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.

Canada's Otis Gold Corp. envisions what it describes as its flagship project in Caribou-Targhee National Forest. The Dubois Ranger District in August 2018 approved miles of exploratory road building for up to 140 exploratory drill sites. That leaves Otis with a long road to travel before it could commence mining, if federal approval were even granted.

Operating primarily on federally managed public land, the mine as Otis envisions it could yield at least 825,000 ounces of gold, using a cyanide-based technique that new mines in Montana were banned from using 20 years ago.

Under a law that Congress passed four years before Custer's Last Stand, the Canadians would be exempt from paying royalties to the American treasury for gold they extract -- a point Otis makes in its investor solicitations, available at: www.otisgold.com.

Absent from Otis' pitch to investors: the dramatic changes it would impose a frontier Idaho county of just 900 souls.