Excerpt from In the District Court of the United States: In and for the Southern District of California, Northern Division, Benjamin F. Bledsoe, Judge The suits herein name no less than two hundred and thirty-four defendants, and it is asserted by defendants that one hundred and eleven other per sons claim interests in the lands involved and are necessary parties in consequence. The litigation directly challenges the title to approximately 165, 000 acres of land in the oil territory of the west side of the San Joaquin Valley extending from above Coalinga on the north, to below Sunset on the south. The value of the land actually involved is alleged by the government in its complaints to be in excess of The patents in issue aggregate sixteen; the first, N o. 20, covering some four thousand acres, was applied for by the railroad company in 1883, and was finally issued in 1892. Suit was brought upon it in January, 1915. Patent N o. 22, covering over sixty thousand acres, was ap plied for in May, 1892, issued July 10, 1894, and suit was brought, the earliest one filed, December 20, 1912. The other patents involved were applied for at various times between 1882 and 1900, and were issued at various dates between 1894 and 1902. It might be said, in passing, that the patent applied for in 1900, and the only one herein involved applied for after 1897, was issued in 1902, and covers three sections of land in the Elk Hills region, none of which as yet are shown to be oil bearing. During the course of the protracted hearings, many hundreds of witnesses were examined in open court, and nearly fifteen thousand pages of testi mony thus taken. The importance and magnitude of the property rights involved have at no time been lost sight of by the Court. A careful consideration of the evidence, and of the various contentions of the principal parties to the litigation has of course been given. Due regard for economy, both of time and of space, however, demand that the conclusions of the Court be stated with brevity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.