UNITED STATES
v.
VALLEJO
AI-generated. These summaries, headnotes, and key points are machine-generated and may contain errors or omissions. Always verify against the full opinion text below. Not legal advice.
The Supreme Court upheld a land survey dividing a Mexican land grant into two disconnected parcels for the claimant while leaving the surplus to the United States in separate pieces, holding that the surveyor's discretion was properly exercised because the survey respected the claimant's preference, maintained a reasonably compact form, and preserved two historic adobe houses that had belonged to the original grantee for approximately twenty years. The Court established that while surplus land should ideally remain in one connected piece, competing surveying rules and practical considerations—particularly the inclusion of structures demonstrating the grant's original intent—could justify departing from this principle, and courts would not second-guess surveyor discretion unless clearly unreasonable.
© FLexlaw, Inc. — AI-generated enrichments are proprietary. All rights reserved.
Mr. Justice MILLER,
delivered the opinion of the court
The objection to the quality of the land does not seem to be sustained by the testimony. If there be a difference in quality between the part surveyed and the part left, it must be too slight to be the subject of consideration here.
It is certainly true that the surplus left to the United States should have been in one connected piece, if there were not sufficient reasons to justify a different course. In all these locations of a limited quantity within a larger one, many rules deserve attention. But as some of these may, and often do conflict with others, they cannot all be observed in every case.
In the present case the survey is supported:
1. By the fact that it was located as desired by the claimant.
2. That it is in a reasonably compact form.
3. That it includes two old adobe houses, inhabited now and for many years past by the heirs of the original grantee, the present owners of the claim.
Both of the first-named two considerations are prominent among the rules laid down by the Commissioner of the General Land Office for the location of this class of claims.
As respects the third, it appears that if the two leagues were taken from either end of the sack as claimed by the government, the one of these houses must be left out. They were both there when the grant was made, and are, probably, twenty years old. This raises a strong presumption that the grant was intended to cover them both.
Tnese reasons, we think, overbalance the inconvenience of having the surplus left to the United States in two disconnected parcels ; especially when one of these parcels contains as much as three thousand five hundred acres, and the other about two thousand acres.
Besides, in this class of cases, a large discretion must necessarily be left to the surveyor; and while we are not prepared to say that we will not in any ease review the exercise of that discretion, we have no hesitation in saying that we do not sit here to determine whether it has been accompanied with the nicest discrimination, or the highest of wisdom.
Decree affirmed.