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 sent up, and as the 
tianscript-never could go up until the clerk had received his 
fees, so the claimant was often compelled to pay 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 repaying 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. 
Thave 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 anew 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 
clearly 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- 
