OCR Text |
Show 528 INTERSTATE ADJUDICATIONS thus continuous during the whole summer season of that year. There was no opportunity to plant in the Fall of 1915 because it was so wet, and in 1916 cultivation was impossible. The soil was described as mush. The farmers of all that region, not only in the valley of the Bois de Sioux but in the Mustinka watershed and elsewhere in the upper valley of the Red River, had only a third or half of a crop in 1915, and in 1916 there was no crop at all, due to excessive and continuous rain. It is not contended on behalf of the complainant that the damage from the floods of 1915 and 1916 in the Bois de Sioux was due to the higher flood line reached in those years so much as to the prolonged period during which the waters lay on the flooded area. It is admitted that such freshets were to be expected in the spring from time to time, but it is said that previously they had only lasted from three to eight days, and that the water receded, leaving the land on the banks of the Bois de Sioux cultivable and productive in the proper season. We can not fail to note, however, that this strip half a mile to two miles wide and fifteen miles long, injury to which is complained of, was low and subject to overflow. There were sloughs in it running into the Bois de Sioux and the government survey showed on the plats that 27 per cent of it was marshy. Much of the tract was good farming land except in time of excessive flood which the history of the region shows, as we have said, was to be expected about every ten years. It is difficult for a court to decide issues of fact upon which experts equal in number and standing differ flatly and when their conclusions rest on estimates upon the correctness of which the court, without technical knowledge, can not undertake to pass. In such cases, the court looks about for outstanding facts from which the lay mind can safely draw inferences as to the probabilities. The court is also aided by its judgment of the care and accuracy with which the contrasted experts respectively have determined the data upon which they base their conclusions. The experts called by Minnesota in this case seemed to us to use more specific and accurately ascertained data for their esti- mates than those for North Dakota, and this circumstance, as well as the more satisfactory reasons given, lead us to think that their con- clusions are more to be depended on. When we consider the extent and prolonged period of the floods of 1915 and 1916, covering, as they did, the whole upper valley of the Red River, of which the Mustinka watershed was but a small part, when we note that that watershed is only one-half of what feeds Lake Traverse, when we find that all this upper Red River valley was drenched with continuous rain for two summer seasons, with a frozen flood between them, when it appears that the farmers of the Mustinka valley lost as much of their crops in 1915 and had as total a loss in 1916 as the farmers on the Dakota banks of the Bois de Sioux, when we know that these farmers in the Bois de Sioux are used to frequent floods in the spring for three to eight days because of the low level of their lands, the system of state ditching- in the Mustinka sinks into a circumstance of negligible significance in the consideration of the mighty forces of Nature which caused these floods. To attribute to such a minor but constant artificial incident a phenomenal effect for two whole summer seasons without a recurrence since is to fly in the face of all reasonable probability. The evidence must be clear and |