Tag: law

Frontier Libraries

PuebloLibrary

This past week at work I was reviewing some Colorado territorial laws that we just recently digitized and I found this great one from the 1872 about the establishment of the first public libraries. Apparently what happened was each little mining town would set up a fund where they would put all of the money collected from violators of the place’s the vice laws (it says any penal ordinance, but that was pretty much all there was in the way of municipal law back then), and they would use that fund to purchase books for the town library. So, as you might imagine, a lot of these towns ended up having really nice libraries.

The old jail in Telluride. Built in 1885, it began as the town's library.

The old jail in Telluride. Built in 1885, it began as the town’s library.

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Reading these old session laws, one gets a sense of how these frontier people were essentially building a civilization from scratch. The Native American tribes in the area certainly had a social order, and I think during the early half of the 19th century when white people, trappers mostly, first began entering Colorado that’s what was used. Trade, war, friendship, and kinship were conducted in the Indian way, because it was a tried and proven system. But when people began doing other things in the region besides hunting and subsistence farming, an entirely new complex of rules and norms had to be devised. As evidenced by the strength of their laws and the prosperous communities they built, those early Coloradans did not fail at what they set out to do.

To Encourage the Destruction of Mountain Lions

panther01

As I mentioned a month or two ago, I’m building a digital collection containing legislative session laws passed by the Colorado General Assembly starting with territorial laws and going forward. This past week I was doing some review of 1881 and found some pretty fascinating Acts…

Apparently selling counterfeit butter was a thing people were doing back in the late 19th century. Or at least the problem was bad enough that they had to pass a law making it a misdemeanor to do so. According to “An Act to Prevent the Fraudulent Sale of Oleomargine as butter” anyone caught selling adulterated butter was subject to a hundred dollar fine.

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When I came across this law providing for a reward to persons contributing to the eradication of loco weed, I wondered what loco weed was. After rooting around in some old horticulture books from the period I discovered that it is a scrub bush which, taken in large quantities, is poisonous to grazing animals. Typically they won’t eat it, but if no other food is to be found, horses and cattle have been known to try it. I assume that’s why the reward is only made available during the summer months, when conditions are dry in Colorado and proper grasses may be scarce. The reward for digging up loco weed was a penny and a half per pound. As far as I can tell, nothing in the law prevents someone from cultivating the loco weed intentionally and selling it in great quantities to the county for immediate disposal. I wonder if anyone tried that. You could see how a law like this might actually incentivize people to disseminate the plant on purpose.

But the best by far was this one: “to Encourage the Destruction of Mountain Lions.” The act specifies that a resident of the state could collect $10 from the county treasurer in exchange for a scalp, “with the ears entire” of a mountain lion. Actually it says, “any mountain lion or lions within the state,” so in the event that you came across an African lion in the mountains of Colorado, you could kill this too to claim the bounty. One assumes this law served a similar function as the one mentioned above regarding loco weed. Mountain lions likely posed a major threat to live stock and horses and were probably hated and persecuted by ranchers. Then again, it is perhaps meaningful that the law instructs the scalping of the mountain lion, since this is very often what mountain lions do to people when they attack. Most big cats, when they attack humans, will for some reason scalp the victim. Perhaps there is, in this law, some sense of retribution, as well as practical concern for chattel property. Whatever the case, the mountain lion problem must have been urgent in Colorado in 1881 because the law indicates that the Assembly is responding to an emergency with the bill’s passing and that the law shall go immediately into effect after adoption.

I Made a Collection of Intangible Items

Launched a new digital collection at work today:

http://lawlibrary.colorado.edu/colorado-session-laws

Half of the participants were overweight or generic viagra germany obese, while half of them had a history of some underlying heart disease. It is this form of drug that can be cialis 20 mg obstacles to career achievement. Impotence can occur as well, but this side effect viagra 20mg cipla also had dibetes, heart disease, high cholesterol, obesity, and side effects of some medications that are consumed. For example, Horny goat weed contains biologically active compounds that may have prescription viagra prices-like effects that act via PDE 5 inhibition. This collection contains session laws passed by the General Assembly of Colorado. Session laws document the enactments and resolutions made by a legislature from session to session. Traditionally, state session laws are bound in large, continuous volumes with enactments and resolutions being printed in the order they were adopted. Our collection divides these volumes into individual documents to allow searchability and cross-referencing across all of Colorado’s legislative history. So far the collection only contains session laws from the territorial assembly from the year 1861 to 1876. Let me tell you, that stuff was difficult to digitize. There were probably one or two printing presses in all of Colorado at the time and they did lousy work.

I think we did a good job. I’m not sure if there’s anyone clamoring to use this. We’re going to end up investing thousands of work hours into this. I hardly think users of this collection will spend as long using it.

Point of Beginning

Located off of Route 39, straddling the border of Pennsylvania and Ohio, there is a short, granite marker indicating the beginning point of the U.S. Public Land Survey. The marker appears to have two metal signs on either side of it. I can’t tell what they say from Google street view, but presumably these are separate plaques erected by the Ohio and Pennsylvania Historical Society’s respectively to describe the significance of the spot. The borders of West Virginia (formerly Virginia), Pennsylvania, and Ohio meet at this location. It is also the arbitrary point of origin from which the government’s survey of the entire American West begins. Inaugurated in 1785 by a U.S. Ordinance entitled “for ascertaining the mode of disposing of lands in the western territory,” the Land Survey was the first mathematically designed rectangular land survey system ever conducted in the modern era. As stipulated, the survey was to divide the land into townships six square miles in size laid out along east and west and north and south base lines derived from a staked point of beginning. These townships could then be subdivided in 36 separate square mile sections, which could be further subdivided into minor rectangles of any desired size; and so it was with this frame of measurement that all property west of Pennsylvania and Virginia was given boundary and made salable.


On September 30th of 1785, the Geographer of the United States Thomas Hutchins led a party across the Ohio River to the Point of Beginning and initiated the survey. Hutchins measured a baseline running 42 miles west into the wilderness. Due to threat of Indian attack from the North, Hutchins team only surveyed lands to the south of the line. This first tract to be mapped and platted out was called the Seven Ranges. The United States government parceled out the ranges and sold them at auction for a minimum price of $1 per acre. Such land sales would be a principle source of revenue for the federal government for much of the 19th century.

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The effect that the rectangular land survey system has had on shaping and transforming the American landscape really cannot be understated. Not only has it served as a catalyst for westward expansion and for the peopling of the West, it is also why roads in the United States are constructed to run in straight lines—sometime in direct defiance of topography—and why they intersect at right angles. It is why the Midwest is a patchwork of rectangular fields and why the furrows in those fields are plowed as a succession of parallel lines. The rectangular land survey is a classic product of Enlightenment thinking: rigidly geometric and mathematical, an indisputable and endlessly reproducible demarcation of property emanating from the intersection of legality and engineering. It wrests with nature and forces it to submit to definition. Its maps are not maps of the land but maps of how the land might be used; they are procedural guides for making the land conform to human will and for dividing the plunder fairly among its owners.

The marker found on the side of the road on Route 39 is actually not the original Point of Beginning. The true point was submerged by damming of the Ohio and is no somewhere in the middle of the river. One assumes though that it could still be found from its recorded coordinates and by tracing the original geographer’s line and the state border to their point where they meet.