Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 10.djvu/454

442 FEDERAIi EEPORTBR. �The respondent contends that the Sioux City & St. Paul road was prior to its rival in location and construction, and that "priority of location of route, of construction of road, and of selection of lands on the line of location give prior, paramount, and exclusive title to the lands thus selected." This proposition is untenable. It is impossi- ble to conceive that congress could have intended that the whole of the lands within the overlapping limits should go to one or the other of the enterprises in question. The only rational inferenoe is that congress intended that both roads should participate in these lands. Now, by applying the principle that priority of location and construc- tion gives priority of right, it would have been inevitable that the intention of congress would have been utterly defeated. Both roads could bardly, in the nature of things, be located and constructed at the same precise time. It was inevitable that one should be located and constructed sooner or later than the other. The Mc- Gregor enterprise had more than 250 miles to locate and construct; the Sioux City & St. Paul about 60 miles. A race of diligence between them would have been no race at all. If congress had intended that the principle of priority should be applied it might just as well have given the lands at the place of intersection out- right to the Sioux City & St. Paul enterprise. Nothing but an utter want of all diligence on the part of the last-named enterprise could have given the McGregor Company any chance whatever to secure a single acre in the overlapping limits. �Take the case for illustration of a grant in the same act to two par- allel roads with overlapping limits. In such a case, if one road, by superior diligence in location or construction, or both, could secure all the lands, the building of the other road would be prevented and the will of the grantor defeated, for it must be assumed that in such a case the purpose of the grantor would be to secure the building of both roads, and not one or the other of the two. Hence we are clear that the principle of priority contended for cannot be adopted to solve the difficulty of overlapping grants, and in this we are sustained by authority. See Mr. Justice Miller's opinion on page 24 of complain- ant's brief; Mr. Justice Harlan's, on page 25 of same; also, Judge Dillon, in 4 Dill. 307. �Again, the defendant's couneel contend that the rights of the corn- plainant company were immutably fixed by the line which the Mc- Gregor Company caused to be located and returned to the proper department of the government in August, 1864; that by virtue of this line the limits of the grant under which the complainant claims ��� �