Gold in Montana Hills May Not Be In the Ground

Famed River Threatened by Mining

Recreation resources such as the Blackfoot River, a fly-fishing paradise, are the state's real treasure, say critics of an initiatives to allow gold mining nearby. (Blaine Harden - The Washington Post)

LINCOLN, Mont. -- The waters of the Blackfoot River mesmerized and haunted Norman Maclean, who fished in the river all his life and celebrated its mysteries in "A River Runs Through It."

Montana voters approved an initiative six years ago that was to have forever protected the Blackfoot from a proposed cyanide open-pit gold mine near the river's headwaters.

But because of another initiative, which was proposed and is being bankrolled by a Colorado mining company, Montanans will be asked on Nov. 2 to remove those protections. If it passes, Initiative 147 would remove the 1998 ban on cyanide heap-leach gold mining, a process that the Montana Department of Environmental Quality says has sullied the state with water pollution problems that will continue in perpetuity.

The fight between mining and environmental interests is likely to be a doozy, and not just because Maclean's classic story of the river (and Robert Redford's 1992 movie based on the story) sanctified the Blackfoot as a temple for fly-fishing. The vote is also shaping up as a contest between two larger stories about what it means to live in the Rocky Mountain West.

The story championed by Canyon Resources Corp., the Golden, Colo., company that wants to build the huge gold mine on the Blackfoot, harks back to Montana's past, when fulfilling manifest destiny and finding a good job depended on resource extraction -- particularly the mining of gold, silver and copper.

Backers of this narrative are promoting the mining initiative this summer at Kiwanis Club meetings and county fairs as a tradition-rich way of reducing unemployment and increasing state tax revenue. At fair booths, paid supporters of Initiative 147 invite children to try their hand at panning for gold.

"There is mineral wealth in Montana, and citizens want a balanced economy that keeps children from moving out of state," said Richard H. De Voto, president of Canyon Resources, which has provided 97 percent of the $1 million spent so far to promote the initiative.

The company has outspent its opponents by 395 to 1, campaign records show. Both sides said the company could spend an additional $3 million to $4 million to advertise its initiative, a large sum in a state with 917,000 residents. That much money will buy a lot of local television time. In Billings, the state's largest media market, 30-second television ads during prime time cost $900.

The other story in the mining fight asks voters to wake up to the economic realities of modern Montana.

It is a state where, according to federal figures, retiree income amounts to three times the combined personal income from mining, logging, ranching, farming and oil and gas extraction.

This New West narrative says there is nothing more important to Montana's economy than protecting natural amenities, such as the Blackfoot, that lure wealthy newcomers to the state.

"This mine on the Blackfoot is threatening the very future of Montana," said Jay D. Proops, a retired multimillionaire from Chicago and a river-loving newcomer who in 1996 bought an enormous cattle ranch that runs for six miles along the banks of the Blackfoot. "This river has brought a vast amount of clean recreational industry into the state. That holds a lot more promise than trying to mine microscopic particles of gold out of a whole mountainside."

At the proposed mine on the Blackfoot, gold would be extracted from 537 million tons of low-grade ore and treated with cyanide, a poison that, in theory, is kept out of surface and groundwater by using large plastic liners. In practice, mining experts say, the liners almost always leak.

Mining was once a driving force in Montana's economic life, but now it is all but insignificant, according to economists who study the Rocky Mountain West.