Mine, all mine; the great mineral grab.

Once upon a time, miners fondly called Butte, Montana, "the richest hill on Earth." That was a century ago. Today, Butte residents can stroll over to the Berkeley Pit and look out on a hole a mile wide, a mile-and-a-half long, and a half-mile deep. It's filled with turquoise-tinted water more acidic than vinegar.

The legacy of hard-rock mining in Montana is not something schoolchildren have to learn from textbooks. Abandoned tunnels, pits, waste heaps, and highwalls speckle the Treasure State from one end to the other. At the heart of the mining legacy is the frontier-era statute that made it all possible: the General Mining Law of 1872.

Born of the fever to settle the American West, the Mining Law was Congress's way of creating immense subsidies and privileges for miners to encourage migration to mineral-rich states and territories. More than a century later, the West long since settled, miners are still getting rich off the Mining Law, while taxpayers get nothing but an endless succession of holes like the Berkeley Pit.

The Mining Law governs all mining of gold, silver, copper, and other so-called hard-rock minerals on Federally owned public lands in the West. Almost 600 million acres fall under its jurisdiction, well over one-third the land area of several Rocky Mountain states. The Mining Law allows companies to roam anywhere on public lands not already withdrawn, staking claims and exploring for minerals.

A company that strikes a rich body of ore can build a mine on the spot and extract the minerals royalty-free, without compensation to taxpayers. And, most startling of all, a company can purchase the land outright at a price of no more than $5 per acre through a practice called patenting. The Anaconda Copper Company used patenting to remove the Berkeley Pit from public oversight.

Written before environmental destruction became a public concern, the Mining Law contains no environmental standards. Existing Federal standards leave gaping holes through which mine operators adroitly jump, occasionally leading to incidents of massive water and soil contamination. Even so conservative a group as the National Taxpayers Union has turned against the Mining Law, dubbing it "the great terrain robbery."

To understand the workings of the Mining Law, Montana is well worth a close look--not because that state's dilemma is unusual, but because it is all too typical.

I guess if you threw a dart at a map of the United States and decided to put a gold mine there, it's probably the worst place possible," says Stuart Coleman, director for resource management of Yellowstone National Park. Coleman is referring not to Yellowstone (where mining is outlawed) but to a high, mountainous area two miles northeast of the park. Noranda Minerals Corporation, a Canadian company, is seeking permission to build a gold and silver mine there.

Coleman does not take a position on the proposal per se--he just finds the location unfortunate. Yellowstone sits on one side, and the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Area, the largest Wilderness Area in the lower forty-eight states, sits on the other. The site is poised at the intersection of three river drainages. One river proceeds on into the heart of Yellowstone. Another, a Federally designated Wild and Scenic River that is home to a threatened species of trout, has been named by the environmental group American Rivers as the "most endangered river in America."

Noranda's waste-disposal plan has turned public concern into panic. The company intends to deposit five million tons of highly acidic waste tailings in a pond overlooking the river drainages. The planned procedure for depositing and storing the tailings has never been tried before.

Miners insist the rivers are in no danger. "It's all 'if, if, if,'" declares Gary Langley, president of the Montana Mining Association. "It's like saying you're not going to build a bridge because it might fall down someday."

But even Langley might think twice about building a bridge over the San Andreas Fault. Earthquakes are a relatively common occurrence in the Yellowstone area. "It doesn't take a rocket scientist," says Coleman, "to look around Yellowstone and see that this is [a seismically] active area." A swarm of earthquake tremors hit the Park as recently as August, he points out, registering about 4.3 on the Richter scale. A break in the tailings pond might kill off fish and other aquatic life for miles downstream in the adjacent rivers.

Feelings run high against the proposal in nearby Cooke City. With only 100 year-round residents and one paved road, Cooke City survives solely on recreation and tourism revenues. "People come here because of the solitude, the beautiful scenery, and the wildlife," says Sue Glidden, proprietor of the local general store. "They're not here because of some industrial project." A campaign has sprung up to oppose construction of a mine in the area, and Glidden supports the campaign wholeheartedly.

Yet Noranda expresses great confidence that its mine will be built. Why? Because Noranda has the Mining Law. Under the Mining Law's doctrine of "free access," companies can stake a claim and conduct exploration anywhere on public lands, regardless of whether a mine can be built safely there or not. A major reform bill pending in Congress would end the industry's free-roaming days, establishing a review process to decide if an area is "suitable" for mining, or whether mining poses unreasonable risks. But it won't apply to mines already in the works.

Now that Noranda has made its proposal, the Forest Service cannot legally respond with the bureaucratic equivalent of "surely you're joking." Mineral extraction, by dictate of the Mining Law, takes precedence over all other uses of public lands. "Currently, the Forest Service feels it doesn't have the authority to say no to mining," say Brian Kuehl, an attorney with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. "They believe the Mining Law requires them, more than just not saying no, to actually facilitate mining."

Finally, Noranda will pay no royalties to extract and sell its mineral reserves, currently valued at about $800 million. No royalties are currently required under the Mining Law. Should Congress suddenly decide to pass a reform bill imposing royalties, Noranda would still slip through. The company filed applications to patent its reserves some time ago.

The confrontation between defenders of Yellowstone and the Mining Law is a reunion of grand patriarchs. President Ulysses S. Grant signed both into law within months of each other in 1872. Neigher had any real precedent in land management: the first national park on Earth, and the most favorable law ever enacted for public-land miners.

The father of the General Mining Law, Senator William Stewart of Nevada, made his fortune as an attorney for large San Francisco-based mining companies, fighting to ensure that his clients captured the largest share of Nevada's Comstock silver boom.

After arriving in office as Nevada's first Senator, he began waxing lyrical about the "honest prospector" and the "poor miner." If Congress would reward these worthy souls for their enterprise, settlement of the West would be greatly hastened, and U.S. claims to the region reinforced. Stewart got his way with the 1866 Lode Mining Law, expanded six years later into the General Mining Law still in force today. After enactment, ironically, small miners enjoyed no more luck competing against big companies like Anaconda than they had before.

Stewart's adversary in the House, Representative George Julian of Illinois, later predicted that "the misfortune of this legislation is heightened by the probability of its continuance," and lamented that this "wretched travesty" would be "permanently engrafted upon half a continent."

In Montana, the Anaconda Copper Company worked to make Julian's prophecy a reality. Anaconda patented mineral deposits as soon as they were found, freeing itself from any possible Federal oversight. Left to itself, Anaconda and its chain of captive newspapers practically ruled the state of Montana until the 1950s.

"Anaconda, a company aptly named, certainly has a constrictor-like grip on much that goes on," remarked one observer in the mid-1940s. "Montana is the nearest to a colony of any American state."

Anaconda went under in 1977, unable to adjust to changing market and social conditions. But Anaconda's legacy lives on, especially in the Butte area. The famed Berkeley Pit is only one stop on a trail of environmental devastation that follows the Clark Fork River for 140 miles. The Environmental Protection Agency has placed this entire area on the Superfund National Priorities List, making Clark Fork the largest complex of Superfund sites in America.

The modern mining industry may leave its own ugly legacy. While miners a century ago laid waste to their surroundings with heedless brutality, they, in turn, could not have imagined the massive scale of mining operations in the 1990s. Break-throughs in technology during the late 1970s enabled companies to process ore bearing only microscopic traces of gold. Today, a miner may leave 100 tons of waste rock on the ground to produce one ounce of gold. According to EPA, the mining industry produces more solid waste than all other industries in America combined. Much of that waste is highly acidic or laced with cyanide, a chemical which, though invaluable for separating gold from worthless rock, can be instantly fatal to human beings.

Half a dozen big gold mines now dominate the hard-rock mining industry in Montana. They have suffered a wide variety of leaks, spills, and floods. Whether any can be fully reclaimed after mining ceases is still unknown. The oldest and largest gold mine in Montana, Zortman-Landusky, went sliding from one disaster to the next, meeting little objection from the state government. Residents of a local Indian reservation, Fort Belknap, complained for years of water contamination from Zortman. Finally, an EPA inspection confirmed the accusations. The state has filed suit against Zortman's owner, charging the company with at least seven violations of the Montana Water Quality Act.

In May of this year, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt signed a real-estate deal unheard of in the private sector--the sale of a thousand acres of land underneath the Goldstrike Mine in Northern Nevada, the richest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere. That land, holding ore reserves valued at more than $10 billion, went to a Canadian mining corporation for $5,180. Babbitt had no choice under the Mining Law, but at least he extracted something in return: He invited reporters to watch him sign the official patent. That night, his catchy complaint hit the six o'clock news on all three networks: "It's the biggest heist since the days of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

But Goldstrike is just one mine. A tidal wave of new patents will be hitting the beach shortly. Most of the oldest gold and copper mines in the West operate on land purchased (or "patented") from the Federal Government decades ago at $5 an acre. But new mines had little reason to bother with the time-consuming patenting process, since they were paying no royalties to mine on public lands. Then the reform bills surfaced in Congress: one in the House by Nick Joe Rahall, Democrat of West Virginia, and one in the Senate by Dale Bumpers, Democrat of Arkansas. They proposed to overhaul the 1872 Mining Law from top to bottom, imposing an 8 per cent gross royalty and stringent environmental standards. Patenting suddenly began to look much more attractive--get the land before the reformers get their bill.

Since 1989, the Interior Department has recorded a tremendous surge in both the number of patent applications and their market value. At least twenty-eight valuable mineral deposits may soon pass into private hands through the patent process. The lucky patenters will gain title to land worth an estimated $22 billion for about $83,000. The largest share of this treasure trove, about $7 billion, lies within Montana's borders.

Half of that sum comes from the Stillwater Mine, owned jointly by the Chevron and Manville corporations. Stillwater, the only platinum/palladium mine in the world outside South Africa, has yet to yield the bulk of its mineral reserves, valued at about $3.4 billion. Stillwater's owners filed their patent applications in March 1991, a week after a Congressional proposal to halt all patenting failed in the Senate on a vote of 52-to-48. Both of Montana's Senators opposed the proposal.

Not everyone considers the upcoming Stillwater patent an unequal exchange. Langley argues that miners need private ownership to guard the security of their holdings; otherwise, investors will shy away from what they see as a risky proposition.

"The idea that 'finders keepers' is needed to promote mineral development is just nonsense," counters Tom Power, chairman of the economics department at the University of Montana and a leading critic of the mining industry. "The coal mining industry hasn't had any trouble maintaining tenure on public lands and attracting investors. There are all sorts of contractual arrangements available to hard-rock miners without letting them seize public lands for their own purposes."

After 122 years, the Mining Law may finally have run out of time. Congress is now considering legislation that would impose stringent environmental standards, give land managers more power to reject bad mine proposals, levy a royalty on production, abolish patenting, and establish a fund to clean up abandoned mines.

Both sides consider Montana a critical battleground. A Canadian mining company prominent in the state has been running full-page newspaper advertisements charging that Mining Law reform will "cost almost 50,000 jobs"--about the number of jobs the industry provides nationwide.

Meanwhile, environmental activists are busy building support for Mining Law reform. Last October, members of the Northern Plains Resource Council decided to become miners themselves for a day: The Mine All Mine Limited Partnership traveled to a popular off-road motorcycle recreation area and staked a 120-acre claim there.

Eight out of ten Americans support Mining Law reform (as does the same proportion of Westerners), according to a recent poll commissioned by environmental groups. But the mining industry wields far more clout with Congress than it does with the public at large, making reform of the Mining Law a painful and halting process. The Senate has passed an industry-written bill that more or less perpetuates the status quo. Rather than abolish patenting, the Senate bill would charge patenters the price of the surface land--the mineral deposits would come free, like the toasters once handed out by banks to their new customers.

The House of Representatives has taken Mining Law reform much more seriously, passing a tough bill by a three-to-one margin. But the two bills still have to be combined into one bill--maybe similar to the original concept, maybe not--and enacted before Congress adjourns for the year. The industry may instruct its supporters in the Senate to delay debate on a final bill until the clock runs out, or filibuster it into extinction. Then again, the industry may not have the votes. No one on either side is ready to declare victory.

Montana, a state born of mining and suckled on a diet of pure copper, has grown up. Despite its "Treasure State" nickname, Montana boasts a booming economy and highly diverse work force--of which the mining industry employs less than half a per cent. But the Mining Law keeps alive the values of an era when one industry, or even one company, could dominate a state and take what it wanted, leaving others to pay the price. The time is coming when, like the Anaconda Copper Company, the Mining Law must either join the modern age or slide away into oblivion.