Sacramento Valley Reclamation Co. v. Cook

Sharpstein, J.: The respondent claims that the demanded premises were swamp and overflowed lands; and that as such they were granted to the State by the Act of Congress of the twenty-eighth of September, 1850. That said lands were selected and segregated by the State prior to the passage of the Act of July 23, 1866, and that after the passage of said last mentioned Act the character of áaid lands was determined by testimony taken by the United States Surveyor General, who decided that said lands were swamp and overflowed lands, and that said decision was approved by the Commissioner of the General Land Office of the United States, and that in accordance with said determination and decision, said lands were, on the twelfth of December, 1873, listed to the State. On June 3, 1874, a patent of said lands was issued by the United States to the State, which, on the eighteenth of [343]August, 1874, issued a patent of the same lands to the respondent.

The appellant claims title to the same lands under a patent of the United States issued to William C. Belcher on the fifth of August, 1869, whose title, through mesne conveyance, vested in appellant on the fourteenth of December, 1870.

It is sufficiently obvious that unless the title to said lands had passed out of the United States prior to the issuance of said patent to Belcher, the judgment in this action was erroneous; so that the only question which we now have to consider is, whether the title to said lands had vested in the State prior to the date of the patent to Belcher.

It is as well settled as anything can be by the Courts, that the donation of swamp and overflowed lands by the United States to the States in which such lands were situated at the date of the passage of the Act of September 28, 1850, “was a grant in presentí, by which the title to those lands passed at once to the States in which they lay, except as to States admitted to the Union after its passage.” (French v. Fyan, 93 U. S. 169.)

In order, however, to avoid confusion, it was necessary to provide a method of determining what lands were “swamp and overflowed lands.” And so it was provided in the second section of the Swamp Land Act, “that it shall be the duty of the Secretary of the Interior, as soon as practicable after the passage of this Act, to make out an accurate list and plats of the land described as aforesaid, and transmit the same to the Governor of the State, and at the request of the Governor, cause a patent to be issued to the State therefor, and on that patent the fee simple to said lands shall vest in the State, subject to the disposal of the Legislature thereof.” And in French v. Fyan, supra, the Court says: “We are of the opinion that this section devolved upon the Secretary, as the head of the department which administered the affairs of the public lands, the duty, and conferred on him the power, of determining what lands were of the description granted by that Act, and made his office the tribunal whose decision on that subject was to be controlling.”