The Past and Present Mining Frontier

Question for Discussion: According to Limerick,
how does mining both shape and shake up
the West?

Reading: Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, pp. 97-100,
105-111; Limerick, "The Gold Rush and the Shaping
of the American West," Leshy, "Mining's Diminished
Future" ; Protesters Stake their Claims

Video: Mining in the West: Newmont mining in Nevada ;
Public Lands, Private Profits: The Summitville Mine

Mining's impact on the American West

The Mining of the West (in-class)
The 1872 Mining Law (in-class)
The General Mining Act of 1872 has left
a legacy of Riches and Ruins (in-class)
Limerick, Uncertain Enterprises (in-class)
Limerick, The Gold Rush and the
Shaping of the American West (in-class)
Leshy, Mining's Diminished Future (in-class)
Kohler, Protesters Stake their Claim (in-class)

History of Mining in the West

Who Owns the West: Mining in the West
Corporate Ownership of Mines in the West (in-class)
Percent of Claims by Foreign Ownership
(in-class)
Mining Claim Owners in the United States
The Mining of the West: Profit and Pollution
on Public Land (in-class)
Areas with Abandoned Mines (in-class)
Areas where Mines have Polluted the Water
(in-class)
Toxic Waste Sites in the West (in-class)
The General Mining Act of 1872 has left
a legacy of Riches and Ruins (in-class)
A Timeline of Mining Reform Efforts (in-class)
California as I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives
of California's Early Years, 1849-1900

The Modern Gold Rush in
the West today
U.S. Government Report:
Mining on Federal Lands
The Modern Gold Rush: Gold Mined
in the West (in-class)
Carlin Trend Gold Mine, USA (in-class)
Carlin Trend Gold Mining Pit (in-class)
50th million once of Gold produced
at the Carlin Trend (in-class)
The New Gold Rush: Sierra
Club Magazine
A Good deal for Miners often
isn't for Uncle Sam (in-class)
Mining's Powerful Friends in Congress (in-class)
National Mining Association
National Mining Association:
Mining Statistics

Cleaning up Mining Messes in the West
Public Lands, Toxic Treasure:
Worst Mine Clean-ups (in-class)
Areas with Abandoned Mines (in-class)
Areas where Mines have Polluted the Water
(in-class)
Toxic Waste Sites in the West (in-class)
The General Mining Act of 1872 has left
a legacy of Riches and Ruins (in-class)
EPA Superfund Sites
Colorado Summitville Mine
Superfund Site (in-class)
More than a Century of Mining has
left the West deeply scarred (in-class)
Picture Gallery of Mining in
California and the West

The 1872 Mining Law (in-class)
The General Mining Act of 1872 has left
a legacy of Riches and Ruins (in-class)
Western Land owned by the Government ( in-class)
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations in the West
( in-class)
History of Mining in the West (in-class)
The Doctrine of First Effective Settlement (in-class)
Limerick, Uncertain Enterprises (in-class)
Limerick, The Gold Rush and the
Shaping of the American West (in-class)
The Gold Rush in the West today (in-class)
Public Lands, Toxic Treasure:
Five of the Worst Mines (in-class)
Cleaning up Mine Messes in the West (in-class)
More than a Century of Mining has
left the West deeply scarred (in-class)
Colorado Summitville Mine
Superfund Site (in-class)
Opponents of Crested Butte's Red Lady Mine Appeal to Supreme Court
Brief History of the Red Lady Mine Dispute
Leshy, Mining's Diminished Future (in-class)
Kohler, Protesters Stake their Claim (in-class)

see The Mining of the West for a broad overview.

Kohler, Protesters Stake their Claims

"DENVER — Environmentalists used an 1872 mining law assailed by critics as a giveaway to industry to stake claims in six Western states Thursday, hoping to protect land from development and prompt an overhaul in rules for hard-rock mining.

About 50 claims totaling 1,000 acres were staked by the Citizens Mining Co., a coalition of industry watchdog groups. Amy Jiron, of Denver, and Bonnie Gestring, of Missoula, Mont., were among those who drove stakes into the ground and filed paperwork with the Bureau of Land Management, in charge of minerals on federal ground. "

"Oil and gas are not regulated under the 1872 mining law. The royalty on coal taken from federal lands is 8 percent and 12.5 percent for oil and gas. Hard-rock mining operators don't pay royalties to the government. "

"We're staking the claims to protect the land from mining," said Gestring, of Westerners for Responsible Mining.

The total cost of Thursday's claims came to $9,250, including local fees. The law's critics say the low cost — $2.50 to $5 an acre — is one of the biggest problems. Another complaint is the priority given to minerals development.

The law, written during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, was meant to entice settlers to the West, said Roger Flynn, director and managing attorney with the law firm Western Mining Action Project in Lyons.

"Now it's used to claim tens of thousands of acres of open-pit mining all over the West," Flynn said. "

Limerick, Uncertain Enterprises

"No industry had a greater impact on Western
history than did mining. When it came to expansion, farmers moved fast -- but miners moved faster." (99)

"Mining set a mood that has never disappeared
from the West: the attitude of extractive industry --
get in, get rich, get out." (100)

"In California, hydraulic mining and underground quartz mining soon replaced the first, egalitarian "placer gold" phase. Once past that first phase, the expenses of mining could go wild, giving rise to the proposition that "It takes a mine to run a mine." Underground mining meant shafts, tunnels, tracks, carts, hoists, blasting equipment, and paid labor." (105)

The Mining Industry in the West

"Hard-rock mining is concentrated in the
West, where much of it takes place on
public land and where Senators doggedly
guard the industry's interests whenever
there is talk of changing the General Mining
Law of 1872. Virtually every year, reformers
in Congress file bills to modernize the law,
which allows miners to dig precious metals
on public land without sharing the proceeds
with the owners -- the U.S. taxpayers.
Sometimes those companies go out of
business, leaving the public to pay for
cleaning up a toxic mess."

from the The Mining of the West

1872 Mining Law:

Congress, to encourage development of the West, allows unfettered prospecting on public land. Miners can work claims for free or pay $5 or less per acre to patent -- or buy -- land.

The Doctrine of First Effective Settlement:

"Whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to effect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area."

"By many measures, the California Gold Rush was the most important event in the history of the American West."

"There are more than 500,000 abandoned mines in the West."

Limerick, The Gold Rush and the Shaping of the American West

"By many measures, the California Gold Rush was the most important event in the history of the American West. The assessment offered in The Legacy of Conquest still makes sense to me: "Rather than 'settling' the region, mining rushes picked up the American West and gave it a good shaking -- and the vibrations have not stopped yet."

"First and in many ways most important, mining rushes created the maximum degree of friction with Indians and set in motion the process that would leave them displaced, removed, and relocated. It is hard to imagine a system that could create more in the way of troubles for Indians: the discovery of precious metals and the movement to exploit them followed mandates that paid no attention to the prior negotiation of Indian treaties and land cessions. Mining rushes flung white Americans around the Western landscape, into Indian terrain, in a way that left few areas untouched..." (215)

"Third, mining, throughout the West, meant a rapidly urbanized kind of settlement, with concentrated populations, in quite a contrast to the more-dispersed, rural pattern of settlement in farming and ranching. Given the fact the West has turned out to be the most-urbanized region, the mining pattern of settlement turned out to be the shaping pattern for the regional future." (215)

"Sixth, and springing from point five, mining both provided a market for farmers and threatened the working conditions of farmers. The demand for food, in other words, presented such a hearty market that others took up farming and ranching in the area. But here is the paradox: the earliest complaints about the environmental effects of mining came from farmers, who found that hydraulic mining, especially, made a mess of their land and water..." (216)

"And yet there is this puzzle: for all the floods and tides of nostalgia poured forth by veterans of Western mining rushes, the cowboy still won. In the competition for legendary Westerner-star of dime novels, Hollywood films, TV shows, and Marlboro commercials--the prospector and the miner never got out of the starting gate. Maybe there is an obvious explanation for this puzzle. Maybe it vindicates the theory that it was not, in fact, the cowboy that the American public found so profoundly attractive and appealing. " (217-18)

"The dimensions of abandonment of old mines test the imagination. The New York Times has said that there are, in the West, "more than 500,000 abandoned mines," and this may be one of the most doubtful statistics ever to appear in that distinguished newspaper, since there has never been anything like an inventory and accurate counting of these sites, and 500,000 may, in fact, it may be a significant underestimate.3 While their operators moved on and forgot these mines, many of them are getting attention today; they not only make for precarious terrain, many of them also leak acid and heavy metals." (218)

"And that brings me to the really quite astonishing journey of Western mining from 1848 to 1998. In the mid-1980s, it looked like precious metal mining in the American West was over and done with. The high-grade deposits had been found and worked over; American mining corporations were much more interested in prospecting overseas. Business Week, in 1984, published an article called "The Death of Mining," and in 1986, the Western historian Michael Malone published an article called "The Collapse of Western Metal Mining: An Historical Epitaph."
(220)

"In the mid-1980s, various authorities announced the end of precious metal mining in the West. Right after they announced this, Western gold mining started off on a boom which has equaled the extraordinary productivity of the early 1850s in California . Right after we got these various epitaphs and obituaries for Western gold mining, the industry launched what the New York Times called "a new gold boom, the biggest in American history." The Carlin Trend, the Times said, is the "most important gold discovery outside South Africa this century," "the largest known deposit of gold in North America." In terms of production, High Country News has called it "the largest gold rush in American history," a gold boom that matches or even "dwarfs any in the history of the West." (220-221)

"The center of this new gold boom has been Nevada, and especially the area around Elko, the forty-mile stretch called the Carlin Trend. But the enthusiasm for microscopic gold, secured by the use of cyanide leaching, has hit lots and lots of places in the interior West, so that the last decade has seen a proliferation of these open pits." (221)

"....the ways in which Americans in 1998 were living with and interpreting the history of mining in the American West. First, remind yourself that one of the central campaigns in Western environmental affairs these days is the effort to cope with abandoned mines, to address the leakage of water freighted with acid and heavy metals from old mines, and to explore the concept of reclamation of mined areas with re-vegetation, sometimes even the backfilling of old pits. While these efforts are limited and incomplete, they are nonetheless striking, demonstrating a surprisingly well-rooted societal commitment to repair the damage and restore the disrupted sites of mining in the past. " (224)

"We have now a situation in which the resources of the United States's public lands are being mined by companies that are, many of them, foreign corporations -- Canadian, Northern European, and South African. Thanks to the 1872 Mining Law, these companies do not contribute revenue to the United States Treasury in return for the minerals taken from the public lands. Moreover, mining in the current mode--open pit, cyanide heap leaching--requires millions to get started; it requires equipment of extraordinary scale and expense. This is not an enterprise for the little guy." (226)

"In ways that do not seem to be grabbing current popular attention, the mining enterprise launched in California a century and a half ago continues to affect the American West. Whether the proper word for this impact is the "shaping" of the American West, as the title of this essay puts it, or the "shaking" of the American West, as I phrased it ten years ago, is a choice I leave for your contemplation."
(227)

Leshy, Mining's Diminished Future

"BEGINNNG with Coronado's sixteenth-century search for the seven cities of Cibola, the lure of mineral wealth has played a special role in Western history. From the fabulous, frenzied "rushes" of the nineteenth century through the uranium boom following World War II, mineral activity has left its mark on the West." (242)

"But unlike the homesteader, the miner's commitment
is less to a place than to a deposit, his dream less of building a home than of becoming wealthy overnight. This further undermines the stability of the mining culture and dependent communities. It is no surprise, then, that the "boom and bust" syndrome, and boomtown social ills like alcoholism and divorce, tend to occur more frequently in mining towns than in other communities. " (243)

"The miner of legend--whether as the lone explorer or the pick-and-shovel laborer working under hazardous conditions--has just about disappeared. Some of the myth of these earlier days survives in the public mind, but the miner never captured the American imagination the way the rancher did. It is hard to imagine a grimy, tired miner reaching for a Marlboro, even with spectacular peaks in the background, or to expect Hollywood to make a movie about an "urban miner."
(244)

"The differences between miners and environmentalists are fundamental because they are competing for the same landscape. To the environmentalist, nothing insults the natural balance and beauty quite so much as mining. And its effects last. Long after a mine shuts down, it can produce wind-blown dust that lodges in lungs and obscures vistas, toxic chemicals that foul streams, disruption of underground aquifers, and subsidence." (244)

"There is an irony in the resistance that mountain towns, many now oriented toward tourism, offer to mining. In many cases tourism followed mining and simply took over -- at bargain prices -- the homes and infrastructure mining had built, as occurred at Aspen and Telluride, Colorado; Park City, Utah; and many other places. That few miners stay long enough to reap the rewards of this transition is consistent with the fact that the initial discoverer of a mineral deposit rarely captured much of its value either. " (245)

"Not until the turn of this century did the idea take hold that the government had anything to say about whether and where mining might take place. Nearly all mining in the West is found on federal, or formerly federal, land, and the government's tacit acquiescence to the trespasses of the forty-niners in California 's Sierra Nevada range firmly established the policy of turning its mineral land over to prospectors and developers on demand. That policy was later formally ratified by Congress in the Mining Law of 1872.

"That law is still in effect. It is the last remnant of free access to federal lands that was the driving engine of nineteenth-century westward expansion. Its scope has, however, been substantially diminished by withdrawals of federal land and by removals of certain kinds of minerals from its ambit. " (246)

"This is not to say that mining will disappear. But the process of opening new mines will be increasingly difficult, and those that run the gauntlet and begin operations will scarcely be given free rein, as in the past . To borrow a lawyer's phrase, in the court of Western public opinion, the burden of proof has shifted from the opponents to the proponents of mineral development, and with that shift, the golden age of Western mining has passed." (247)