Page:United States v. Samperyac.pdf/5

122 Rh   respectively governors of said province, and that he was well acquainted with their handwriting; that he had examined the signature to the grant in this case, and found it to be in the proper handwriting of Miro, governor of said province at that time. He further testiﬁed, that the grant in this case was in the most usual form and mode of granting lands by the said governors, and would have been perfected into a title in form under the Spanish government; that lands thus granted were considered and treated by the government and the grantee as established titles, and were to be surveyed or not as the grantee chose; that a concession or order of survey, calling for lands fronting on watercourses, were to be run off, when surveyed, as follows: commencing from forty to sixty feet back from the highest high land, after passing all overflowed land if any in front, and the grantees were authorized to locate the grant on entirely good, arable land, so as neither to include inundated nor barren land, unless they chose to do so. He further testified, that the command of Arkansas commenced on the Mississippi River, at a place called Little Prairie, about forty miles below New Madrid, and fronted on the Mississippi down to Grand Point Coupee, now called Lake Providence, in Ouchita parish, State of Louisiana, and extended back west so as to include all the waters which emptied into the Mississippi from the west, between those points. He stated, on cross-examination, that he knew Bernardo Samperyac; that he resided in the Province of Louisiana at the date of the order of survey, 11th October, 1789, and was then living on Red River in Natchitoches parish, Louisiana; that in granting lands to individuals, the consideration frequently was for services rendered the government, but more frequently to induce population; that any man from any quarter could and generally did obtain concessions and orders of survey; that the Spanish governors kept records of grants, but that the destruction of the offices at New Orleans by ﬁre, in 1792 or 1793, destroyed the greater part of the records, and that a great many more were said to have been purloined and taken off, about the change of government, by officers who had been attached to the Spanish executive off1ces; that, as to granting lands, the governors-general of