I have seen it all now. Meanders. In 45 years I have never seen anything like it. Not even close.

11 US General Land Office Surveyors meandered a 30,000-acre lake between 1814 and 1860?ÿ They all matched each other remarkably well and followed the cypress fringe all the way around the lake. The lake is a typical cyclic natural lake in Louisiana.?ÿ It is natural and as the river that receives outflow from the lake rises and falls so does the lake.?ÿ All land patents to every deed used the GLO township plats, and the legal descriptions were lots in fractional sections around the lake. During summer months the lake dries up to about only 3,000 acres of very shallow water, but at least 8 months out of the year it is at least 5 feet deep, sometimes more than 20 feet deep.?ÿ There are no trees in the bed of the open water.?ÿ An explorer in 1804 was exploring the river that the outlet of the lake feeds into, and the river is about 20 miles from the lake.?ÿ The stream that connects the lake to the river is about 100 feet wide. In 1804 an explorer who was exploring the river that receives the lake outflow for President Thomas Jefferson, camped overnight at the point where the 100-ft. wide river empties into the river he was exploring, which is about 20 miles from the lake itself.?ÿ The next morning he continued upstream in the river he was exploring, so it is obvious he never went to the lake. But he wrote in is notes that the river also ran across the lakebed and that in the dry months the lake dries up (to prove that it dries up, being 12 miles long, the curvature of the Earth would hide water in the 3,000-acre permanent pool).?ÿ But there is no river in the lakebed as documented by a federal surveyor in 1895, 1966, 1975 and presently no river.?ÿ The hydraulics clearly show that a river could not form and maintain a channel there.?ÿ?ÿ

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In Louisiana the state owns the bed of stream only to the low water mark.?ÿ On lakes, the state owns to the ordinary high water mark. Plaintiffs who own land around the lake sued and said based upon that explorer, that the lake is a river. Then they claimed that the 30,000 acre lake bed, flat as a pancake is the BANK of the river they claim runs through the bottom of the lake and that the GLO surveyors were meandering the bank of the river (1 to 5 miles away) and stated in their field notes they were meandering the LAKE.?ÿ The plaintiffs claim that landowners own the bank of the river they front down to the mean low water mark (Louisiana only), and the judge ruled the following:?ÿ The lake is not a lake, and is instead is a river, and the area between the mean low water and the ordinary high water is the bank of the river.?ÿ Therefore the 53 landowners around the lake could extend their property lines all the way to the river (some more than 5 miles) that the plaintiffs never found.?ÿ He did this by concluding that meander lines do not represent the boundary--that the waterbody does. So now we have 53 landowners with all kinds of weird lateral property lines in the fractional sections extending for miles to a river that no one found.?ÿ The judge said something like, "Yall find the river." And he withdrew from the case and gave it to another judge. Even if they find a remnant of a river in the bed of that lake, the lateral property projection lines will cause 53 of the worst boundary disputes in American history, and the people on the opposite side of the lake will be fighting over where the river was.?ÿ?ÿ

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The BLM Manual gives excellent cases about the threshold of meander line validity when it doesn't match the waterbody, with the worst threshold I saw of 25% as I recall.?ÿ If it gets greater than one would have intended when patenting the land, the meander line holds, which makes the lakebed omitted lands if it is not a lake.?ÿ The attorneys in the case did not even bring this up on appeal although there was plenty testimony about it.?ÿ?ÿ

So, as I sit here tonight, I have learned that a Rand McNally Map that one might still find at the Exxon station, or even maybe my truck GPS is more reliable and accurate than all 5 GLO township plats of the lake that covers 5 townships. Cool.