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32 Mo. 79

Bell v. Dawson

Supreme Court of Missouri

Decided March 15, 1862

Supreme Court of Missouri · decided 1862-03-15

Louis Circuit Court. This was an ejectment, commenced in the St. Louis Land Court, July 1,1854, and, taken by change of venue to the Circuit Court in 1856, and tried at the September term, 1859. The land claimed was a tract of one by forty arpens, in the St. Louis Grand Prairie common fields, and alleged to be the southern arpent of the one and one-half arpens confirmed to Philibert Gagnon by the act of Congress of April 29,1816, and surveyed as United States survey No. 1591.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1862-03-15

How this case has been cited

Cited by 4 later decisions — most recently June 1913

4 state decisions

20186218701880189019001910decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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Bates, Judge,

¶1delivered the opinion of the court.

¶2This is an action of ejectment. The plaintiffs claim under a deed made on the 6th day of March, 1775, from Philibert Gagnon to John B. Ortez, for a piece of land described as “ A lot of one arpent in front by forty arpens in depth, situated in the Grand Prairie bounded on one side by Mr. Laclede, and on the other side by the said vendor, such as it now exists, which the said Ortez says he knows and is satisfied therewith.”

¶3It was shown that, at the time this deed was made, Gagnon’s land in the Grand Prairie, was a tract of three arpens in front by forty ai’pens in depth, and that it was bounded on both sides by lands of Mr. Laclede.

¶4The court below, in effect, declared the deed void for uncertainty of description. This was right. The description was absolutely uncertain as to which side of the Gagnon tract it was intended to take Ortez’s lot from, and there are no means of making the description certain.

¶5Judgment affirmed;

Judges Bay and Dryden concurring.
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