The cloudless August day dawned with a sky so blue, the air so crisp, it bespoke the change of seasons. Tessa rose before first light, swinging the kettle on its crane over the ashes she’d banked carefully the night before. Breakfast was a blur of bowls and mugs and terse words as her brothers hurried to their tasks at field and ferry. Ma was never so missed as at peep of day. But she’d made peace with Ma’s going just as her brothers would make peace with her going in time. Six days had passed since she’d seen Clay. Would he ride in on the Sabbath like last week? Or would some fort matter keep him rooted? She filled a wash bucket with lye, scrubbed her brothers’ shirts clean, and set out her own Sabbath best. Draping the laundry across a near fence, she pondered what needed doing next. Taking the whetstone she’d gotten from the creek bed, she began sharpening knives, the sound rasping her nerves. Next she gathered the last of the greens from the garden, braiding the onions to hang from the rafters. For supper she’d make fried mush with maple sugar that Zadock had expressed a…

A friend introduced me to the concept of glamping—glamorous camping. Think muslin curtains and rustic beams separating you from the great outdoors, a queen-sized bed with fluffy pillows, a cooler stocked with champagne and aged cheddar. Sounds relaxing, doesn’t it? That’s not what my heroine Meg Pero faced on a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers survey in 1871 Arizona, in A Distance Too Grand. I have camped a good portion of my life, even dabbled with backpacking in high wilderness at one point. But the life of a survey team was something beyond that. Each team had staff that could log topography, determine flora and fauna, check minerals and geology, photograph the area, and determines weather patterns. Larger teams boasted cooks, a surgeon and one or more hospital stewards, and even a chaplain . Lieutenant George Wheeler, who led an ambitious survey to map lands west of the one-hundredth meridian from 1869 to 1879, also took with him 30 guides plus men to help him manage the camp. A cavalry detachment escorted each survey. On smaller expeditions, like the one my Meg serves on, everyone might have more than one role. Equipment like theodolites, telescopes, and hand-walked odometers had to…