Canty v. Staley

[380]

ANGELLOTTI, J.

These are appeals from the judgments in favor of defendants, and from the orders denying plaintiff’s motion for a new trial in two actions to quiet plaintiff’s alleged title to two parcels of land in Fresno County, which actions were consolidated and tried together.

Plaintiff asserted title under certain tax proceedings based on assessments for state and county taxes for the year 1894, culminating in deed from the state to plaintiff for the property involved. These alleged proceedings were set forth in plains tiff’s complaints.

The answers of the defendants sufficiently denied the allegations of plaintiff’s complaints to present the questions we shall discuss. They also contained allegations on the subject of an attempted tender, made after the commencement of the action, to plaintiff, of the amount alleged by plaintiff to have been expended by him in connection with his attempted purchases from the state, but the trial court made no finding thereon, no evidence having been introduced in regard thereto, so far as the record shows. Judgment was given in each case denying plaintiff any relief, and decreeing defendant to be the owner of the property involved and quieting his title thereto as against plaintiff.

It was stipulated at the trial “that the title to the real property described in each of the complaints was, at the time of the commencement of each of said” actions, vested in each of the defendants therein named respectively . . . unless the same had been divested by the tax-sales and proceedings under which plaintiff claims title.”

In the matter of the attempted sales by the state, the facts present the same question that was decided in the recent case of

Buck

v.

Canty, ante,

p. 226, [121 Pac. 924], Such sales were made on May 5, 1905, the day noticed therefor in the published notice, four days after the legislative act of the year 1905, approved March 1, 1905, amending section 3897 of the Political Code, so as to require notice of such proposed sale by the state to be given by mailing a copy of the notice “to the party to whom the land was last assessed next before the sale if such address be known,” went into effect. The deeds from the state affirmatively showed that the only notice of such sales that was in fact given was the notice by publication in a newspaper, and there is no pretense that any other