Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“ So long as the United States has not conveyed its land it is entitled to survey and resurvey what it owns and to establish and reestablish boundaries, as well one boundary as another, the only limit being that what it thus does for its own information cannot affect the rights of owners on the other side of the line already existing in theory of law. If, as the result of the survey adopted, the United States should give patents for land thought by the plaintiffs to belong to them, 'the courts can then in the appropriate proceeding determine who has the better title or right. ”

“ We know of no warrant for the notion that the power is exhausted by a single exercise of it. Repeated retracement of lines, although, of course, exceptions, are well known, we believe, to the Land Department, as, with the limitation that we have expressed, there is no reason why they should not be. ”

“ Doubts having arisen as to where a portion of the Hancock line on the northern boundary ran, the Land Department employed one Perrin to make a resurvey. It found and reestablished the original monuments except between Hancock's stations 20 and 25, and attempted to fix the line between these also. In 1901 the resurvey was approved by the Commissioner of the General Land Office, but in 1902 on an appeal, the Secretary of the Interior reversed the approval and ordered a new survey of the line between stations 20 and 25. ”