William O. Douglas

“ After 1871 outright grants of public lands to private railroad companies seem to have been discontinued. But, to encourage development of the Western vastnesses, Congress had to grant rights to lay track across the public domain, rights which could not be secured against the sovereign by eminent domain proceedings or adverse user. For a time special acts were passed granting to designated railroads simply 'the right of way' through the public lands of the United States. That those acts were not intended to convey any land is inferable from remarks in Congress by those sponsoring the measures. ”

“ It gave the railroad power to take by eminent domain a two-hundred-foot right of way over privately owned land, and demonstrates that, in granting four-hundred-foot strips of public land to Union Pacific and Northern Pacific Congress pursued a conscious policy of providing these railroads with more land than was necessary merely to provide a site for their construction. ”

“ To say that it means the visual area and an indeterminate depth-x inches or x feet-necessary for support is to ask the Court to rewrite legislation and to cast upon it administrative tasks in order to accomplish a policy that seems desirable a hundred years after Congress acted on a different outlook. No wonder that this Court did not accept such an inadmissible retrospective reading of a statute when the Government pressed it on us in the Great Northern case. See Argument for the United States, 315 U.S. at page 269. ”

“ The system which Congress set up to effectuate its policy of reserving mineral resources in the alternate sections of public land granted by § 3 was by way of an administrative determination, prior to issuance of a patent, of the mineral or nonmineral character of the lands. Patents were not issued to land administratively determined to constitute mineral lands. ”

“ Resolved, That in the judgment of this House the policy of granting subsidies in public lands to railroads and other corporations ought to be discontinued, and that every consideration of public policy and equal justice to the whole people requires that the public lands should be held for the purpose of securing homesteads to actual settlers, and for educational purposes, as may be provided by law.' Cong. ”

“ Such a method permits the separation of the surface from the coal and the unhampered use of the surface for purposes to which it may be adapted.' Report of the Secretary of the Interior 15 (1907) , H.R.Doc.No.5, 60th Cong., 1st Sess. 15. ”