Land locators sprang up by hundreds. The country was
held up and searched for "vacancies" at the point of a compass.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of splendid acres were wrested
from their innocent purchasers and holders. There began a vast hegira
of evicted settlers in tattered wagons; going nowhere, cursing
injustice, stunned, purposeless, homeless, hopeless. Their children
began to look up to them for bread, and cry.
It was in consequence of these conditions that Hamilton and Avery
had filed upon a strip of land about a mile wide and three miles long,
comprising about two thousand acres, it being the excess over
complement of the Elias Denny three-league survey on Chiquito River,
in one of the middle-western counties. This two-thousand-acre body
of land was asserted by them to be vacant land, and improperly
considered a part of the Denny survey. They based this assertion and
their claim upon the land upon the demonstrated facts that the
beginning corner of the Denny survey was plainly identified; that its
field notes called to run west 5,760 varas, and then called for
Chiquito River; thence it ran south, with the meanders--and so on--
and that the Chiquito River was, on the ground, fully a mile farther
west from the point reached by course and distance.
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