July 29, 1943

7/29/43

Dear Folks,

I drew you a map of our township and the surrounding town. I thought it might give you an idea of what I was doing. I marked with heavier lines when we have been but that doesn’t mean we are done in that part. You see, we are supposed to locate the old corners and on lots of the lines we couldn’t find anything at all. So all we can do is keep going till we do find an old corner and then make new corners where the come in relation to the old ones we find. That isn’t very clear but maybe you will get the idea. It is called proportioning the corners in.
I might tell you some about the boys here in camp with me. I’ll take La Verne Kiethly this time. He is from Los Angeles Calif. and the youngest member of the party 20 a couple weeks ago. He doesn’t belong to any church and doesn’t take churches very seriously. He says he went to Sunday School a little when he was small.
He just didn’t see any sense in fighting and made up his mind that he wouldn’t. Says he didn’t know anything about CPS all he knew was he wasn’t going to fight. His father is a plumber. Everybody likes him very well, he is one of the three that don’t smoke. Verne is about 6 feet tall and quite slender. I don’t suppose he weighs as much as I do. He will work hard and is one of the easiest fellows in the bunch to get along with. You can tell that he is younger then the rest of us by various things one can’t put his finger on. One thing I notice is that he hasn’t done very much thinking.
We don’t know anything more about our Sweet Home trip yet.
I hope you aren’t working too hard at threshing. I still seem to enjoy the farm news and the courting and romance news from Mom.
Love Bernard.

Attached: a map of township with note:

After returning from the nest Sweet Home trip we expect to make our camp at the end of the Brush Creek Road [arrow pointing to map]. Which will let us into the west half of the township. As there are no roads in the west half we will have to use pack mules and go out from the main camp a week at a time to get to the south west part. There are trails all over the country here. They follow the ridges and some of them aren’t bad walking. The Forestry service keeps them open this time of year in case of fire. The trails I put in my map are the ones we have --- over or surveyed across. Sections 14, 22, 23, 26, and 35 caused us a lot of walking. Those trails are much crookeder then I could show them. One day we walked 3 ½ miles to work in the morning and 2 ½ miles back at night. That is a lot of walking besides surveying a mile besides. We always do a mile a day and when it is done we come in. Sometimes it is early like today we were in at 4:00 then once in a while it is 5:30 or 6:00. A few times it has been convenient to do a mile and a half one day to quit closer to the road then we’d only do a ½ mile next day and get off shortly after noon.