- “In hardrock mining, it is axiomatic that when a once-profitable mine has been worked out by a company, someone else will attempt to prove that the property is still capable of earning a buck.”
After a successful career
as a hydrologist and consultant for mining companies in Montana,
David Stiller decided to write a book. By looking at one mine in
Montana that a prospector in 1898 named after his horse – the “Mike
Horse” – Stiller says he hoped to alert people to the danger posed
to Westerners by more than a half-million abandoned hardrock
mines.
One danger is a fatal plunge down a mine
shaft. At least one person, he says, dies every year from an
exploration gone wrong. The more common danger is to a
high-mountain watershed after the blowout of a tailings dam. That
happened at the Mike Horse Mine in 1975, Stiller writes, and the
river that suffered an onslaught of acid mine waste was the
Blackfoot, made famous by Norman Maclean’s A River Runs
Through It. Nothing lived for three miles down the river
after a plug of acid mine waste swept through
it.
Stiller says it’s no surprise that miners
through the decades routinely put environmental protection last and
profits first. Congress in 1872 wrote the mining act to encourage
people to move West and settle a wild land. If he had the power to
amend the mining law, Stiller writes, he’d dump its “archaic”
patenting process that practically gives away mined land to mining
companies; then, with money raised from royalties imposed on
minerals taken from public lands, he’d tackle cleaning up “the
15,000 worst sites in the West.” Abandoned mines may lie mostly in
remote places, he concludes, but they share these characteristics:
They make a mountain look diseased, and their danger to the
environment never ends.
Wounding the
West: Montana Mining and the Environment, University of
Nebraska Press, 312 N. 14th St., Lincoln, NE 68588 (402/472-3581);
$25, 212 pages, photos, maps.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Mining is forever.
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