Page:The-new-brunswick-magazine-v3-n3-sep-1899.djvu/39

The object of the Common Council in prosecuting their inquiries is evident from the statement of the committee, "If we are correct in our view respecting the Red Head, the City of St. John owns all the land between Union street and a line drawn from some one of the Red Heads at the Mill Pond, N. 75° E. to the city limits eastward."

Donaldson and Ansley refer to the lawsuit between James Simonds and Hazen and White in 1792, in which there was a dispute as to the location of Red Head, and they add, "This shows in the clearest manner the doubts, or rather the conflicting interests, which existed in all their minds in regard to where a Red Head was, or where they individually would wish it, though none of the parties ever seemed to have vehemently insisted on its being where we believe it to have been, viz., at some one of the many banks of red earth on the borders of the Mill Pond."

To the writer of this article the words in italics ap-pear to reveal a weak spot in the argument of Lauchlan Donaldson, namely the indefiniteness of his Red Head. The heirs of the old grantees claimed that as the limits of their two grants were so largely dependant on the location of Red Head, that landmark must of necessity be a well known and notorious landmark, which was the case only with Red Head on Courtenay Bay and which by common consent they had from the first considered the boundary named in their grants. The committee of the city council had nothing more definite to urge than that Red Head was "one of the many banks of red earth on the borders of the Mill Pond." This conclusion was largely based on the contention that