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Show 468 LEADING FACTS OF NEW MEXICAN HISTORY years passed slowly by before this fallacy of the squatter’s reasoning became apparent to all right minded men.3* The court of private land claims was unique in character, and its establishment and work mark an interesting epoch in the history of New Mexico and of the general government as well. In its purpose, jurisdiction, and functions it was unlike any other ever established in the United States. Its function being, primarily, to determine the validity of title as between the United States and the grantee claiming under a foreign nation, it involved: First, a legal interpretation of the terms the two governments. of the treaties between Second, a consideration of international law, the civil law of Spain, founded upon the Roman civil law; the edicts, ordinances, and decrees of the Spanish crown, reaching back two or three centuries, relating to the crown possessions of the Indies. Third, the laws and statutes, federal, departmental , and state, of Mexico subsequent to the independence of that government in 1820. 891 Report of the Governor of New Mexico, 1903, p. 378: ‘Even the local did much to encourage these abuses. Not through ignorance, for every grant was notoriou sly well known, but from disregard of grant rights and lust for fees of the office, entries were allowed to land offices of the government be made upon grant lands the Same as upon publie domain, notably in southern Colorado and New Mexico, and of course Squatters would pre-empt the best portions — those which were irrigable. This practice was made all the more aggravating when, afterwards, congress, in confirming these grants which the United States never owned all and had by solemn treaty stipulated to proes, although illegal when made, should creating the Court of Private Land Claims, accept pay from the United States at the price of $1.25 per acre for such excepted area, the latter in many cases being at the time of such adjudication worth from twenty-five to fifty dollars per acre. It is proper to note these outrageously unjust pro visions were the result of legislation at the that instance of the majority of eastern members of congress who knew no more of the geography, topography, climatic and physical conditions or the necessity for irrigation in the farther west than they knew of the moon, and seemed to care as little, presuming, if they eared to indulge in any presumption whatever, that all these lands in the far western territories were the same as those in the rainy, well-watered, and timbered regions east of the Mississippi river. Members from the few states in the country west of the Mississippi, and the voteless delegates of Territories, were helpless and could only beg but not demand from that class which Governor Gilpin was wont to characterize as ‘ salt water tyrants of the Atlantic Coast.’ ’’ Ps also Reports of the Governor of New Mexico, 1895, pp. 1-14; 1896, pP- SPANISH AND MEXICAN LAND GRANTS 469 Fourth, the restrictive provisions of the act of congress creating the court. Fifth, the decisions of the federal courts of the United States in the review of cases involving similar questions arising in Californ ia and under the Florida and Louisiana purchases, and also involvin g somewhat of the customs, definitions, interpretations, and traditionary usages touching the estate and tenure of Spanish and Mexican grant titles; and lastly, such of the law of evidence,®* realty, descent, alienation, and equitable rights as are applicable under rules of judicial procedure in courts of the United States. ‘An interesting feature of the business of the court’? says one of its able justices,?®* ‘‘is the historic romance attaching to the settlement and holding of these lands. The documentary evidence in many cases had to be supplemented by the oral testimony of withesses, relating to occupation, abandonment by Indian hostilities, heredity, and family pedigree of claimant, dating back to a time when witnesses from seventy-five to one hundred years old testified to what, when children, they had heard told by their aged grand- fathers. Here were brought out the stories of the marches northward into the frontier provinces across arid deserts, over drifted sands, through prickly cactus, thorny mesquite-chapparal, and under burning suns reflecting the blinding light from wastes of snowwhite alkali, on and on to the welcome, pine-clad mountains, with their cool streams and fertile building of the rude adobe valleys. Then the settlements, the and jacal dwellings, the little mission church with its venerated cross, the forts for defense, the pastoral life, with flocks of sheep and cattle, and the oft contention over watering places —the life over again of the patriarchal age of Abraham and Lot. Then the hostile raids of the Indians, the masSacres, captivities, flights, years of wars and persistent returns. “In these stories one could look back in fancy over the long trails these settlers followed and see the marches of the first Spanish in- vaders, the old conquistadores who, like the Crusaders of the middle ages, clad in all the panoply of Spanish cavaliers, resplendent in the glamour of the conquest of a New World, rode forth from the Halls of the Montezumas, on that long stretch of mountain plateau from *°? All the muniments of title which constituted the written or documentary evidence in the cases before the court were in the Spanish language, the oldest ing known as ‘archive’? documents or records. The translation of these required the services of experts who had years of experience as translators and custodians of the archives and were familiar with the script, nomenclature, and formula of these ancient legal documents and their forms of authentication and peculiar rubrics. These archives were on parchment or royal sealed Paper and the more ancient were full of abbreviations, like middle-age Latin. 93 Wilbur F. Stone. |