Land claim

“ And what is true of lots in cities, the ownership of which is in dispute, is equally true of large tracts of land in the country. The property in this case, to quiet the title to which the present suit is brought, is described in the bill as unoccupied, wild, and uncultivated land. Few persons would be willing to take possession of such land, inclose cultivate, and improve it, in the face of a disputed claim to its ownership. ”

“ Third condition describes the land as one league of the larger size, and the requirement is that the judge who shall give the possession shall have the land measured in conformity to law, leaving the surplus which remained to the nation. Land commissioners confirmed the claim for one league, but on appeal taken by the claimant to the District Court that decree was reversed, and a decree entered confirming the claim as one for the whole tract with specific boundaries. ”

“ That when there is a specific tract of land confirmed according to ascertained boundaries, the title of the confirmee is complete. 2. That where the claim has no certain limits, the title attaches to no particular land, nor can a court of justice establish the boundaries. 3. That the uncertainty of the intended location and of the outboundary in the case is too manifest to require discussion to show that a public survey is required to attach the concession to any land. ”

“ It will require three months, I judge, for a man to select a good claim (a quarter section, being 160 acres) , and fence and plough a part of it and to erect thereon a cabin. There is never a want of land to preempt in a new country. The settler can always get an original claim, or buy out the claim of another very cheap, near some other settlers. The liberal policy of our government in regard to the disposal of public lands is peculiarly beneficial to the settler. ”

“ And if the settler has kinsmen and friends willing to join with him, he can claim for himself and each of them 100 acres of land, and pay for it by the work of road-making in the new country, so that in four years, if the work set by the Commissioners be executed, each man who has been one year resident and has brought ten acres into cultivation, becomes, ipso facto, owner of the whole lot of 100 acres. ”

“ The Amending Land Act increased this power, and I was assured that many thousand farmers had got certificates entitling them to selection, and instead of using them to obtain new farms, sold them to squatters, some of whom had accumulated a number which entitled them to claim wide districts of fertile land properly belonging to intending settlers. ”

“ That all lands exclusive of timber lands and mineral lands which will not, without irrigation, produce some agricultural crop, shall be deemed desert lands, within the meaning of this act, which fact shall be ascertained by proof of two or more credible witnesses under oath, whose affidavits shall be filed in the land office in which said tract of land may be situated. ”

“ It is obviously the main purpose of the section to declare, that after the lands are surveyed they shall be subject to sale, according to the general land system of the government; and, secondly, to subject them to the right of pre-emption as defined by the act of 1841, and to extend that right to lands unsurveyed as well as to those surveyed. ”

“ And, going beyond the special language of the act in respect to the sale of lands, the court observed:
'But we go further, and say that, whensoever a tract of land shall have once been legally appropriated to any purpose, from that moment the land thus appropriated becomes severed from the mass of public lands, and that no subsequent law, or proclamation, or sale would be construed to embrace it, or to operate upon it, although no reservation were made of it. ”

“ Those acts also provide that when, in the opinion of the president, 'a departure from the ordinary method of surveying land on any river, lake, bayou or watercourse, would promote the public interest,' the land may be surveyed, and sold in tracts of 2 acres in width, fronting on any such water, and running back the depth of 40 acres. ”

“ Land was the object which invited the greater number of these people to cross the mountain, for as the saying then was, "It was to be had here for taking up ;" that is, building a cabin and raising a crop of grain, however small, of any kind, entitled the occupant to four hundred acres of land, and a preemption right to one thousand acres more ad joining, to be secured by a land office warrant. This right was to take effect if there happened to be so much vacant land or any part thereof, adjoining the tract secured by the settlement right. ”

“ Of course you know that if land is allowed to go unfenced for twenty years—or for a longer or shorter period according to different states—that the land becomes public property, or at least the public has a right-of-way over it and it can not be closed off. ”

“ Webster among the number, this court said: 'The question is well settled at common law, that the person whose land is bounded by a stream of water, which changes its course gradually by alluvial formations, shall still hold by the same boundary, including the accumulated soil. No other rule can be applied on just principles. ”

“ Again, what nation but England would tolerate so long a system of land law, so bristling with antiquated technicalities, so tedious, and so expensive, as almost to amount to a prohibition of the transfer of land in small quantities ”

“ This is not a matter of procedure or jurisdiction, but of substantive rights concerning land. It seems to us that it should be governed by the decisions of the state where the land lies. See Slide & S. Gold Mines v. ”

“ From time to time it has been necessary to make changes in the land laws, as when the discovery of mineral lands, reserved by congress called for the substitution of lieu lands, but there has been no diminution in quantity or value. ”

“ Then, too, if it should become bruited abroad, while the valley was open for entry, that water for irrigation was being developed up the valley, settlers could have flocked in down the valley—and waited for the water. A nester is patient. His life is spent in waiting. Under the desert land laws one can file on three hundred and twenty acres, or a half-section, pay twenty-five cents per acre down and then wait four years before being compelled to file with the land office the proof of reclamation that will entitle him to final patent to his land. ”

“ Riparian rights inhere in the owner of the soil and are part and parcel of the land itself, and are vested and valuable rights which no more may be destroyed or impaired than any other part of a freehold. ”

“ U.S., and reciting the fact that in that case they confined a grant of every alternate section of 'land' to such whereto the complete title was absolutely vested in the United States, proceeds: 'The acts which govern this case are more explicit, and leave less room for construction. The words 'public lands' are habitually used in our legislation to describe such as are subject to sale or other disposal under general laws. ”

“ To revert to the parallel of the disposition of land made by the owner of an estate, who certainly would not place his kitchen - garden in the loveliest part of his park, do not let the Nation surrender forest or hillside, but, preserving them intact, apportion for purposes of cultivation the less beautiful, flatter, and probably more productive ground. Let the public watch how many of the schemes brought forward relate to regulation, not inclosure. ”

“ The owner of a piece of land, who had built a house or inclosed 20 or 40 acres of it, had the benefit of this universal custom, as well as the party who owned no land. Everybody used the open, uninclosed country which produced nutritious grasses as a public common or which their horses, cattle, hogs, and sheep could run and graze. ”

“ It is believed that the proof required by the above-named act, as to the quality of the lands, is not sufficient to prevent lands not desert from being acquired under it, while the entire absence of any provision prescribing what portion of land in the tract entered shall be irrigated, the cultivation and improvements which shall constitute reclamation, the penalties or forfeitures for abandonment, or sale of the applicant's interest before making final proof and payment, renders the act liable to be taken advantage of for objects not contemplated by it nor compatible with the public interest. ”

“ Let our government instead take over all private, state, or federal unproductive lands, whether it is fertile, arid or marsh. Statistics from the United States Department of Agriculture Bureau of Agriculture Economics on federal rural lands, on page 7, shows that the federal lands, swamps and marshes are 3,000,000 acres, barren and brush land 40,000,000 acres, non-forested range land 234,000,000 acres, crop land 4,000,000 acres ”

“ We put imaginary wheels under that imaginary home of ours and kept it traveling all over the farm. The trouble with us was we had too much latitude. With half an acre of land at our disposal, we should have been circumscribed by boundary lines. On half an acre you have to be reasonably definite about where you are going to build; slide too far one way or the other, and you are committing trespass, and litigation ensues. But we had sixty acres from which to pick and to choose—sixty acres, with desirable sites scattered all over the tract. ”

“ Said the court: 'In no just sense can lands be said to be public lands after they have been entered at the land-office, and a certificate of entry obtained. If public lands before the entry, after it they are private property. ”

“ In attempting to make a grant described by rivers of whose courses and location they were ignorant, by given distances which could not be made to conform to the natural objects, making a grant of over seven millions of acres of land by specific boundaries of which they knew nothing, they made a total failure, and gave no description by which any surveyor could, without the aid of a lively imagination, make any location. ”

“ But it the river should suddenly change its course, or desert the original channel, the rule of law is, the boundary remains in the middle of the deserted river-bed.' It is laid down by all the authorities that, if an island or dry land forms upon that part of the bed of a river which is owned in fee by the riparian proprietor, the same is the property of such riparian proprietor. ”

“ Applying to this premise of fact the legal principle that, where property is separated from the water by land belonging to some one else, no riparian rights attach to the land of the former, it is held that the lot owners before the court have no riparian privileges which the government of the United States is in any way bound to respect. ”

“ And every person owning and residing on land may, under the provisions of this section, enter other land lying contiguous to his land, which shall not, with the land so already owned and occupied, exceed in the aggregate one hundred and sixty acres. ”

“ A common field lot, as intended by said act of Congress, is a piece of land of larger or smaller dimensions, as the case may be, according to ancient cultivation, lying alongside of, and parallel to, other similar pieces of land, and claimed or cultivated under the protection of a common fence by those who inhabited said towns or villages prior to the 20th December, 1803; and said pieces of land might not have been conceded or surveyed by any French or Spanish authority, or surveyed officially by the United States as a common field lot. ”

“ While there was plenty of land for every man or woman who wanted a home on the soil, it made little difference if single landlords or companies got possession of millions of acres, if a hundred men in one western river valley owned 17,000,000 acres; but when the good land for small homesteads was all gone, then was raised the real issue. At the opening of the twentieth century the nation, which a hundred years before had land and natural resources apparently without limit, was compelled to enact law after law conserving its forests and minerals. ”

“ Taking the above unity as a basis, and observing the distinction which must be made between grazing land, or that which is proper for raising stock, and farming land, without the facility of irrigation, this law grants to the contractor or contractors for the establishment of a new settlement, for each hundred families which he may introduce and establish in the state, five sitios of grazing land, and five labors at least, the one-half of which shall be without the facility of irrigation ”

“ One hundred and sixty acres of fairly rich and well-watered soil, or a much smaller amount of irrigated land, may keep a family in plenty, whereas no one could get a living from one hundred and sixty acres of dry pasture land capable of supporting at the outside only one head of cattle to every ten acres. In the past great tracts of the public domain have been fenced in by persons having no title thereto, in direct defiance of the law forbidding the maintenance or construction of any such unlawful inclosure of public land. ”

“ We cannot be very far wrong in saying that primarily these footprints were cut as boundary marks, or as marks indicating possession. When a settler took land and enclosed it, then he cut his mark at the corners of his enclosure; and the simplest and most natural mark was the impression of his foot.
Tin miners in old times were required annually to cut their marks in the turf of their claims. If they failed to do this, they forfeited their claims. ”