PLSO The Oregon Surveyor March April 2020

Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon |  www.plso.org 17 old trail had been used only very brief- ly, during a “gold stampede,” concluding that “the great stampede to Eagle Creek collapsed upon itself like banks of snow dissolving” when the miners departed, turning their attention to richer resourc- es in other areas. Thus Shoshone County was unable to prove that public use of the trail at issue had actually endured for any full 5 year period, so even if state law had been judicially allowed to play a role in this QTA case, the county would have been unable to prevail. Yet this defeat not surprisingly left the county person- nel chagrined, as from this experience they became convinced that Idaho law on the subject of public road establishment could never be of any benefit to them, or to any citizens of their county, in any federal courtroom, having been judicial- ly deemed to be irrelevant and impotent in any QTA litigation (FN 3). Judicial rulings quite often have a serious impact upon subsequent events, involv- ing parties who had no involvement in the previous legal action, but who later encounter similar issues in another loca- tion, and as our featured case reveals, the result of the Eagle Creek case had an im- pact of that kind upon another citizen of Shoshone County. TheNemeths apparent- ly owned a tract of unspecified size, in an unspecified portion of Shoshone County, for several years, and they evidently ac- cessed their land bymeans of a typical old dirt road crossing federal land, adminis- tered by the Forest Service, without any difficulty, of either the physical variety or the legal variety, throughout the period of their ownership. They apparently just assumed, when they acquired their prop- erty, that their access road was a typical public road, under county jurisdiction, or perhaps they were told by some unspeci- fied party that it was a county road, and if they obtained any title report at that time, that report either failed to indicate the legal status of their access route, or they simply paid no attention to the contents of that report. In 2009, the Nemeths placed their land in trust status, and Nemeth’s wife died at an unspecified subsequent date, apparently resulting in a decision on the part of the widower to sell his Shoshone County property. In 2016, Nemeth found a buyer, but his potential grantee wisely insisted upon definitive verification that the subject property had legal access, so Nemeth made an inquiry with Forest Ser- vice personnel, but they told him that the road in question was under complete fed- eral control, denying that it had ever been identified as a county road, as he had long assumed. Nemeth then learned that the road leading to his estate had been built in 1906 by county personnel, so he turned to the County Board, once again seeking verification that the road was under coun - ty jurisdiction, but several months later, in 2017, the Board informed him that they had decided not to assist him, noti- fying him that he could obtain such legal verification only by means of a quiet title action. Upon being so informed, Nemeth filed a road validation action in the state court system, citing RS 2477 as the basis for his assertion that his access route was in fact a typical public county road, and seeking judicial verification of the road’s status, but rather than supportingNemeth, as they had supported the Eagle Creek partners, county personnel, convinced that Nemeth’s case was doomed to fail- ure, and unwilling to invest any county resources on his behalf for that reason, chose to oppose his efforts. In 2018, the judge dismissed Nemeth’s state court ac- tion, agreeing with the county that, in view of the futility of the Eagle Creek litigation, it was clearly impossible for anyone to ob- tain legally conclusive verification of the kind sought by Nemeth, either statutori- ly or judicially, under Idaho state law, and deeming public road validation pursuant to RS 2477 to be a purely federal matter, over which neither any state or county personnel nor any state court could ef- fectively exercise any jurisdiction. Nemeth was thus left with 3 options, he could just give up and sell his real estate at a greatly lowered price, due to his inabil- ity to prove that his property was legally accessible, or he could file a QTA action in federal court, which under federal law, he presumably realized or was advised, could not be successful without coun- ty support for his position, or he could challenge the legitimacy of the adverse position which the county had taken, re- fusing to act cooperatively with him, by appealing the dismissal of his state court action to the Supreme Court of Idaho (ISC). Nemeth chose the last option, re- quiring the ISC to review everything that had taken place over the previous sever- al years in Shoshone County with respect to RS 2477, and the results of that review are documented in Nemeth v Shoshone County (2019 WL 6314832 - 11/26/19). The ISC began its analysis of the Nemeth scenario, ominously for Shoshone Coun- ty, by noting that “RS 2477 rights-of-way required no administrative formalities” to achieve legal existence, clarifying that for 110 years “no formal act of public accep- tance, on the part of the states or localities in whom the right was vested” was nec- essary to produce a public right-of-way upon any land that remained public do- main at any given date. Because RS 2477 The Croesus Lode, shown here along with several others, on a Twentieth Century GLO map of the Eagle Mining District, lies within Section 19, T50N, R6E, Boise Meridian. Featured Article continues on page 18 T