for three years. He had the satisfaction of knowing that the mineral regions he surveyed and thus helped to open were shipping thousands of tons of copper and iron ore through the Soo Locks to Michigan’s growing industrial complex.