47 Tex. 578 | Tex. | 1877
The transcript in this case has not been prepared with that care with which it evidently should have been. It shows upon its face that a part of the evidence upon which the case was tried in the court below, was not incorporated into the statement of facts as copied in the record. The copy of the title or grant which gave rise to the controversy, though in the transcript in the Spanish language, yet there seems to have been no translation of it in the court below, and none has been furnished us; and the facts upon which the proper decision of the case should turn seem to have been very unsatisfactorily exhibited or developed in the court below. We might very well affirm the judgment, under the authority of many previous decisions of the court, to the effect that errors, relied upon for the reversal of the judgment, could not be considered, in the absence of a proper statement of facts. But waiving objections of tins character, and looldng at the case as exhibited in the record,, we are constrained to say that we are unable to see any error in the judgment of which the plaintiffs can justly complain.
It certainly cannot be maintained that the grant to Ponce de Leon should be held void because its boundaries were not defined and marked by a scientific surveyor with a chain and
The right of appellee to the land in controversy, under the title to Ponce deLeon, turns upon the correctness of appellants’ position, that, in order to properly locate the grant upon the ground, its first fine is absolutely required to pursue a course clue east from its initial point. If we take the translation of this part of the grant found in the brief of appellants’ counsel to be correct, as it seems to be, so far as our imperfect knowledge of the Spanish language enables us to say, still we do not think this is a proper conclusion from it, especially when we consider the manner in which it is shown that surveys were made at the date of this grant. If lines of a survey are indicated by natural or artificial objects, such objects furnish a guide for locating the land, which will control calls for mere course, even when scientific instruments have been used for fixing the supposed course of the lines. We think, therefore, the call in this grant for a line on the “side of the north, • at tire foot of the hills, and leaving inside all that can be cultivated,” must control the call for a line “ talcing the course from west to east.”
There is no error in the judgment.
Affirmed.