Origins
The 1871 Hayden survey had its roots in the Pacific Railroad Survey bill passed by Congress in 1853 to find the best routes for railroads from the Mississippi to the Pacific coast. The bill spawned an era of federally funded Great Surveys undertaken by the Department of the Interior after the Civil War that brought together explorers, engineers, scientists and topographers in a common effort to chart the western U.S. Hayden along with John Wesley Powell, Clarence King and George Wheeler were the leaders of these great surveys.
In March 1871, a sum of $40,000 was appropriated by Congress to finance Hayden's fifth survey to explore mostly the territories of Idaho and Montana. Hayden was very familiar with Jay Cooke's desire to promote the Yellowstone region for the Northern Pacific Railroad and had attended Nathaniel P. Langford's January 1871 lecture in Washington D.C. on the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition to Yellowstone of the previous year. The $40,000 that was granted for Hayden's expedition was not available until July 1, the beginning of the fiscal year; however, the determined Hayden was still able to organize and equip his expedition with the help of the US Army, Fort Bridger and the railroads. After the passage of the Sundry Civil bill, Hayden immediately applied to the Secretary of War for permission to draw on equipment, stores, and transportation at frontier army posts. This was authorized, together with a small escort "when deemed necessary and the public service will permit." Likewise, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads agreed to carry Hayden's men and equipment without cost.
Hayden had an experienced assistant, James Stevenson. In 1866, Stevenson accompanied Hayden into the badlands of Dakota Territory in a search for minerals and fossils, and from that time on he was Hayden's assistant in every venture until the Hayden Survey was merged with those of King and Powell to form the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879.
The two were now able to outfit and equip members of Hayden's survey at Fort D. A. Russell in Wyoming and transport the equipment, subsistence, wagons, and animals he would need by rail to Ogden, Utah, where a base camp had been set up in May on an old lake terrace a mile east of the city. During the weeks leading up to the expedition the scientists and other men were to make up the party that would venture into the Yellowstone region.
In the spring of 1871, Hayden selected the members of the survey team, 32 in all, from among friends and colleagues, seven previous survey participants, and a few political patrons. Included in the party was William Henry Jackson, his photographer from his 1870 survey and Thomas Moran, a guest artist arranged by Jay Cooke. Two of the members, the young mineralogist Albert Peale and the botanist George Allen, were respectively a student of Hayden's at the University of Pennsylvania and Hayden's Natural History professor at Oberlin College. Both Allen and Peale kept private journals of the expedition which when discovered in later years have brought great insight to the daily operations of the survey team.
Read more about this topic: Hayden Geological Survey Of 1871
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