When ordered to make a winter survey in 1873, Second Lieutenant Francis Vinton Greene, of Illinois, set out with a command of men who would face unrelenting cold and extreme challenges as they surveyed what became the northern boundary between the United States and Canada across Minnesota.
Greene and the men he took with him were part of the larger Northern Boundary Survey team of engineers, surveyors, and cartographers that spent from 1872 through 1874 moving west 860 miles from Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains.
Their work involved identifying and marking the border. By early fall 1873 they were in what would be western North Dakota and had completed most of their job, but “the lateness of the season and scantiness of supplies on hand precluded the idea of finishing the topography of the twenty-four miles intervening between us and Captain Gregory’s most westerly station,” Greene wrote in an official report of the work. He turned east and proceeded to Fort Totten, which had been established in 1867 at a site just south of Devils Lake in present North Dakota.
The U.S. Boundary Commission was organized by the secretary of war under the direction of two former Union officers in the Civil War. One was Captain Francis Ulric Farquhar, a Pennsylvanian who had been recognized for gallantry and meritorious service during the battles of Williamsburg and Cold Harbor, Virginia. The other, Major William Johnson Twining, was similarly recognized for his service in the battle of Nashville and other engagements in Tennessee and Georgia in 1865. Both were now part of the United States Engineering Corps, and although Farquhar left the Boundary Commission at the end of the 1872 season, Twining remained throughout the project as chief astronomer.
Working with them were Captain James Fingal Gregory, an 1861 West Point graduate from New York, who served as the assistant astronomer, and Second Lieutenant Francis Vinton Greene, of Illinois. Greene had completed training at West Point in 1866 and now worked as an assistant to both Farquhar and Twining, taking astronomical readings and directing topographical units.
Earlier in 1873 the surveying parties had been unable to negotiate a swampy area between Lake of the Woods and Red River, across northern Minnesota so with colder weather closing in, Major William Johnson Twining ordered Greene’s party to complete that section, writing in the official report, “A work so difficult could only be justified by the fact that the ground was utterly impossible in the summer. The freezing of the swamps would enable the supply-train to move east as far as the Roseau Lake.”
In ordering Greene to do the work during winter, Twining knew the men would face grave weather conditions. “The men, though they had a rather rough summer, most of them, readily volunteered for the winter,” he wrote.
Over Open Prairie in the Face of a Snow-storm
On October 24, 1873, Greene’s contingent left Fort Totten, traveling over “an open prairie from which the grass had been burned” and making the trip “in the face of a northerly snow-storm.” The group headed toward Fort Pembina under orders to “adopt, without examination, the intermediate astronomical stations observed by the British parties during the preceding winter.”
The stations, located at West Roseau and Pine Ridge, were twenty and fifty-six miles, respectively, east of Fort Pembina. In all, the distance to be surveyed by Greene’s winter teams covered eighty-nine miles across the northern border of present-day Minnesota.
Once at Fort Pembina, the men repaired tents, tools, and instruments and obtained winter gear: snowshoes, forage, rations, and stoves to be used in their tents. Greene, after considerable discussion with the British Boundary Commission officers and civilians at Fort Pembina, learned that the common means of transportation in the region during the winter were either “wagon-beds mounted on runners or single ox-sleds.”
Dogsleds would also be useful. Green obtained “four government wagons (six mules each), an ambulance (four mules), and three hired teams, two of which were drawn by two mules each, and the other by a pair of oxen.” Greene found “a sufficient number of second-hand sleigh-runners, known by the freighters as ‘Maineite bobs,’ for all the wagons.” He hired additional men who would serve as laborers, teamsters, and dogsled drivers, swelling his party to forty-eight.
Although the mules could easily pull loads of up to three tons on hard roads and in soft snow if the footing underneath was solid, Greene soon recognized that it took great skill for a driver to handle the six-mule teams when following crooked roads through the woods. Because trees were difficult to avoid, repairs to the bobs often became necessary after a trip.
Fed oats, barley, and wheat, along with about forty pounds of hay each day, the mules weathered the increasingly colder temperatures and long pulls. Greene had one ox team but it was inefficient, traveling more slowly than the mules and covering far less distance in a day. Greene said the greatest daily travel for the oxen was eighteen miles, in comparison with forty-four miles for a mule team.
The men believed that once at the swampy area, they would easily be able to complete their surveying, because the ground would be frozen. At first, though, the ground was still soupy. Greene wrote that when he reached the “edge of the Great Roseau Swamp, about midway between Red River and the Lake of the Woods,” he put an “empty sleigh on this swamp, and, in so doing, mired the mules to their bellies, and lamed one quite badly.”
The Swamp Was Not Frozen
To his surprise, “it was found that the swamp was not frozen at all, in spite of the fact that we had already had the thermometer down to 35° below zero.” The men observed that a heavy layer of tall, thick grass had been bent down by heavy snow, covering the swamp like an insulating blanket that kept the water from freezing.
Knowing he could not use the mules and sleighs on the unstable swamp surface, Greene had his carpenters make toboggans. But even with these lighter conveyances, more work had to be done to build a “road” over the marsh. Greene sent men on snowshoes out onto the swamp. They packed the snow and grass, pressing it into the water below, where it froze and became “hard enough to hold several tons.” This made it possible for the toboggans, pulled by dogs, to cross and eventually, as it became firmer and wider, for the mule teams with their sleighs to cross as well. But there were issues.
“It was a not a very safe road,” Greene wrote, “for the drifting snow soon filled it up to the level of the surrounding country. It was not distinguishable by the eye, and had to be followed by feeling, the road being hard, and the rest very soft snow. If, by any carelessness, a sleigh got a runner off the road and in the soft snow, the whole was instantly upset, and it required several hours to right it again.”
In places where the swamp was heavily timbered, the presence of deadfalls made the large sleighs impractical. Consequently, Greene stockpiled supplies at the Pine Ridge astronomical station and used dogsleds to reach the areas farther east. The five- or six-dog teams, with their sleds, procured at Fort Pembina, cost about $80 each. The sleds built of hickory or ash were constructed from a single board about half an inch thick, ten inches wide, and ten feet long. Using steam, builders curled the front of the board and attached five transverse cleats to keep the wood from splitting. Each sled was covered with a moose hide placed on the board and wrapped up and around the load before being secured with buffalo thong lashes.
Wool Caps, Moose Hide Pants, and Sioux Moccasins
During the winter, Greene divided the teams much as he had during the previous summer and fall. Some surveyed; others built the mounds necessary to mark the boundary. All had similar gear. They wore close-fitting skullcaps made from two thicknesses of wool blanket lined with flannel, with an attached Havelock, or shawl-like collar, that hung over their shoulders and buttoned beneath the nose, leaving only their eyes and nose exposed.
Greene and his assistants wore pants made from moose hide, which cost twice as much as buffalo leather but was more effective, he said, at keeping out the cold and wind. Beneath these leather garments the men had on “a suit of woolen clothes and two or three suits of woolen underclothes.” To keep snow out, they tied the bottoms of their pant legs tightly. They donned buffalo-leather coats and moose-hide mittens lined with wool blanket material and featuring gauntlets reaching to their elbows.
Because they tramped through snow and on ice all winter, foot coverings were particularly important. Although Greene began the season with some “Fort Garry ‘beef packs,’” he found that once the temperature dipped to twenty degrees below zero, they were “useless, as the leather froze stiff as iron.” Then he and the men switched to Sioux-style moccasins, several sizes too large.
Before putting on the moccasins, the men encased their feet in “one or two pairs of woolen socks, then a pair of ‘neeps’ (slippers made of blanket), then a square piece of blanket wrapped several times around the foot from heel to toe.” Finally, the men added their oversize moccasins, “more to keep the blanket and slipper in place than for any other purpose,” Greene said.
Working in all sorts of weather, the men suffered considerably, “with frozen ears, noses, and fingers, with icicles hanging from the beard, and with the eyelashes closed from time to time with ice.” The frigid temperatures were never more evident than when the men cooked or ate a meal. Damp fingers and lips froze to tin cups and could be removed only by tearing the skin.
Similar hardships arose from the survey work itself. Equipment such as chronometers had metal parts that absorbed the cold. “If a tangent screw was touched with the bare fingers,” Greene wrote, “the instantaneous result was a ‘burn,’ and not a temporary sensation, but one like that from a hot iron, lasting several minutes.”
When taking azimuth readings at night, Greene and the man assisting him had to “occasionally unfasten his eye lashes stuck together with frost. The pain in the eyes, from the proximity of the cold eye-piece, was at times very severe, and occasionally brought tears, which congealed in little icicles depending from the eyelashes, and gave the face a comical look, somewhat like that in the children’s pictures of Jack Frost.”
The topographical parties had less difficulty with their instruments than the astronomical crew, partly because they did their work during the day, when temperatures were twenty to thirty degrees warmer than at night, when the azimuth readings had to be recorded. Even so, the mercury often remained below zero for days at a time.
Sleeping in a Buffalo Leather Bag
“One night,” Greene wrote, “just before going to bed, I looked at the two spirit-thermometers fastened to a tree, and they read 46º and 47º below. In the morning they recorded the astounding temperature of 50º and 51º below zero. Every one had slept soundly, however, inside of skin and blanket bags.”
Greene and his assistants each slept in “a bag of buffalo-leather, eight feet long, and about the same in circumference,” which was “surrounded, above and below, by several thicknesses of blanket, and the whole was strapped in the canvass bed-cover.” The other men bunked four to a bed made of eight layers of Hudson Bay wool blankets as a “mattress,” with “four thickness of blanket and a buffalo-robe over them, the whole well tucked in on the sides and ends.”
These beds were placed in tents that often had three feet of snow piled up around them to form a barricade against wind and cold. Each tent or group of two tents attached end to end had a small stove for heating and cooking. The food consisted of bad bread, strong tea, and rich, fat pork.
Greene’s party completed the difficult survey of the swampy land between Lake of the Woods and Red River by early February. Using the mule-drawn sleighs, the men then undertook a 180-mile, five-and-a-half-day crossing to Fort Abercrombie, situated on the high west bank of the Red River south of the present city of Fargo, North Dakota. They suffered “greatly on the open prairie from the cold and the driving snow.”
While the wagon master took the sleighs across country to Saint Cloud, Minnesota, Greene and his other men finally got out of the cold when they boarded a train that would take them to Saint Paul. On February 20 Greene reported to Major Twining in Detroit “with my assistants and records.” There the men settled in to a warm atmosphere, which might have seemed stifling after nearly a year in the field.
Candy Moulton can be reached at Candy.L.Moulton@gmail.com
