Talk:Malheur Indian Reservation

Needs Maps, etc.
MaxwellPerkins (talk) 08:31, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Edits to this page
Whoever is at 72.160.70.247 has made the same edits to this page a couple of times, and has had them reverted each time, because those edits change the sense of the text and distort the historical context. Or to be more concise, they're wrong. Why is 72.160.70.247 doing this? MaxwellPerkins (talk) 23:29, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Area of the reservation
The areas added to the article are inconsistent. 2285 sq. mi does not equal either 1,778,560 acres or 7197.6 sq. km. (It does equal 5920 sq. km.) Does the discrepancy result from two different sources with two different original units of measurements? What are the sources? Is one authoritative? Some other reason? MaxwellPerkins (talk) 05:22, 10 January 2015 (UTC)

Areas fixed
They are now consistent within the accuracy of the conversion software. 2285 sq. mi. equals 1462400 acres: 640 ac./sq. mi times 2285 sq. mi. (One township, a surveying or cadastral measure, equals 640 ac.) Whether they are correct is another matter. I take 2285 to be correct. The Oregon History Project cites "approximately 1.8 million acres" (http://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-records/malheur-indian-reservation/). The correspondence between various government officials including the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, President Ulysses S. Grant and subsequent presidents as well as other government officials between 1872 and 1889, now residing in the Oklahoma State Library in Stillwater, OK (http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/vol1/html_files/ore0886.html), give the original extent of the reservation as measured by what are known as metes and bounds — landmarks, bearings and distance. Later documents switch to descriptions by township and range, but only for the portion of 760 acres restored to the Paiute band after the abolishment of the original grant. Those documents do not give an area measurement. I find no map online that is large or detailed enough for an accurate estimation. MaxwellPerkins (talk) 23:43, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

signature
Somehow the previous section didn't get my signature, not sure why. Not thinking, that's why.

An Approximation Using Google Earth
I used the metes and bounds — with an exception — from the archived letters at UOkla collection, and with Google Earth created a polygon connecting the points and following the described land features, a 38-point polygon. The exception is the location of a geographic feature called "Soda Spring, on the Canyon City and Camp Harney road." I know that road, having been up and down it many times. The place called "Soda Spring" would be near a wide spot in the road now called Seneca, on the headwaters of the Silvies River somewhere. I don't know that spring, and no reference that I find puts a "Soda Spring" there. The nearest one is quite a few miles away, on the eastern edge of the Ochoco National Forest. It is too far out, because it is way beyond any arm of the Silvies River, which is the next bound, following the Silvies River south, through Seneca. (The rivers are another factor limiting the validity of the estimate; it is the fractal problem with measurement of river length or coastline length or similar features.) I picked an arbitrary spot near Seneca to represent Soda Spring. I checked my polygon against the best (tiny) map that I could find; it has a discrepancy in the area around the evanescent Soda Spring. Names are also a bit of a problem: What the documents call "Strawberry Butte" is now called Strawberry Mountain. I doubt very much that it has changed much in aspect since 1872; more likely, there's been a change in perception.

Earth Point, a web site of tools for use with Google Earth, has a tool that takes as input a Google Earth polygon, and then calculates among other things an area in the units of your choice. When I put my admittedly inexact polygon into Earth Point, it returns 1522537 acres or 2379 square miles. So 2285 is close, and I have no intention of futzing with it further. If there are any takers, I have the polygon as a .kmz file, to use as a starting reference for a better measure. MaxwellPerkins (talk) 01:53, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Soda Spring
A more exhaustive and detailed search turned up a Soda Spring in a National Water Information System database for USGS Water Resources (http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/inventory/?site_no=10392400&agency_cd=USGS&amp;). It is on the Silvies River about 3 miles south of Seneca, OR. That seems to be the most likely candidate for the location indicated in the official correspondence in the UOkla archives. For one thing, it makes the polygon on Google Earth conform a little more closely with the published map of the original reservation's extent, by visual inspection. For another, the area of the polygon calculated by Earth Point is 2303 square miles. The difference between that result and the figure now contained in the body of the article, 2285 sq. mi., is less than 1%, which makes either figure acceptable, if possibly still not equal to the original calculation done in Washington in 1872, wherever that may reside. I am satisfied that the areas are now correct and consistent. MaxwellPerkins (talk) 06:58, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Foto
The foto is from the Wikipedia article on the Harney Basin. The foto is correctly captioned "Harney Basin." It shows the Silvies River drainage in the basin north of Harney and Malheur Lakes, north of a long peculiar finger of land called Wright's Point. MaxwellPerkins (talk) 06:48, 10 January 2015 (UTC)