Bryan,
If you created an image showing how much of of the background would be blocked by even ten foot trees on the ridge line, I must have missed it. That is what the "red telephone poles and line" indicate --the line is 3 meters above the ridge line in the top image. The trees in the 2nd photo (the one with the man) are substantially taller than that.
As for your theory that we can see so much background because of the height of the trees along the horizon, I find this to be highly improbable at best. While the trees would add to the background, this doesn't explain what we are seeing.
- There are trees at least somewhat visible on the horizon, and we can see that we are dealing with several tree heights of visibility on the vertical plane, and adding or taking away the trees on the horizon won't change this.
- Assuming the second photo is from the same ridge (I think a safe assumption) then the height of the trees on the ridge in that photo would more than offset the height of the trees at the distant horizon. Yet still there are trees on the horizon which are substantially visible.
Here is an elevation profile along the line shown. Your 30 foot trees would just be visible on the ridge about a mile away (provided there were not trees on the intervening ridge) but that is all one would see. We see much more than this in both the photos.
For comparison, here is part of the photo with the man. We aren't just looking at one tree height of elevation in the background, and that is over the trees on what I think is the first ridge.
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As for your theory that maybe the cleared a road or a portion of the 6th so they could view the property from there, I guess it is possible, but it seems a bit far fetched. I was thinking he may have been standing on an existing running along a ridge line.
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As for your speculation on the timing of the man image, you wrote:
Oh, getting back to the "man" picture, You thought it might have been fall, winter, or spring. It couldn't have been earlier than November. Crump didn't own the land. Since they seemed to have cleared the land in record time and the picture was published in May, it seems unlikely that it was after March. The Brown picture, showing it cleared, must have been taken in spring if they were to have time to grade greens, fairways and tees and then seed them.
You are coming at this issue from an entirely different perspective than I am. You seem to be rejecting the caption on one photo, partially rejecting and partially accepting the caption on the other photo, then trying to work from the state of the land in the photo to determine the date the photo was taken. In other words, you seem to have assumed what i consider to be the key issue, and are working backward off of that assumption.
I agree that
if the photo with the man was taken of the 4th fairway, 2nd green, and 3rd tee from the 6th hole, then it must have been taken very early on in the process, before much clearing had occurred. But given that the photo was published in May, and given that AWT had been out there in after much of this area had been cleared and reported on that in April, I am left wondering whether this is the area identified in the caption at all.
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I think it is my mistake on the date of the topo. I cannot actually read the date, but I was told (by Patrick) that the actual date March 1913, and I think I must have confused this later. I don't think the tree lines on this topo match what we are seeing in the photo with the man, which would mean that IF this is a photo of this area, then the picture would have had to have been taken even before the survey, which had to have been completed before the topo.