PLSO The Oregon Surveyor Sept/Oct 2019

10 Vol. 42, No. 5 The Oregon Surveyor | Book   Review The Land Surveyor’s Guide to the Supreme Court of Oregon Volume One—1848 through 1892: Building the Foundation of Our Law. By Brian Portwood Featured Article L and Surveyor’s Guide to the Supreme Court of Oregon, Volume One , by Bri- an Portwood, PLS is a great read, with the chronological format leading the reader through the timeline of deci- sions. Now, after spending considerable time with the book, I find that I continue to refer to it regularly for its ongoing ref- erence value. As a Land Surveyor with an appreciation for history, I have always had an interest in the circumstanceswhichprompted specific decisions, later often codified into statute, upon which we now base so much of our daily work. The period covered in Volume One, from before statehood, to 1892, cov- ers some very influential cases including decisions dealing with: Surplusage in writ- ten descriptions, the controlling value of monuments, ambiguities in descriptions, and the meaning of often used terms like “bank,” “meander,” and “right-of-way.” Perhaps it is the nature of such decisions, later codified, that seem so permanent and defining in a one- sided manner that led me to what has become my current favorite lesson from Volume One: Sometimes both sides of a case had it wrong. Bingham v. Salene, an 1887 case out of Columbia County, dealt with the granting of either permanent rights or revocable privileges. In this case the nature of hunt- ing rights granted upon the Salene estate were in dispute, with one party believing they had granted merely a revocable per- mit, while the other (Bingham) believing they had been granted permanent rights. In fact, Bingham apparently felt so strong- ly about the rights they had been granted that they began selling rights to hunt to others who were not a party to the orig- inal agreement (in error in the eyes of the court). Reviewed By: David W. Taylor The court in this case went on to decide several matters with lasting implications: The rights granted were indeed perma- nent, sole, and exclusive (in favor of the grantee), but also limited to particular ar- eas (wetlands) and though transferable by the grantee, they were not able to “am- plify the scope” of those rights by sharing them with others. Like many other cases in this book, this one is slightly abridged, leaving out some superfluous language from the decisions. My interest in this case ledme to get a copy of the complete decision and there found additional interesting items. Though it had no bearing on the case, the court did take it upon itself to comment (in the beautiful language of the time) that …”the defen- dants were likely exasperated”…by the conduct of the grantees who…”behaved in a most impudent and insolent manner” and that…”had the privilege granted been used in conformity with its terms, the…mis- understanding might have been avoided.” A lesson for today, from the Supreme Court of Oregon in 1887. The opportunities for continued learning for Land Surveyors or anyonewith an inter- est in Oregon history abound in this book and I am looking forward to Volume Two. x PLSO notes with regret the passing of long time land surveyor and PLSO member Jim Miller, who died on July 14 in Phillips- burg, Kansas, the place of his birth in 1935, aged 83. Jim was a veteran, who served in the U.S. Army during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the early portion of his 60 year surveying career, which featured 28 years of federal service as an employee of the Bureau of Reclamation, and ended upon his retirement in 2015 at the age of 79. He knew the West exceedingly well, hav- ing worked as a federal surveyor in 13 different western states, and the Northwest played an especially important role in both his career and his personal life, as he was married in Vancouver, Washington, in 1974, and first became licensed as a surveyor in Oregon in 1982. Happily, he is survived by numerous children and grandchildren, who now reside in Arizona, Florida, Kansas, and Texas. x In Memoriam: Jim Miller