Missouri River’s Jokes with Farmers.
Suppose that, years ago when you were a young man, you came to Missouri and bought a farm on the banks of the Missouri River, and spent the next fifteen or twenty years in clearing the land and bringing it into a high state of cultivation. And then suppose that, just when you had begun to derive some benefit from your years of toil, the river should suddenly reach out and swallow up about half your farm.
Then suppose that the river, after keeping your farm for several years, should grow seemingly repentant and replace your farm, you would no doubt feel that all the land within the bounds mentioned in your deeds was your own as much as it ever was.
But that would all depend on the precise manner in which the river replaced your land. That is where the accretion law of Missouri comes in, and it is a fearful and mysterious thing. If the river, in putting your land back, began piling it up against your bank and continued doing so, the land to the water’s edge would be yours, even if it went beyond your original boundaries. But if the river, as it often does, should first throw up a bar out in the channel and then gradually fill up the space between that and your land until finally the current changed and left the island thus formed joined to your land, you would have no claim to any land thus formed. It would belong to the county, and could be surveyed and sold to the highest bidder, and the money it brought would go to the school fund.
The Missouri River is a malicious stream, and if it ever comes to judgment, will have a lot to answer for. Instead of pursuing its course in an orderly manner and sticking to one established course, it is forever changing, eating away the bank on one side and throwing up new banks on the other side, cutting out old sand bars here and building new ones there, so that the main channel is never the same for very long at a time.
In Holt County, near Fortescue, there has been a great deal of excitement lately, caused by the disputes over the possession of some of the land thus formed, commonly known as “bar land.” Several men had fenced land which was claimed under deed by John C. Hinkle, a Civil War veteran, who has lived on this land for the last fifty years. About fifteen years ago the river took five hundred acres of Mr. Hinkle’s land and afterward put it back as a bar. Mr. Hinkle claimed the land on the ground that the bar had made to his land, and the other men claimed it on the ground that it had been put back as an island, which finally joined Mr. Hinkle’s land, and was therefore as much theirs as any one’s. The court upheld the squatters’ claim that the land did not belong to Hinkle, and this decision was the signal for squatters to rush in and seize bar land all along the river front. In the last thirty days perhaps a dozen men have settled on these bars.
The fact of possession seems to be given considerable weight in this matter, and the land has generally been seized in the night. A squatter will pick out a piece of land that most suits his fancy, get some help, slip in at night, put a fence around it, and build a shack on it. Of course, it is not much of a house or much of a fence, but it is enough to establish proof of possession.
Sometimes two different men will have designs on the same piece of land, or perhaps the man whose deed calls for this land will offer objections to its being seized, and these conditions have given rise to several exciting encounters. Several houses have been torn down, many fences cut to pieces and in at least one instance men have been escorted from the land of their choice at the point of a Winchester, with instruction to “beat it” and not to come back. While no blood has been shed so far, it is freely predicted that it is only a matter of time until somebody is carried out “feet first.”
The county has ordered the land surveyed, with the intention of selling it to the highest bidder, but the law says that the ones in possession have a right to buy it at the highest bid, so that even if the county sells the land, the ones actually on the ground have a big advantage. This fact will probably cause others to try to seize land before the survey is made.
The land is not so very valuable except in a dry year, as it is liable to overflow any time the river rises a few feet.