James Clark McReynolds

“ They unquestionably support the familiar rule relied on by counsel for the Oil Company that, in general, meanders are not to be treated as boundaries, and when the United States conveys a tract of land by patent referring to an official plat which shows the same bordering on a navigable river, the purchaser takes title up to the water line. But they no less certainly establish the principle that facts and circumstances may be examined, and if they affirmatively disclose an intention to limit the grant to actual traverse lines, these must be treated as definite boundaries. ”

“ It does not necessarily follow from the presence of meanders that a fractional section borders a body of water, and that a patent thereto confers riparian rights.
In the instant case we find a survey of improved lands made at the express request of the occupant to whom they were subsequently patented; a grant from the United States specifying the exact number of acres conveyed; a positive declaration in field notes that land to the north lies outside the traverse lines; admission that excluded area contains not less than 40 acres of high ground, and evidence of large timber growing there ”

“ A glance at the annexed map, taken from the Williams and Barnes maps in the record (Bristol made no map or plat, and the one made by the draftsman in the land office is very small and apparently without reference to a scale) , shows that the Bristol meander line does not purport to define the sinuosities of a stream; it is not represented as the border line of a stream; and it shows, to a demonstration, that the meander line, as actually run on the land on the east and northeast of lot No. 1, is the boundary, and that a water course is not the boundary. . . . ”