The following provisions of the Federal Statutes relate to the location of "placer" claims:

"Claims usually called 'placers' including all forms of deposit excepting veins of quartz, or other rock in place, shall be subject to entry and patent, under like circumstances and conditions, and upon similar proceedings, as are provided for vein or lode claims; but where the lands have been previously surveyed by the United States, the entry in its exterior limits shall conform to the legal subdivisions of the public lands.

" Legal subdivisions of forty acres may be subdivided into ten-acre tracts; and two or more persons, or associations of persons, having contiguous claims of any size, although such claims may be less than ten acres each, may make joint entry thereof; but no location of a placer-claim made after the ninth day of July, eighteen hundred and seventy, shall exceed one hundred and sixty acres for any one person or association of persons, which location shall conform to the United States surveys; and nothing in this section contained shall defeat or impair any bona fide preemption or homestead claim upon agricultural lands, or authorize the sale of the improvements of any bona fide settler to any purchaser.

" Where placer-claims are upon surveyed lands, and conform to legal subdivisions, no further survey or plat shall be required, and all placer-mining claims located after the tenth day of May, eighteen hundred and seventy-two, shall conform as near as practicable with the United States system of public land surveys, and the rectangular subdivisions of such surveys, and no such location shall include more than twenty acres for each individual claimant; but where placer-claims cannot be conformed to legal subdivisions, survey and plat shall be made as on unsurveyed lands; and where by the segregation of mineral land in any legal subdivision a quantity of agricultural land less than forty acres remains, such fractional portion of agricultural land may be entered by any party qualified by law, for homestead or preemption purposes."

A placer location gives a qualified possession of the ground located; that is to say, it confers upon the owner the exclusive right of possession of the surface area for all purposes incident to the use and operation of the same as a placer mining claim, and all unknown lodes or veins, but does not give right of possession to known lodes or veins within its limits. The right to the possession of such lodes or veins can be acquired only by locating them as lode claims.21

A patent for a claim can in no case exceed 160 acres; that is, for a single claim, and it cannot be so much, except in the case of an association of persons. An association may take 160 acres; an individual claimant can have only twenty acres.22