After way too long, I finally used a GPT to track down the case citation for Houston Texas Central Railroad Company v. W.A. East, including an online copy of the case itself.

TL;DR: Hathi Trust for once actually comes through:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044103152245&seq=301

Texas Supreme Court cases are recorded in West's South Western Reporter. WestLaw is famously obsessive with copyright, but all cases prior to 1928 are now in the public domain. Yay, P.D.

There's an online archive of South Western Reporter at Hathi Trust:

https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100333420

(Via the Online Books Page at University of Pennsylvania: https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=swreporter)

The full citation for the case, which gives the volume and page number, is:

So we want South West Reporter, volume 81, page 279.

Which is here:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044103152245&seq=301

(Hathi infuriatingly doesn't permit full-volume downloads, but you can download PDFs one page at a time...)

The process by which I'd done this seems interesting (IMO):

I'd turned this up using a GPT (FastGPT from Kagi), asking it what the early-20th century Texas case concerning rule of capture was, whether that case was online anywhere (reply: not really, though there are several discussions of it), and then where Texas State Supreme Court rulings were published. OCLC failed to give reasonable references, the Internet Archive doesn't seem to carry these, but the UPenn Online Books Page (Homepage: https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/, a hugely useful tool I'm deciding) pointed me to Hathi.

On GPT: the ability to go through a series of questions about a topic, rather than just doing a keyword search, really is transformational. I'd been an early user of Google (1998/9), and online library catalogues for over a decade before that. Being able to inquire about topics and narrow down where to find things is tremendously useful, and I'm still wrapping my head around this as a tool.

cc: @pluralistic

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