🪨 The 1872 Rule Hiding Under Skamania's Mining Fights

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I've spent the past year sitting in county and city meetings for the Dispatch, and lately two of them keep circling the same subject: mining. In the remote northwest corner of the county, up against the Mount St. Helens monument, a Canadian company called Cambria Gold Mines, formerly Ascot Resources, wants to drill toward a possible open-pit copper mine in the Green River Valley. Out on the west end, a company called Storedahl wants to open a gravel quarry that neighbors say would put roughly 500 truck trips a day onto Highway 14. Two very different projects, and the arguments you hear about them are the ones you'd expect. Fish and scenery and volcano risk on one. Trucks and water and torn-up pavement on the other. Jobs on both. The Yakama Nation and the Cowlitz Tribe, who know that mountain as Lawetlat'la and hold it sacred, oppose the copper mine too.

Those are all real arguments and worth having. But sitting through the June 30 commissioners' meeting, where Cascade Forest Conservancy came to brief the board on the copper mine, I kept waiting for someone to say the one thing that reframes the whole copper conversation. Almost nobody did. It's a fact I found genuinely surprising when I finally understood it, and I think most of us walking around this county have no idea it's true.

We own the copper. We collect nothing for it.

If that copper mine gets built on the federal land near Mount St. Helens, and the copper comes out of the ground, the public that owns that land collects no royalty on the metal. None. Not the county, not the state, not even the federal treasury. The reason is a law older than the state of Washington. The General Mining Act of 1872, signed by President Grant, still governs how "hardrock" minerals (copper, gold, silver, molybdenum, the metals this company is after) come off of federal land. It was written in an era when the entire point of federal policy was to give the West away and get people to settle it. So it lets a company stake a claim, dig out the minerals, and pay the public nothing for the ore itself.

Who wrote this, and why it never expired

The man most responsible for that promise was a Nevada senator named William Stewart, and his story tells you almost everything about the law. Stewart had come west in the Gold Rush, mined, then made his fortune as a lawyer arguing claim fights over the Comstock Lode, the great silver strike under Virginia City. When he reached the Senate he did not so much invent a mining system as bless the one the camps had already built for themselves. Out in the diggings, thousands of miles from Washington, prospectors had written their own rough rules: find it, stake it, record it, and it is yours. Stewart put that frontier bargain into federal law in 1866, then expanded it in 1872, and President Grant signed it seven years after the Civil War ended, in the middle of a great national project of handing the West to whoever would go settle it. Nobody drafting it pictured the day the frontier would run out. So they wrote in no royalty and no expiration.

You can see what that promise was capable of two years later and a thousand miles east of here. In 1874 an Army expedition under George Custer found gold in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory, land the United States had guaranteed to the Lakota "forever" in a treaty signed only six years before, and which the Lakota held as sacred. The treaty did not slow anything down. The government's early efforts to hold the miners back collapsed within months, some 15,000 prospectors poured onto forbidden ground chasing the same stake-it-and-it-is-yours dream, and the collision became the Great Sioux War, Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn in 1876, and Congress simply taking the Black Hills back in 1877. The Supreme Court later ruled that taking illegal. The Lakota have refused the payment ever since and keep asking for the land instead. I put that here because the thing stirring in our own northwest corner, a mineral rush meeting a people who hold a place sacred, is not some strange new wrinkle. It is almost the oldest part of this law's story.

Coal pays. Copper does not.

I want to be clear about how unusual that is, because it's easy to assume a mine automatically means money for the place it lands in. When a company pumps oil or gas or digs coal out of that same kind of federal ground, it pays a federal royalty, and the state where it happens gets back about half. Wyoming more or less built its budget on that arrangement. But copper and gold were carved out and left under the old 1872 rules, and those rules carry no royalty at all. Groups that track this estimate that more than $245 billion in minerals have come off public land royalty-free since 1872. The claim holder's yearly fee to the federal government runs about $200 per claim.

This is the part that connects straight to that meeting. Cascade Forest Conservancy told the commissioners something the local Forest Service had told them: the county would likely see no direct receipts from a mine anyway. When I first jotted that in my notes it sounded like a throwaway line. It isn't. It's the 1872 law doing exactly what it was built to do. There's no royalty to collect, and no royalty means there's nothing for the state or county to take a share of. Washington doesn't levy a severance tax on minerals either, so there's no state cut on the back end. The business tax a mine would pay goes to Olympia, not to Stevenson.

What the county would actually keep

So what would actually land in the county's lap? Realistically, property tax on whatever privately owned equipment and buildings sit at the site, plus whatever jobs and local spending the mine brings while metal prices are high. That is not nothing, and I don't want to wave it off. But weigh it against what the county keeps no matter what: the roads the trucks grind down, the water everyone downstream depends on, the draw of an unspoiled monument, and, if a mine is ever walked away from, a share of the mess.

Look a few hundred miles east to Butte, Montana, which called itself "the richest hill on earth" and mined copper, the very metal this company wants, under these same rules for the better part of a century. What the boom left behind is the Berkeley Pit: a mile-long crater slowly filling with more than 40 billion gallons of acid water so poisonous it kills flocks of birds that land on it, and one of the largest Superfund cleanups in the country, still grinding on long after the profitable copper and the company that took it were gone. Cleaning up abandoned hardrock mines is a multibillion-dollar bill nationally, and it lands mostly on taxpayers, not on the miners who profited. The public owns the copper, carries the risk, and under this law collects no rent on the resource.

You'd think a 154-year-old giveaway would have been fixed by now. People have tried. Congress at least stopped letting mining companies buy the land outright back in 1994. Bills to finally charge a royalty, most recently somewhere around 8 to 12.5 percent, get introduced and then die, session after session, against heavy lobbying. And right now the pressure runs the other way. Copper and other metals are on the federal "critical minerals" lists because of batteries and the power grid, and the current administration is pushing to open more public land to mining, not less. It's a Grant-era law meeting an electric-car-era appetite, and so far the law is winning.

Two fights, and only one is ours to shape

Now here's where I want to be careful, because these two mining fights are not the same animal, and the 1872 story only fits one of them. The gravel quarry out west is not a hardrock mine on federal land. Gravel is what the law calls a "salable" mineral, and this one is a private operation going through county permitting. That difference matters enormously, because it flips who holds the pen. On the copper mine, the county is mostly a bystander: the real decisions sit with federal agencies, and the 1872 law wrote local government out of the money. On the gravel quarry, the county actually has leverage. There's a draft environmental study, a county hearings examiner, permit conditions the county can attach, and a public comment window open until July 30. If you're a west-end resident worried about the haul route, where opponents count a truck roughly every 68 seconds, that comment period is a real lever you can pull. If you're worried about the copper mine, most of the real levers are 2,700 miles away in Washington, D.C.

I'm not writing this to tell you to be for or against any mine. I don't think that's my job. I'm writing it because we're having the copper conversation with a piece missing, and it's a piece that should change the questions we ask. The commissioners described a county "locked in a box": roughly 80 percent of Skamania is federally owned, less than 2 percent of its land is taxable at full value, few options left, families priced out, schools closing. All of that is real, and I feel the weight of it in those rooms. But part of that box was built in 1872, and it's worth knowing that the usual promise, let the mine in and the county gets paid, doesn't automatically hold here. Before anyone treats a copper mine as a budget rescue, we should ask what money would actually reach the county, and the honest answer, under the law as it stands, is very little.

And that phrase, under the law as it stands, is carrying a lot of weight. We are used to being on the rough end of federal law here. And I think a lot of people have quietly decided the only move left is to take what we're given. But zero is where the federal government starts. It is not where this has to end. In a rural Montana county not so different from ours, three grassroots councils sat down with a hardrock mining company in 2000 and walked out with a legally binding contract. They got water monitoring stricter than the state required, company-paid buses to keep mine traffic off their roads, and limits on where worker housing could go. That agreement is still in force today, and it survived the mining company being sold to someone else. None of it came from Congress fixing the 1872 law. It came out of a lawsuit and a permit fight, which is exactly what is already underway in the Green River Valley. Montana went further and passed a law requiring big new mines to pay the local government costs they create. Michigan taxes copper mines and sends most of that money to schools and a rural development fund. Washington has done neither. So no, we are not owed a royalty under the law we have. But nobody is stopping us from asking for an agreement, and nobody is stopping us from asking Olympia for a law. Places our size have gotten both.

I want to see that same change come to Skamania, because we (including the hard-working folks who run our county) all deserve a viable future here together as neighbors.

So here are the questions I'd want answered before this comes up again. If a mine is built, what specifically would the county collect, in dollars, and who has that in writing? What can the county actually require or refuse, and what is preempted by federal law? Where are the comment windows still open, and which of these decisions can a local voice still reach? And the bigger one, for anyone we send to Olympia or D.C.: are you willing to touch the 1872 law, or are we going to keep acting like the West is still being handed out for free?

Whatever you think about mining, we all share the same roads, the same river, and the same view of that mountain. We should at least walk into these fights knowing which ones we can still shape at home, and which were mostly decided for us a century and a half ago.

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