Chapman Dewey Lumber Company v. St Francis Levee District

• Citation: 232 U.S. 186,58 L.Ed. 564,34 S.Ct. 297
• Decision Date: 26 January 1914
• Docket Number: No. 82,82
• Parties: CHAPMAN & DEWEY LUMBER COMPANY and Chapman & Dewey Land Company, Plffs. in Err., v. ST. FRANCIS LEVEE DISTRICT
• Court: United States Supreme Court

232 U.S. 186

34 S.Ct. 297

58 L.Ed. 564

CHAPMAN & DEWEY LUMBER COMPANY and Chapman & Dewey Land Company, Plffs. in Err.,

v ST. FRANCIS LEVEE DISTRICT.

No. 82.

Argued December 12, 1913.

Decided January 26, 1914.

Messrs. Henry D. Ashley and William S. Gilbert for plaintiffs in error.

[Argument of Counsel from pages 187-190 intentionally omitted] Messrs. Samuel Adams, H. F. Roleson, J. C. Hawthorne, and N. F. Lamb for defendant in error.

[Argument of Counsel from pages 190-194 intentionally omitted] Mr. Justice Van Devanter delivered the opinion of the court:

The chief controversy in this case is over the title to about 1,500 acres of unsurveyed lands in Poinsett county, Arkansas, which were part of the public domain at the date of the swamp-land act of September 28, 1850 (9 Stat. at L. 519, chap. 84), and the Federal question to be considered is whether, under the operation and administration of that act, these lands have passed from the United States, or are still its property.

Although within the exterior lines of a township surveyed in 1840 and 1841, they, with other lands, were excluded from the survey, were meandered as if they were a lake, and were designated upon the official plat as a meandered body of water called 'Sunk Lands,'—a name frequently applied in that region to areas which subsided during the New Madrid earthquake, a little more than a century ago, and subsequently became submerged. Other unsurveyed areas, designated as meandered bodies of water, were also shown upon the plat. The township was approximately 6 miles square, and the plat bore an inscription to the effect that the total of the surveyed areas was 14,329.97 acres, so the unsurveyed areas represented as water must have amounted to 8,000 acres or more.

After the enactment of the swamp-land act, the state requested that the township be listed as swamp lands, and patented to it under that act, both of which were done, the former in 1853 and the latter in 1858. In requesting the listing, the state described the township as containing 14,329.97 acres, the total of the surveyed areas as inscribed upon the plat, and in making the list, the Secretary of the Interior took the same total and deducted 514.30 acres in fractional section 16, which already had passed to the state under the school-land grant thereby making the listed area 13,815.67 acres. The patent embraced lands in several townships, the portion of the description material here being: 'Township 12 north of range 7 east. The whole of the township (except section 16), containing thirteen thousand, eight hundred and fifteen acres and sixty-seven hundredths of an acre . . . according to the official plats of survey of said lands returned to the General Land Office by the Surveyor General.'

In the state courts the levee district, the plaintiff, claimed title to the lands in controversy under the swamp-land act and an act of the state legislature in 1893 (Laws [Ark.] 1893, p. 172), granting to the levee district 'all the lands of this state' lying within the boundaries of the district; and the defendants opposed this claim upon two grounds: One, that if these lands had passed to the state, the defendants had succeeded to the title by riparian right in virtue of their ownership, under conveyances from the state in 1871, of the fractional sections and subdivisions abutting on the meandered area called 'Sunk Lands;' and the other, that the lands in controversy had not passed to the state, but were still the property of the United States. The trial court sustained the plaintiff's claim and entered a decree accordingly, which was affirmed by the supreme court of the state, the chief justice dissenting. 100 Ark. 94, 139 S. W. 625.

Both courts found as matter of fact from the evidence produced at the trial that at the time of the survey and at the date of the swamp-land act the unsurveyed area designated upon the plat as 'Sunk Lands' was not a lake or permanent body of water, but only temporarily overflowed, and was not distinctly lower or materially different from the adjoining lands; and with this as a premise it was held that the lands in controversy did not pass to the state or to the defendants with the adjoining lands as an incident of riparian ownership, but were con- veyed to the state by the patent issued in 1858, and thence to the levee district by the state act of 1893.

If the patent conveyed these lands to the state, we are not concerned with their subsequent disposal, for that is a question of local law. But did the patent include them? This, of course, is a Federal question. In answering it in the affirmative, the state courts regarded the words 'Sunk Lands,' shown upon the plat, as meaning that unsurveyed area to which they were applied was land, and not water, and also regarded the words, 'The whole of the township (except section 16),' as used in the patent, as embracing all that was within the exterior lines of the township, except section 16, whether surveyed or unsurveyed, and even although meandered and excluded from the survey. We are unable to...