Iron Silver Min Co v. Campbell
Decision Date | 28 April 1890 |
Citation | 34 L.Ed. 155,10 S.Ct. 765,135 U.S. 286 |
Parties | IRON SILVER MIN. CO. v. CAMPBELL et al |
Court | U.S. Supreme Court |
F. W. Owers, Ashley Pond, L. S. Dixon, and E. O. Wolcott, for plaintiff in error.
T. M. Patterson and C. S. Thomas, for defendants in error.
This is a writ of error to the circuit court of the United States for the district of Colorado. The action was brought in that court by Peter Campbell et al., plaintiffs, against the Iron Silver Mining Company, defendant, and was in the nature of an ejectment to recover possession of a mineral lode called the 'Sierra Nevada Lode Mining Claim.' The pleadings merely set up that the plaintiffs were the owners of said lode or claim, describing it, and that defendants had in truded upon their possession. The defendants denied that plaintiffs were the owners of the claim, and asserted their own title. The case was submitted to the court without a jury. The court made the following finding of facts and conclusions of law, on which it rendered a judgment for the plaintiffs: This finding of facts and conclusions of law is embodied in, and made a part of, a bill of exceptions. We think the correct practice in cases submitted to a court without a jury, is for the court to make its finding of facts and its conclusions of law a separate paper from pleadings or bills of exceptions.
The only thing of any consequence in the bill of exceptions, containing a considerable amount of oral testimony, almost every word of which is objected tob y one party or the other, is the two patents under which the adverse parties claim title. From this and the finding of facts it appears that the patent under which the Iron Silver Mining Company claims was issued to William Moyer on his application, made in the proper land-office, on the 13th of November, 1878, and bears date January 30, 1880, and that the one under which plaintiffs below claim bears date March 15, 1883. It is conceded that both patents cover the land in controversy. The Moyer patent, being the elder, is for 56 acres of placer mining land. The plaintiffs' patent, though of a later date, is for a vein or lode of mineral deposit which runs under the surface of the ground covered by defendant's patent. The conclusion of law which controlled the judgment of the circuit court in the present case is that 'it is conclusively presumed and found, from the face of the said Sierra Nevada lode patent, that the said Sierra Nevada lode claim had been duly discovered, located, and recorded, and owned by the said patentees in the said Sierra Nevada lode patent, and their predecessors in interest, the said paintiffs, within the exterior boundaries of said tract of land described in said William Moyer placer patent, before the time of the said application for the said placer patent; and the mining ground described in the said complaint, and conveyed by the said lode patent, is excepted out of the grant of the land described in and conveyed by the said placer patent.' It is the soundness of this conclusion of law from the facts found which we are called upon to review.
The real principle on which the plaintiffs relied to establish the superiority of their claim for the lode in controversy is that it was a known lode, within the meaning of the act of congress on that subject1 at the time of the application for the Moyer patent, and therefore, by the act of congress on that subject, the title to it did not pass to the grantee in that patent. If the fact were proved that the Sierra Nevada lode was a known lode, within the limits its of the placer patent obtained by Moyer, at the time of his application, the contention of the plaintiffs is sound. But notwithstanding nearly all the testimony, particularly all the oral testimony found in the bill of exceptions, was introduced for the purpose of proving the existence of this lode, and that it was known to Moyer or his grantor; and in refutation of that proposition the court in its finding of facts makes no finding on that subject. It was obviously the opinion of the court, and it is the ground on which defendants in error support its judgment here, that the patent issued by the government is conclusive evidence that such vein was known so as to authorize the land department to issue a patent for it as being reserved out of the grant in Moyer's patent. It is very singular that the patent to Campbell and others for the Sierra Nevada claim makes no reference to this reservation in Moyer's patent, and no statement that the existence of the lode was known to anybody at the time the Moyer patent was applied for, or when it was granted. There is nothing on the face of this patent to show that there was any contest before the land department on this question of the existence of the vein, and the knowledge of it, on which the validity of the patent is now supposed to rest. We have, therefore, the junior patent, which is held to defeat the prior patent, with no reference to any contest between the different claimants before the land-office; and we have the court, in deciding the present case, while hearing the testimony which would defeat or sustain that patent, utterly ignoring it, and making no finding upon the subject which the defendants in error believe to be involved in the issue. The reason of this action by the...
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