Camfield v. United States

THAYER, Circuit Judge, after stating the case as above, delivered the opinion of the court. Section 1 of the act of February 25,1885, supra, declared, in effect, that it should thereafter be deemed unlawful for any person, association, or corporation to make or maintain an inclosure which embraced within its limits any public land of the United States, [104] to which, the person making or maintaining the inclosure had no claim or color of title, and to which he asserted no right under a claim made in good faith, with a view to the entry thereof at the proper land office under the general laws of the United States. The. statute in question is general in its terms, and it contains no exceptions. It was within the power of congress to enact such a law; and, haying enacted it, it is not within the province of the judiciary to inquire or to decide whether the measure was politic or impolitic, wise or unwise. The answer filed by the defendants admitted, in substance, that the defendants had caused an inclosure to be made which embraced within its limits more than 20,000 acres of the public domain. This admission brought them within the inhibitions of the law. It matters not what their intent may have been in making the indos are. The courts charged with the enforcement of the law cannot say that the construction of a dam for purposes of irrigation is a work of such great utility and importance that, in the execution of the same, the plain mandate of the statute may be disregarded. In support of their contention that the answer disclosed a good defense to the bill., we have been referred by counsel for the appellants to the cáse of U. S. v. Douglas-Willan Sartoris Co., 3 Wyo. 288, 22 Pac. 92; but we cannot concur in the views expressed by the majority of the court in that case. We think that the defendants admitted that they had been guilty of a violation of the act of February 25, 1885, and that the facts pleaded by way of excuse do not amount to a justification of the unlawful act in question. The decree of the circuit court of the United States for the district of Colorado is therefore affirmed.