What do 1872 and 1,866 have in common?

What they have in common is Otis Gold Corporation, the Canadian gold-mining company that plans to tear into the Idaho side of the Centennial Mountains, in Clark County.

A Kilgore Project access road in Clark County, Idaho.

As for those numbers ... 1872 is the date of the U.S. General Mining Act. This obsolete, Reconstruction-era law -- cherished by mining companies who are plundering Western public lands under the free-for-all declared by Donald Trump -- continues to govern the giveaway of American minerals, even to foreign mining companies like Otis Gold. And it does so without requiring royalty payments to the American treasury.

The second number -- 1,866 -- is the number of mining claims that Otis Gold has acquired in Clark County for its flagship project, the Kilgore Project. The project is named for a nearby village that is a gateway to the Centennial Mountains in Clark County, which the U.S. Department of Labor reports has virtually no unemployment.


Otis' mining claims, in Caribou-Targhee National Forest, are double the number of people who live in Clark County, which is about the size of the state of Rhode Island.

Otis currently is soliciting global investors for the Kilgore Project, which was authorized to launch a five-year exploratory phase on July 15, 2019. Through a brief, obscure legal notice published once in the back pages of a declining local newspaper, Caribou-Targhee National Forest's Dubois Ranger District in 2018 gave the public a mere 30 days to comment before approving Otis' plan.

Otis Gold is soliciting investors with a pitch focused on two components:

1. Low-grade ore to be extracted at a 12,000-acre open-pit mine, using the dangerous cyanide heap-leach process that Montana banned decades ago; and

2. The U.S. government does not require that the American people be paid royalties for this lost wealth. According to a 2012 Government Accounting Office report, U.S. government does not even know how much gold, silver and other minerals have been extracted from federally managed public lands.

It is worth noting that Idaho's state government, and its congressional delegation, supports this giveaway.