83 Iowa 612 | Iowa | 1891
This action was brought to quiet the title to certain tracts of land claimed by the plaintiff under the swamp-land grant, made by the act of congress approved September 28, 1850. The defendants claim title under the act of congress approved May 15, 1856, which granted land to the state of Iowa to aid in the construction of a railway from Dubuque to Sioux City. Of the land in controversy, the district court found and adjudged that two lots and fifteen forty-acre tracts belonged to the plaintiff, and that thirty-one such tracts belonged to the defendants.
I. The chains of title under which the respective claims of the parties are made are the same as those considered in the case of American Emigrant Co. v. Fuller, ante, p. 599, Numerous legal questions are presented in this case which were determined in that, and it is only necessary to say that as to such questions our rulings in that case are followed in this.
II. We are required to determine the "character of each of the seventeen tracts of land which were adjudged' by the district court to belong to the plaintiff. The defendants have offered no evidence with respect to six of them, and admit that they are swamp land, within the meaning of the swamp-land act of 1850. The evidence shows without serious conflict that six of the remainder are of the same character. The controversy as to five of the tracts is more serious, but a careful consideration of the evidence leads us to conclude that they must also be classed with the others. The grant included “the whole of those swamp and overflowed lands, made unfit thereby for cultivation,” which remained unsold at the passage of the act within the states to which it applied. The third section of the act provided that the tests to be made of such land
Applying the rules stated tó the evidence in this case, we find without difficulty that all the tracts of land in controversy are swamp and overflowed lands,