Targeting Idaho public lands, Canadians see lucrative future in America's gold giveaway

"There's multiple other targets out at Kilgore that have never been drilled before ... So not only do we have the existing deposit, there is a significant amount of blue sky out at the project." Craig T. Lindsay, president and CEO of Canada's Otis Gold Corp.

Blue sky over Kilgore and the Centennials

Blue sky, indeed.

Vancouver, Canada's Otis Gold Corp. says it sees a long-term opportunity to enrich its investors at Americans' expense by mining royalty-free gold from public lands in Idaho.

Otis Gold's so-called Kilgore Project is the "flagship" project of its Idaho ventures. It is named for a nearby hamlet in sparsely populated Clark County, on the southern flank of the Centennial Mountains. (Another is the Oakley Project, in Cassia County, on the Utah/Nevada border.) A five-year exploratory project is scheduled to begin near tiny Kilgore in July 2019.
 
Encouraged that the company's risky cyanide-based extraction process could produce more than 800,000 ounces of gold in Caribou-Targhee National Forest -- without having to pay royalties to the U.S. Treasury -- the Canadians say that 2019 is just the beginning.

Something far larger is coming to Kilgore, it says.

Canadian mining company hopes 'frontier' county in Idaho can deliver its golden future

The commonly accepted population density for a United States county to qualify as a "frontier" is six residents per square mile. Idaho's Clark County -- larger than the state of Rhode Island -- has 0.6 residents per square mile. It lies at the base of the Centennial Mountains.

So it is here -- in a frontier county with just 360 or so registered voters, and where unemployment is barely above 0 percent -- that a Canadian company hopes to sell investors on a dangerous open-pit gold-mining operation on wildlife-rich, American public lands.

Teton Range, viewed from Kilgore, Idaho

It would be developed just a few miles south of Montana, which decades ago banned the water-intensive, cyanide-based process that Canada's Otis Gold Corp. hopes to use in its flagship operation, the Kilgore Project.

Politically powerless, sparsely populated county is focus of risky gold-mining process

With just 900 residents, many of them immigrants and their families working in agriculture, Clark County is Idaho's least-populated county. Yet it is larger than the state of Rhode Island. It lies just west of Yellowstone National Park, in a watershed where fresh water feeds into the lifeblood of Idaho -- the Snake River Plain Aquifer. Clark also occupies the southern flank of the Continental Divide's Centennial Mountains, a prime migration corridor for wildlife in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Kilgore, Idaho, the Kilgore Project's namesake.

But with a tiny, isolated and politically voiceless population, limited communications and no effective news media serving as a watchdog, Clark has become a prime target for Canada's Otis Gold Corp., and its ambitions for a massive open-pit gold mine on public land.

It's called the Kilgore Project.

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.