Severance from public domain

if the description was vague and indefinite, as in the case before us, and there was no official survey to give a certain location, it could create no right of private property in any particular parcel of land, which could be maintained in a court of justice. ... The land claimed was not severed from the public domain by the Spanish authorities, and set apart as private property, and consequently it passed to the United States by the treaty which ceded to them all the public and unappropriated lands.