Simmons v. Ogle
| Decision Date | 01 October 1881 |
| Citation | 26 L.Ed. 1087,105 U.S. 271 |
| Parties | SIMMONS v. OGLE |
| Court | U.S. Supreme Court |
APPEAL from the Circuit Court of the United States for the Southern District of Illinois.
The facts are stated in the opinion of the court.
Mr. John W. Ross and Mr. Franklin A. McConaughy for the appellant.
Mr. James L. D. Morrison for the appellee.
Simmons recovered, on the seventeenth day of January, 1878, a judgment in ejectment against Ogle, for the possession of the south half of the northeast quarter of section three, township one north, of range nine west, in St. Clair County, Illinois, and under the proper writ was placed in possession of it. The title on which he recovered was a patent to himself from the United States, dated June 12, 1874. Ogle thereupon instituted the present suit in chancery to compel a conveyance of the legal title thus established by Simmons to himself, on the ground that he had a superior equity, by reason of which the title in Simmons should be decreed to be held by him in trust for the benefit of Ogle. After answer, replication, and a full hearing on the evidence, the court granted the prayer of the bill, and from that decree Simmons brings the present appeal.
There is much conflict in the testimony. Some parts of it are irreconcilable, and the result of it in producing any very clear conviction of the true state of the case is unsatisfactory, especially in regard to the foundation of the right of complainant to be the true equitable owner of the land. The fact which he takes upon himself to establish is that, on Dec. 30, 1835, one John Winstanley bought the land of the United States, at the land-office in Edwardsville, and paid for it. The subsequent conveyances and transfers from Winstanley to Ogle are not controverted, and if the purchase and payment now stated and alleged in the bill were satisfactorily established by the evidence, the decree should be affirmed.
The evidence by which this proposition is supported is of two classes.
1. The records of the Edwardsville land-office, now found in the General Land-Office at Washington, where they were removed by law.
2. The conveyances and other proceedings by which, if Winstanley ever had any right, it became vested in Ogle, and the actual possession of the land by Ogle.
As regards the first of these, the records of the Edwardsville land-office show a written application by Winstanley at that office, on the thirtieth day of December, 1835, for the purchase of the land. It is numbered 13,164, and shows the quantity of the land to be 84.46 acres, and the price to be paid $1.25 per acre.
There is, also, an entry on the books of the office, of which the following is a copy, and which is photographed in the record:
'S. H. THOMPSON, Register.'
These, it is said, being the original entries made in the records of the local land-office, are sufficient evidence of the purchase and payment for that land by Winstanley, and that no successful contradiction of them is found anywhere. When to this is added the conveyance by Winstanley to William C. Anderson of the same land, in 1837, and that Anderson's title came to Ogle, who, in 1851, took possession of the land and held it until his removal under the action of ejectment brought by Simmons against him, the case of complainant is substantially stated.
As regards the weight to be given to the possession of Ogle, it is to be considered that whether he had the equitable right or not, neither the Statute of Limitations nor the equitable doctrine of lapse of time could begin to have effect against any one until Simmons purchased of the United States and obtained his patent in 1874, for up to that time the legal title was undeniably in the United States. If this had not been so Ogle would have successfully pleaded the Statute of Limitations against Simmons in the action at law. No laches could be imputed to Simmons, who brought suit very soon after he received his patent. Nor can laches be imputed to the United States, either as a matter of law or on any moral or equitable principles. For so common is it for squatters and trespassers to settle on the lands of the United States, and so indulgent are the laws in encouraging such settlements, and so numerous are these settlements without claim of right, and such is the impossibility of resisting or ejecting the settlers, or of efficiently asserting the right of possession by the government, that the weight of the inference in favor of any claim of right, whether legal or equitable, against the United States, growing out of mere possession, is very slight indeed.
Nor do the sale and conveyance by Winstanley to Anderson afford any legal evidence of his right to do so, and very little that he believed himself to have such right. He could never be made responsible for more than the purchase-money, and, knowing what entries were on the books of the local land-office, he might well be willing to take the money and the chances. The evidence, therefore, in support of the entries on the books of the land-office do not add greatly to its force, and the complainant's case must rest on the intrinsic probability arising from those two pieces of evidence, that Winstanley bought and paid for the land.
If either of these entries had stated the purchase and payment in words, they are open to the weakness which arises from the fact that in all such completed sales two other documents of superior probative force usually attend the sale, one of them invariably, neither of which is here produced or shown ever to have existed. The most conclusive of these is the patent. There is no pretence here that any patent ever issued to any one on Winstanley's purchase. It is proved that he was a careful business man, much accustomed to dealing in lands, and as he had sold this land, and made himself liable by a warranty deed, he would naturally have made that title secure by procuring the issue of the patent.
It is, however, well known that early purchasers of the public lands were careless about their patents. But as a reason for this, they attached primary importance to the paper issued when a sale was made, and delivered to the purchaser by the register and receiver of the land-office, called a certificate of entry.
This is a paper in two parts, the first of which is signed by the register, giving a description of the land, the amount paid for it, the name of the purchaser, and a statement that on its presentation at the General Land-Office a patent would be issued to the purchaser. The...
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