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Show Father admitted that the "surveying" may have been a bit sketchy. But for us it couldn't be far in error because our claim lay right along the Beaver County line, and the "wagon-wheel surveyors" had used that boundary as their base line. Father also admitted a slight disappointment that the land across the line, in Iron County, had been government-surveyed the previous summer and the land there had been already taken by some alert homesteaders. But our homestead was only a short distance north of the sidetrack and the "section houses" which marked a sort of station at Nada signboard. A Japanese foreman directed the section gang of Mexican laborers who kept the track in repair. The land-locaters had built a rambling shack of a "hotel" of raw pine lumber to serve prospects coming to inspect available homesteads. To help settlers hold their claims the company offered services, for a price of course. They had crews that plowed a field and constructed a "homestead house" of regulation size, 12 by 16 feet. These improvements would hold off possible "claim-jumpers" until the settler could return with his family. But Father didn't need to do this. After paying the company fee for locating him on his chosen homestead, he had ordered lumber for our house and the store and post office shipped to Nada and hauled to our claim. He'd hurry back to supervise the clearing of land for what he regarded as the townsite and for construction of buildings. |