Walkup v. Evans

The allegations of the complaint went to the- following effect. The United States, by the act of September 4, 1841, donated to the state five hundred thousand acres of public land to be selected within the state limits, and the California legislature, by its act of May 3, 1852, and the- later acts of April 30, 1857, April 23, 1858, and April 16, 1859, provided for such selection, the sale of the land in parcels, and the issue of patents to the purchasers; and that a part, describing it, of the land so selected was that involved in the present suit. One Smith Worden was the purchaser, and the state issued its patent for the land to him on December 9, 1859, six days after which Worden duly made a conveyance to the plaintiffs in fee. On December 1, 1860, the United States issued to the plaintiffs a patent for adjoining lands which,_ together with the other, were worth as much as five thousand dollars, being valuable as agricultural and timber holdings. In June, 1863, the defendants entered upon this land, the plaintiffs not consenting but remonstrating rather, and began to dig it up, defacing and mutilating it in one part and another with deep excavations and huge earth-heaps from the excavations, etc., in search of gold, as they professed, with the result that in those parts the land had been rendered worthless for agricultural purposes; besides which in the course of these operations they had destroyed much growing timber on the land. Already the defendants had caused injury to the land to the extent of a thousand dollars and, if they continued the operations, as they openly threatened to do, the injury would amount to complete destruction of all value in the land. The defendants were irresponsible persons, many of them Chinamen, had no fixed places of abode, refused to pay for the injury they had done, and had no property out of which a judgment for damages could, be collected, The prayer was for an injunction.

The defendants by their answer denied the plaintiffs’ ownership of part of the land and alleged that the patents above mentioned had been procured by fraud; they denied that they had cut down any growing timber except just enough to use for firewood or that by any of their acts the value of the land had been diminished to an extent beyond one hundred dollars. They denied, moreover, that they were irresponsible, insolvent or unable to respond in damages. They averred, too, that all the land was mineral land, and so reserved and exempt from sale, entry, location or grant to either the state or an individual, and that the plaintiffs were aware of this at the time they assumed to acquire it. On their own part they averred a quiet and peaceable occupancy for mining purposes, by themselves and persons under whom they claimed, of a described portion of the land throughout a period of nine years past, all in accordance with the mining rules of the vicinage. They averred that they had made large expenditures of money in pushing their activities, of all which the plaintiffs had had full and timely notice; but that, so far from objecting to these activities, the plaintiffs expressly had told the defendants to go on with them, and, since the defendants had expended at least twenty thousand dollars upon their mining claims, making these valuable features of the property, the plaintiffs were estopped.