CHAPTER TWO 



"It Gets in "lour Blood" 



Placer and Lode 



Frontier Democracy — The Mining Law of 1872 



Anyone who believes the wild west is dead 

 hasn't given much thought to mining. Rock Creek 

 is rich with mining lore: scams to snare eastern in- 

 vestors, run-ins between miners and government 

 agents and the usual heartbreaking roller coaster of 

 market prices. Despite the public's concern for its 

 blue ribbon fishery, the levels of cadmium and lead 

 in Rock Creek have exceeded Environmental Pro- 

 tection Agency "gold book " water quality stan- 

 dards for freshwater aquatics.' Officials blame a 

 century of mining— most of it unregulated — for 

 these heavy metals concentrations. Of all the ac- 

 tivities in the Rock Creek drainage, mining is the 

 hardest to control. 



To understand mining in Rock Creek — or 

 anywhere in the nation — it helps to step back more 

 than a hundred years to the General Mining Law 

 of 18^2. The Mining Law was born of the same 

 frontier spirit as the Homestead Act, which gave 

 free land to settlers, and it operates on the simple 

 principle of finders keepers: anyone who finds a 

 valuable mineral deposit on federal land is generally 

 allowed to take it.'' 



"It was the most democratic process ever, ' 

 says Ted Antonioli, a geologist for A & M Mining 

 Company whose family has been in the business 

 in the Philipsburg area for generations.' 



More than a century later, the Mining Law 

 still governs gold, sih^er, copper and other "hard- 

 rock" minerals (as opposed to coal, oil, gas, sand, 

 gravel and quarry stone). And while miners may ap- 

 plaud it as democratic, property owners in the Rock 

 Creek drainage tend to consider it confiscatory. 

 The federal government retained "subsurface "— 

 or mineral— rights to homesteads granted after 

 1912; on such lands, miners apply to the Bureau 

 of Land Management or the Forest Service for per- 

 mission to dig up a rancher's property. 'We own 

 quite a bit of surface rights but the government re- 

 tained the mineral rights, " says Bob Neal, whose 

 ",000-acre family ranch lies -tO miles up Rock 

 Creek. "So miners have access to prospecting on 

 our private land It can get to be a bad situation ."■' 

 The only recourse of the "surface " property owner 

 is to petition the federal agency controlling the 



mineral rights and show good reason why the area 

 should be withdrawn from mining activity. Where 

 mineral rights are privately held, the surface owner 

 may purchase them like any other piece of 

 property. 



While mineral holdings under private lands 

 are called "rights, " mineral holdings under public 

 lands are called "claims. " A prospector who can 

 show he might reasonably expect to profit from a 

 claim may purchase the site from the government 

 for $2.50 or $5 an acre depending on the type. That 

 process, called "patenting ", was a bargain even in 

 the last century. The green Forest Service maps of 

 Rock Creek are laced with fingers of white 

 representing mining claims that have become 

 private property. Most are "placer " claims or sur- 

 face deposits following the gentle creek beds of the 

 upper Rock Creek basin. (Placer deposits are 

 generally leached from "lode" sites— underground 

 veins — upstream. But the exploited lode sites of 

 Rock Creek are concentrated along the steep 

 gulches draining into the canyon.) Although the 

 General Accounting Office reports that since 19"8, 

 some 1 5". 000 acres of public land nationwide have 

 passed into private ownership for a patenting fee.^ 

 the federal forests of Rock Creek patented their last 

 acre in 1939.* Since then, it hasn't been worth a 

 Rock Creek miner's time and expense to go 

 through the patenting process. 



"Most.of the operations on Rock Creek have 

 been on small bodies; they basically manage to 

 mine them out in a year or so, " says Jim Sheldon, 

 a mining engineer for Region One of the Forest Ser- 

 vice. "The law (covering patents) hasn't changed 

 but enforcement has; where we used to be able to 

 look at maybe one in five, every claim that goes 

 to patent nowadays gets a hard look There's been 

 a change in the public philosophy; government 

 ownership of land used to be considered un-Amer- 

 ican and patents were intended as a just reward for 

 exploration. In the '60s that all changed" 



From a miner's point of view, "it costs a lot 

 in lawyers' fees to patent a claim these days," says 

 Antonioli, "and it doesn't get you out of regula- 

 tions ' 



