patrick.net

http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/pub.php?id=67

In 1863, Henry Miller filed patents for thousands of acres of unsurveyed "swamplands" in the San Joaquin Valley. The State of California had classified them as swamplands even though no state official had ever examined them; instead the state relied on eyewitness testimony by several land officers that Miller had been all over the area in a boat. As Miller later confided to a biographer, that boat had been strapped to a wagon.