Banned by Montana, cyanide mining bid focuses on Idaho side of wildlife corridor

"Although cyanide reacts readily in the environment and degrades or forms complexes and salts of varying stabilities, it is toxic to many living organisms at very low concentrations. ... Fish and aquatic invertebrates are particularly sensitive to cyanide exposure." International Cyanide Management Code For the Gold Mining Industry


Montana's Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge lies just below the north slope of the Centennial Mountains, a range of the northern Rockies along the Continental Divide and the Montana-Idaho state line.

Red Rock River and the Centennial Mountains, Montana

We don't think it's a good neighborhood for a massive cyanide-based gold mine. But a foreign gold-mining company does.

Canadians eye U.S. lands for trainloads of free gold from cyanide-based Kilgore Project

“When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so.” 

President Donald Trump, December 4, 2018
 
“We must not allow corporations to pillage our public lands and leave taxpayers to clean up the mess.” 

Elizabeth Warren
U.S. Senator (D-Mass.) and presidential candidate,
April 15, 2019


We agree -- especially when the raider is a foreign gold-mining company.

Yet President Trump and the U.S. Congress are exempting Canada's Otis Gold Corporation from this pronouncement. So this mining company -- and others like it -- is indeed hoping to extract American wealth from America's wildlands without paying a penny in royalties to the American treasury.

And they hope to do so in a part of Idaho where few will notice ... until the train has left the station.

Canadian firm pitches risky cyanide mining process, snubs Greater Yellowstone wildlife

Grizzly bear warning near Kilgore Project site.

As generations of hunters, campers, ranchers, wildland travelers and Continental Divide hikers can attest, the Centennial Mountains between Idaho and Montana are still some of the wildest country along the border between the two Rocky Mountain states.

Yet it is here, on the Idaho side where this photo was taken, that a foreign gold-mining company hopes to cash in on America's policy of giving away its natural wealth without requiring royalty payments to the American people.

Otis Gold hoping for vast cyanide-based Kilgore Project near Nez Perce battle site

Interpretive site near Kilgore recalls the Camas Meadows fight.

In August 1877, a year after Americans celebrated a century of independence, Nez Perce Indian men, women and children were in a fighting -- but ultimately unsuccessful -- flight from military forces sent to corral them. The attack on their camp at Big Hole, Montana, ended in defeat for government forces; but victory came at a terrible cost in warrior casualties.

Yet days later they did it again. They defeated U.S. forces at Kamiskin Takin (Camas Meadows) in Idaho, near today's hamlet of Kilgore, just south of the Montana state line in Clark County. (Sculptures stand at an interpretive site.) The Army bugler killed in the fight is buried here -- just down the road from a foreign company's proposed cyanide-based open-pit gold mine.