In Borax Consolidated Ltd. v. Los Angeles, 296 U.S. 10, 56 S.Ct. 23, 80 L. Ed. 9 (1935), the court was dealing with a controversy between one claiming title to tide lands and one claiming title under patent from the United States. If the lands were in fact tide lands they were not public lands and never had been, but had always been the property of the state. It was held that the jurisdiction of the department extends only to the public lands and that it has none over tide lands. Hence, if the lands were of the latter description the department was powerless to convey them. In Borax Consolidated, Ltd. v. Los Angeles, supra, the City of Los Angeles claimed title, by legislative grant from the State of California, to land which the City claimed was tideland. If the land was tideland, legal title thereto passed from the United States to the State on its admission to the Union in 1850. If it was not tideland, the legal title remained in the United States. In 1880 the Land Department determined as a fact that the land was not tideland, but upland, thus in effect, determining that the legal title had not passed from the United States. Accordingly, the land was surveyed, and a patent therefor was issued to Banning, predecessor in title of Borax Consolidated. In a suit by the City to quiet its title, Borax Consolidated and other defendants (referred to in the opinion as petitioners) contended that the Land Department's determination was conclusive. Rejecting this contention, the Supreme Court said: " Petitioners thus invoke the rule that `the power to make and correct surveys belongs to the political department of the government and that, whilst the lands are subject to the supervision of the General Land Office, the decisions of that bureau in all such cases, like that of other special tribunals upon matters within their exclusive jurisdiction, are unassailable by the courts, except by a direct proceeding.' "But this rule proceeds upon the assumption that the matter determined is within the jurisdiction of the Land Department. So far as pertinent here, the jurisdiction of the Land Department extended only to `the public lands of the United States.' Specifically, the term `public lands' did not include tidelands. "The question before us is not as to the general authority of the Land Department to make surveys, but as to its authority to make a survey, as a basis for a patent, which would preclude the state or its grantee from showing in an appropriate judicial proceeding that the survey was inaccurate and hence that the patent embraced land which the United States had no power to convey. Petitioners' argument in substance is that while the United States was powerless as against the state to pass title to tidelands in the absence of a survey , the question whether or not the land was tideland would be foreclosed by a departmental survey although erroneous. This contention encounters the principle that the question of jurisdiction, that is, of the competency of the Department to act upon the subject-matter, is always one for judicial determination. Here, the question goes to the existence of the subject upon which the Land Department was competent to act. Was it upland, which the United States could patent, or tideland, which it could not? Such a controversy as to title is appropriately one for judicial decision upon evidence, and we find no ground for the conclusion that it has been committed to the determination of administrative officers." 296 U.S. 16-19, 56 S.Ct. 26, 80 L.Ed. 9.