After the United States adopted the Rectangular Survey System late in the 18th century, the country pursued a policy of westward expansion. America adopted a survey the land first, sell the land second, approach. Thus, to open up the Midwest and West to development as quickly as possible, the United States pursued an aggressive policy to surveying all the public lands. Surveying these public lands evolved over time - the instruments improved (especially with the invention of Burt's Solar Compass) and the rules governing the public surveys became more detailed. There were of course problems along the way, inaccurate instruments, incompetent surveyors, and fraudulent surveys. But overall the system worked ok, and an enormous amount of land was surveyed, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century.

One of my favorite things is to dig into the history of an instrument - who owned it and where was the instrument used to survey. The history of many instruments is lost, of course. But if you are lucky enough to know the prior owners of an instrument, you can sometimes get lucky and discover where the instrument was used. The BLM maintains a website that allows you to search by surveys and surveyors (for those who surveyed on public lands):

BLM Website for Searching Surveys and Surveyors of the Public Lands