Winter et al. v. United States.
the proper officer; and all this without cost to the royal treasury. In other words the concession was an authority to the surveyor-general and his deputies, to make the survey as a public trust; and it was the duty of the grantee to call upon him for that purpose, or procure authority for a private person to do it.
The government contented itself in the first instance with giving the authority to survey, and then leaving it to the party interested to procure the execution of that authority. No law or regulation existing in the Province of Louisiana, has been brought to the notice of the court, which dispensed with a survey in the case of an open floating concession, and it is presumed there was none.
It is also quite evident that a survey under the Spanish government meant, as with us, the actual measurement of land, ascertaining the contents by running lines and angles, marking the same, and fixing corners and boundaries. 1 Land Laws, App. 996–998, 1001, 1003, 1004, 1014, 1043; The United States v. Hanson, 16 Peters, 198; 6 Jac. Law Dictionary, 157.
"The survey," say the supreme court, in Ellicott v. Pearl, 10 Peters, 441, "made by a surveyor being under oath, is evidence as to all things which are properly within the line of his duty. But his duty is confined to describing and marking on the plot the lines, corners, trees, and other objects on the ground; and to subjoin such remarks as may explain them; but in all other respects, and as to all other facts he stands like any other witness, to be examined on oath, in the presence of the parties, and subject to cross-examination." This case is cited, because in pointing out the duty of a surveyor of land, it clearly shows the nature of a survey, and what must be understood by it; namely, running lines with compass and chain, establishing comers, marking trees and other objects on the ground, giving bearings and distances, and making descriptive field notes and plots of the works. These are the ingredients of an actual survey, as well as the evidences of it; for it is not the mere assertion of the surveyor that he had surveyed land that makes it so. The United States v. Hanson, 16 Peters, 200.
A return by the surveyor-general, embracing a description of a survey of land in legal form, was primâ facie competent
