458 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 



pay the clerks for making out the transcripts ; and as the ap- 

 peal could never be decided, and the claimant never get a per- 

 fect title, until the transcript should be ^ent up, and as the 

 transcript never could go up until the clerk had received his 

 fees, so the claimant was often compelled to j^ay the expenses 

 of the transcript, amounting in some cases to several hundred 

 dollars. This was an expense which custom and law impose 

 upon the appellant, but in these cases the United States made 

 no provision for re^^aying the respondent, although he was 

 compelled to advance the money. After the appeals had been 

 taken to the court of the last resort, the United States Attor- 

 ney-General ordered the appeals to be dismissed in about four 

 hundred cases, and in about forty cases the United States 

 Supreme Court have given judgment in favor of the claim- 

 ants, making four hundred and forty claims finally confirmed. 

 About one hundred and forty claims have been abandoned 

 by the claimants or finally rejected by the courts, and this 

 estimate would leave two hundred and thirty cases still be- 

 fore the courts for adjudication upon their merits. 



I have said that four hundred and forty cases have been finally 

 confirmed, but final confirmation is not equivalent to final settle- 

 ment. Up to 1859, it was supposed that when judgment 

 on appeal had been rendered in private land claim, by the 

 United States Supreme Court, in favor of the claimant, the liti- 

 gation between him and the federal government, so far as 

 that title was concerned, was at an end. But a new law was 

 passed, requiring the surveys of the Californian ranches to be 

 subject to review by the United States DistrictCourts. The 

 exact boundaries of the claim could only be determined by a 

 survey ; and in large ranches, where the boundaries were not 

 clearlv defined, the location of the ranch became a matter of 

 very great importance, often involving values of tens and even 

 hundreds' of thousands of dollars. 



The consequence of the new law was, that four hundred 

 and twenty out of the four hundred and forty finally con- 

 firmed claims, are thrown into the courts again ; their settle- 



