Matthews v. Digges
Matthews v. Digges
Opinion of the Court
There are two appeals in this case presented in the same transcript—one an appeal from the judgment in the plaintiff’s favor; the other an appeal from an order made after final judgment denying the defendant’s application to be relieved from the forfeiture declared ■ by said judgment under, section 1179 of the Code of Civil Procedure.
The action was one in unlawful detainer after forfeiture of certain demised premises alleged to have arisen through the breach of certain covenants in the lease thereof by the plaintiff to certain lessees named Wood and Judge, assignors of the defendant. The lease in question was executed by said plaintiff to Wood and Judge on March 22, 1917, the property covered by said lease consisting of two separate ranches containing in the aggregate about nine thousand acres of land, known as the San Lorenzo ranch and the Bitterwater. ranch, and situate in the counties of San Benito and Monterey. About six hundred acres of the land of these ranches was tillable, the balance being grazing land. The plaintiff alleged that there were three certain covenants of this lease which had been broken by the predecessors of the defendant prior to the latter’s assignment of the lease. By one of these the said lessees were required to take proper care of a small orchard on one of these ranches; by another to take proper care of a certain cream separator thereon; by the third of these covenants the lessees were to use reasonable efforts to poison the squirrels upon the leased property. The plaintiff, in his amended complaint, alleged the breach of all three of these covenants, but upon the trial of the cause the court found that as to the first two of these in the order above stated the averments of said complaint were untrue. As to the covenant to poison squirrels the trial court found the covenant had been broken so as to entitle the plaintiff to declare a forfeiture of the lease and to recover possession of the premises in this action. Judgment decreeing such forfeiture and recovery was accordingly entered in the plaintiff’s favor, and from such judgment the first of the appeals herein was taken.
After the entry of such judgment the defendant moved the trial court for an order relieving him from such forfeiture under section 1179 of the Code of Civil Procedure, *563 which motion was upon the hearing thereon denied, from which order denying the same the second appeal was taken.
Upon the first of these appeals the appellant makes several contentions. The first of these is that the evidence was insufficient to sustain the finding of the trial court that there was a breach of the covenant in said lease requiring the lessees to poison the squirrels upon the leased premises such as would entitle the plaintiff to declare a forfeiture of said lease. The covenant in relation to the poisoning of squirrels upon the lands in question reads as follows: “The parties of the second part also agree that they will at their own cost and expense use reasonable efforts to poison squirrels upon said leased property, the party of the first part at his own cost and expense to furnish the necessary poison.” It may be stated in limine with respect to the breach of this covenant that it was broken, if at all, by the original lessees in said lease; that the plaintiff’s notice of his claim of forfeiture for such breach and of his demand for the possession of the premises was served upon the said original lessees prior to the assignment by them of their said lease to the defendant herein, and that the said defendant took said assignment of said lease with full knowledge that said notice of forfeiture and demand for possession had been served by plaintiff upon' his assignors. It cannot, therefore, be successfully claimed that the defendant herein stands in any better position respecting this action and these appeals than his said predecessors in interest would have occupied had no such assignment been made.
With respect to the appellant’s first contention upon the first of these appeals, that the evidence is insufficient to justify the findings and conclusions of the trial court as to a sufficient breach of the foregoing covenant to justify a forfeiture of the lease, it may be said that, after a careful reading of the evidence in the case, we are entirely satisfied that there was sufficient evidence furnished by the plaintiff and his witnesses, both as to the fact that the plaintiff had on his part in said covenant supplied the necessary poison to enable his lessees to perform their part of said covenant, and as to the fact that they had not reasonably performed their part thereof, to justify the findings and conclusions of the trial court in both of these regards. The evidence, it is true, is conflicting as to both of these matters, *564 but the trial court resolved these conflicts in the plaintiff’s favor, as it was entitled to do, and with its findings and conclusions in so doing we are not at liberty to interfere. The appellant’s rather specious argument that, since the covenant in question sets no specific time within the five-year term of the lease within which they were bound to perform it, and hence that a forfeiture was prematurely declared, had apparently little weight with the trial court, and could have little with any person at all familiar with the pest of ground-squirrels in farming or grazing communities and with the necessity of regular and organized measures for the extirpation of this troublesome and destructive rodent on the part of owners and occupiers of such lands and insisted upon by the laws of the state especially framed for this purpose. It was clearly the duty of the lessees of these premises under the terms of this covenant in their lease to reasonably keep in a state of reduction the squirrels thereon. This, according to the positive testimony of the plaintiff and his witnesses, they did not do, since they testified, and the court found, that as a result of their failure of reasonable efforts in that regard the said leased property continued to be infested with squirrels. We find no merit, therefore, in the appellant’s contention as to the insufficiency of the evidence to sustain the findings of the court in respect to the plaintiff’s performance and his lessees’ breach of their respective parts of the foregoing covenant in said lease.
Judgment and order affirmed.
Waste, P. J., and Knight, J., pro tern., concurred.
A petition for a rehearing of this cause was denied by the district court of appeal on February 25, 1920, and a peti *567 tion to have the cause heard in the supreme court, after judgment in the district court of appeal, was denied by the supreme court on March 25, 1920.
Shaw, J., Lawlor, J., Lennon, J., Olney, J., and Kerrigan, J., pro tem., concurred.
Reference
- Full Case Name
- JOHN L. MATTHEWS, Respondent, v. ROBERT M. DIGGES, Appellant
- Cited By
- 9 cases
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- Published