Winter et al. v. United States.
But it has been said that the recording gives them no character of validity as evidence; that the recorder should record papers produced without regard to their genuineness or otherwise, and that before a copy of such record can be read, the genuineness of the original must be proven by extraneous evidence.
Can such be a fair exposition of the acts of congress requiring such documentary testimony? If so, the effect would be simply to impose burdens on the claimants, and seduce them into a fatal but delusive security as to the evidences of their titles, by requiring them, under the penalty of losing the benefit of such documents as evidences of their rights if they should fail to have them so recorded, and subjecting them to the expenses incident to such recording. Such we cannot conceive to have been the design of the government, or the effect of the law; and we insist, that by recording them they were intended to be made evidence without further proof, as without such recording they are forbidden to be received as evidence in any court. 1 Land Laws, 1519; Ib. 528; Ib. 548; Ib. 620, 636, 640.
If such be not the fact, no advantage whatever could result to the claimants, but only advantages to the government, and burdens and prejudice to the claimants; a result not warranted by the spirit of the acts of congress, but directly opposed to it. See Mackay et al. v. Dillon, 4 How. 445. Copies admitted by court in Missouri, and admission not disapproved.
But from lapse of time, if from no other principles, the transcripts of these plots ought to be received as evidence, being from the proper office and made by the proper depositary of the original papers, in which office they are in this instance shown to have been since 1798, a period of fifty years, within which time witnesses to the transaction are presumed to have died or departed the vicinity, and especially such may be presumed to be the case in the circumstances of the present case, the act having taken place under a foreign government, and seven years before the present government acquired jurisdiction; the smallness and sparseness of the settlements, and the removal of many of the inhabitants on the change of government, as well as the death of all the parties to the transaction, the grantees,
