38 OUR FEDERAL LANDS 



century of law suits resulting from error and dis- 

 putes growing out of error would no doubt prove 

 colossal if it were possible to compute it. Some idea 

 of the grossness of such a system's inaccuracy is 

 shown by Commissioner Spry's discovery as late as 

 1926 of 14,432,940 acres of Public Domain which 

 the government did not know it possessed. The con- 

 tract survey system passed in 1910. 



Since organization of the cadastral engineering 

 service, the bulk of surveying, notwithstanding de- 

 creasing Public Lands, has constantly increased. An 

 aggregate of 5,160,072 acres of surveys and resur- 

 veys was applied for in 1927 alone. This contradic- 

 tory situation is due primarily to decrease in agri- 

 cultural settlement owing to exhaustion of the sup- 

 ply of good farming land and the consequent move- 

 ment of population and activity back into regions 

 covered by the faulty surveys of years ago, which 

 now must be done over. 



Last year's surveying, for example, besides the 

 run of usual work, corrected thirty-eight erroneous 

 or fictitious surveys in California, Colorado, Idaho, 

 New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and Florida; 

 determined riparian rights to define swamp lands 

 and omitted lands in Colorado, Oregon, Wyoming, 

 Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Missis- 

 sippi, Louisiana, and Florida; surveyed ten town 

 sites in Alaska, Idaho, New Mexico, Oregon, and 

 Florida together with forty-five islands in Califor- 

 nia, Nebraska, Idaho, Montana, Washington, Wy- 



