Page:U.S. Department of the Interior Annual Report 1877.djvu/49

Rh where the locusts were most numerous. A number of paid assistants were employed, reports from whom are in the hands of the commissioners. Professor Riley, besides visiting Texas, Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado several times, also visited the Manitoba region, in British America. Professor Thomas visited Iowa, Nebraska, and Minnesota. Dr. Packard late in May and during June passed through Montana and Dakota, and was enabled to obtain such information as to enable the commission to predict that there would be no invasion of the Mississippi Valley this summer — a prediction which subsequent events fully confirmed. He was also in Utah and Nevada at the time when the people were suffering from the locusts, and afterward made a journey through Northern California, Eastern Oregon, and Washington Territory, so as to ascertain the western limits of the Rocky Mountain locust, which was found to be the 120th meridian. He also determined the species which has for two centuries past locally ravaged Oregon and California.

It is believed that the diffusion of useful knowledge, the personal aid rendered by the commissioners and their assistants, has already saved to the West many times the amount of the funds appropriated by Congress, while the survey that has been made of the locust-area, the study of the migrations, habits, parasites, and means of prevention, has laid the way for future investigations which will eventuate in the abatement of the evil.

Under the provisions of the act creating the Hot Springs commission, the following gentlemen were appointed commissioners to survey, lay out, and appraise the value of the lands on the Hot Springs reservation, and to adjudicate the claims of the occupants, &amp;c.: Hon. A. H. Cragin, of New Hampshire; Hon. John Coburn, of Indiana; and Ex-Governor M. L. Stearns, of Florida. The commissioners have prosecuted the work with energy; and although it was found more difficult than at first anticipated, its progress toward early completion has been very satisfactory.

The prosecution of the surveys has required much care and skill; the nature of the land, its heavy growth of timber, its rough and rocky ridges, and the obliteration of old lines and corners making the establishment of new lines a work of extreme difficulty.

The following results have been secured up to the present time:

1. The exterior lines of the reservation have been definitely determined, measured, and monuments set at each section and quarter-section corner.

2. General subdivision lines, dividing the whole area into squares of approximate 2,600 feet to the side, have been run and accurately measured for future base-lines.

3. A portion, including 265 acres, has had its exterior lines run and