Northern Pacific Railway Co. v. Wismer

Background

A railroad company sued to recover eighty acres (and the title to 64,000 acres turned on the outcome) that a local man had claimed by homestead and later patented in 1913. The railroad relied on an 1864 law that granted it alternate sections of public land along its line, and it filed its final map locating the line on October 4, 1880. The landowner traced his title to a homestead entry and a later federal act that opened surplus reservation lands to settlement.

Reasoning

The central question was whether the land was already taken out of the railroad’s grant because it had been set aside for the Spokane Indians before the railroad fixed its line. The Court found that a council agreement of August 18, 1877, Colonel Watkins’s actions to place the Indians on that land, and reports up through the Commissioner and Secretary of the Interior (communicated to the Senate by January 23, 1878) established the reservation before October 1880. Military orders and a later presidential order in 1881 only confirmed what had already been done. Because the reservation existed when the railroad filed its map, the land never became part of the 1864 grant.

Real world impact

The decision means the disputed acres were excluded from the railroad’s land grant and the homesteader’s patent stands for those lands. It protects the tribe’s reserved area from being taken by the railroad and shows that government agents’ actions to create reservations can be binding even before later formal paperwork. The ruling affirms title for occupants who received patents under the opening laws that followed reservation allotment.