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Opinion of the Court.

234 U.S.

land, to give opportunity for contests, and to give effect to whatever information was obtained. At most according to the Commissioner's report, the clause was intended to serve merely as an additional safeguard; and its words suggest that its use was with an eye to future discoveries rather than to existing conditions.

Coming to its effect in a patent, which is of more importance than how it came to be there, we find that this question came before the Land Department in the case of Samuel W. Spong, 5 L. D. 193. The tract in question had been patented to the Central Pacific Railroad Company under its grant, the patent containing the excepting clause. Spong applied at the local land office to enter the tract under the mining law, claiming that it was mineral and therefore excepted from the patent. The local officers refused his application, assigning as a reason that the title had passed to the company under the patent, and the Commissioner of the General Land Office affirmed their decision. The matter was then taken before Secretary Lamar, who sustained the decisions below, saying (p. 194): "The issue of said patent was a determination by the proper tribunal that the lands covered by the patent were granted to said company, and hence, under the proviso of said act, were not mineral at the date of the issuance of said patent." Again (p. 195): "In the case of Deffeback v. Hawke (115 U. S. 393), the court reviewed and commented on the several acts of Congress relative to the disposition of mineral lands, and held that the officers of the Land Department have no authority to insert in a patent any other terms than those of conveyance, with recitals showing a compliance with the law and the conditions which it prescribed." And again (p. 196): “While the exception of mineral lands from the grant to said company is clear and explicit, yet it does not appear from a careful consideration of the language of said grant that Congress intended to grant only such lands which may

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after the lapse of an indefinite number of years prove to be agricultural in character." The question was also presented in Courtright v. Wisconsin Central Railroad Co., 19 L. D. 410. The land involved had been patented under a railroad land grant like that now before us, the patent containing the same exception. Courtright, claiming that the land was mineral, and was known to be such since before the patent, insisted that it remained public land and sought to make entry of it. The local officers held that this could not be done in the presence of the patent, and their ruling was sustained by the Commissioner. On appeal, Secretary Smith affirmed the action of the other officers, saying (p. 413):

"The issuing of patent is a determination by the Department that the lands embraced therein are of the character described in the grant.

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"If it was the intention of the officers of the Government to leave as an open question the character of the lands embraced in the patent, then they acted without authority, for when patent issued, that was the end of the jurisdiction of the Department over the lands. The exception contained in the patent went beyond 'giving expression to the intent of the statute,' as construed by the supreme court, and added a restriction upon the grant which is not to be found in the granting act.

"I am therefore of the opinion that the Department has not jurisdiction to determine the character of the land in controversy after issuance of patent. If it be true that the lands in question contain minerals in paying quantities, and that this fact was known to the officers or agents of the company at the date of selection, or date of patent, and they failed to make the fact known to the Department, such conduct was a fraud upon the Government, and the courts can grant relief."

It thus appears that the Land Department has regarded

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the issuing of such a patent as a determination of the nonmineral character of the land and as effectually and unconditionally passing the title. There has been no departmental decision to the contrary. Indeed, on December 10, 1903, the Secretary of the Interior directed that the excepting clause be omitted from future patents, because he regarded it as without any warrant in law and void. 32 L. D. 342.

This clause was extensively considered by Circuit Judge Sawyer in Cowell v. Lammers, 21 Fed. Rep. 200. The patent in that case had been issued under the Central Pacific grant. The suit was to enjoin a trespass in the nature of waste, the complainant being the grantee of the railroad company and the defendant a miner who had located part of the patented tract as a lode mining claim. He had applied to the Land Department to enter the claim under the mining law, and his application had been rejected because the patent was outstanding. In granting the injunction the court said (p. 206): "The lands are either patentable under the act or they are not. If patentable, the issue of a patent is authorized. If not patentable, it is unauthorized, and the issue of a patent is, clearly, as conclusive evidence of the determination of the fact of patentability, upon a collateral attack, in the one case as in the other. Suppose it should afterwards turn out that all is mineral land. The exception would be as broad as the grant, and be void as an exception. Is it any the less so, in this class of cases, as to a part? There

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must be some point of time when the character of the land must be finally determined, and, for the interest of all concerned, there can be no better point to determine this question than at the time of issuing the patent." Again (p. 208): "A patent upon its face should either grant or not grant. It must be seen from a construction of the language of the grant [patent] itself whether anything is granted or not, and, if anything be granted, what

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it is. There is no authority to issue a patent which, in effect, only says if the lands herein described hereafter turn out to be agricultural lands, then I grant them, but if they turn out to be mineral lands, then I do not grant them. Such a patent would be so uncertain that it would be impossible to determine, from the face of the patent, whether anything is granted or not."

In principle, the effect of the excepting clause in the patent is not an open one, under the decisions of this court. It is foreclosed by what has been held upon full consideration. In Deffeback v. Hawke, 115 U. S. 392, where was involved the right to certain valuable townsite improvements upon land patented as a placer mining claim, the contention was advanced that as the owner of the improvements was the prior occupant the patent should have contained a reservation excluding them and all rights necessary to their enjoyment from its operation, but the contention was declared untenable, the court saying (p. 406): "The land officers, who are merely agents of the law, had no authority to insert in the patent any other terms than those of conveyance, with recitals showing a compliance with the law and the conditions which it prescribed." The case of Davis v. Weibbold, 139 U. S. 507, directly involved the validity of a clause in a townsite patent declaring that no title should be thereby "acquired to any mine of gold, silver, cinnabar or copper." By the mining laws mineral lands were withdrawn from disposal under other laws and the townsite law specially declared that no title to any mine of gold, silver, cinnabar, or copper should be acquired under its provisions. The defendant claimed under the townsite patent and a deed of release and quit-claim from the probate judge, who was the townsite trustee, and the plaintiff claimed under a later patent for a mining claim located upon part of the townsite and based upon an actual discovery of a valuable vein of gold after the issue of the townsite patent.

Opinion of the Court.

234 U. S.

The decision and the reasons for it are fully comprehended in the following extracts from the opinion:

(p. 519) "The exceptions of mineral lands from preemption and settlement and from grants to States for universities and schools, for the construction of public buildings, and in aid of railroads and other works of internal improvement, are not held to exclude all lands in which minerals may be found, but only those where the mineral is in sufficient quantity to add to their richness and to justify expenditures for its extraction, and known to be so at the date of the grant." (As shown in Barden v. Northern Pacific Railroad Co., [19 L. D. 188] the word "grant' here means the patent and not the act making the grant.)

(p. 524) "It would seem from this uniform construction of that Department 1 of the Government specially intrusted with supervision of proceedings required for the alienation of the public lands, including those that embrace minerals, and also of the courts of the mining States, Federal and state, whose attention has been called to the subject, that the exception of mineral lands from grant in the acts of Congress should be considered to apply only to such lands as were at the time of the grant [patent] known to be so valuable for their minerals as to justify expenditure for their extraction. The grant or patent, when issued, would thus be held to carry with it the determination of the proper authorities that the land patented was not subject to the exception stated. There has been no direct adjudication upon this point by this court, but this conclusion is a legitimate inference from several of its decisions. It was implied in the opinion in Deffeback v. Hawke, already referred to, and in the cases of the Colorado Coal & Iron Co. v. United States, 123 U. S. 307, 328, and United States v. Iron Silver Mining Co., 128 U. S. 673, 683."

1 The reference is to several Land Department decisions cited and reviewed in that opinion.

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