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.1906 8.Courtesy ofthe Pioneer Museum,Bozeman, Montana.60 / Chapter 6Scraping tailings at the Grubstake Cyanide Mill near Red Bluff, Montana, ca.1906 8.Courtesy of the Pioneer Museum, Bozeman, Montana.mill well tunnel shaft. 8 Timbering mines and keeping the steam boil-ers hot required a great deal of wood whether on mining claims or not.Ewald Kipp, an Arizona mining engineer, reported in 1927 that  I am stilltimber helping to an old timer who has been doing nothing else for thepast ten years. It was healthful, as  all of this hard labor with the ax andsaw and the pick and shovel are doing me good. 9 H.R. Dick Cooke, aReno attorney, made clear how important the annual assessment workwas to Thomas R.White of San Francisco in 1940:  This exclusive rightof possession conferred upon the locator by the statute is as much theproperty of the locator as the vein or lode, subject to the right of theGovernment to limit the cutting of timbre growing on the mining claimto the necessity for its use in working the mine. 10 Doing the assessmentwork preserved the rights in timber and kept claim jumpers at bay.It s Off to Work We Go / 61Getting the work out of the way provided a measure of peace.George F.Davis, a Spokane attorney and president of the SunnysideMines Company of Virginia City, Montana, told Alonzo Emerson in1938 that  we will also perform enough exploration work on the VanderMiller vein across the creek to cover current assessment work and thenwe can file proof of it along with Sunnyside. That filing would  protectour titles to all of the Sunnyside claims to June 1940. 11 For miners, warbrought better news than peace.In addition to increased demand formetals, Congress lifted the assessment work burden.John E.Corette toldJ.J.Carrigan, the manager of mines for the Anaconda Copper MiningCompany in 1943, that Public Law 47, 48th Congress, chapter 91, 1stsession, H.R.2370, had  suspended the $100 assessment work require-ment. Now only a filing of an annual notice maintained an interest in aclaim.12World War II came to an end in 1945, and the demand for metalsfell until the Korean War gave demand a nudge, but peace was hard onminers.Mining state representatives went back to Congress trying togive the mining industry a break from the onerous $100 per claim peryear assessment work requirement.13 The mining industry needed cashto pay its bar bills again.As we will see in a later chapter, a simple regulation requiring thatthe federal government be paid the $100 in cash would revolution-ize the process.Thousands of speculative claims suddenly were openfor relocation.Again, as Jared Diamond has observed,  Early minersbehaved as they did because the government required almost nothingof them, and because they were businessmen. 14 The work requirementwas one of those things that government required miners to do andto attest that they complied with statutory requirements.When gov-ernment required more than an affidavit in the late twentieth century,miners clearly demonstrated that work and money had a different valueon the public lands.chapter 7Spurs, Dips, and AnglesIn fact, alone, the world itself is gray,our language indecipherable to us,my mouth a puddle splashed; and one againyou are the passer-by who looks awayjust as it happens, who scarcely could discussthe strange nuances of an age s burningsecuring our extinction, and our yearning. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Some Exigencies in After the Palace Burns (2003)he ability of a hard-rock or lode locator to pursue a vein outsideTthe sidelines of a location into the claim of abutting miners cre-ated another problem of certainty in western American mining.Thisparticular  custom of some miners became general law, confoundingclaimants, lawyers, judges, and public policy makers.In the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, miners and their lawyers had to deal with thepractical aspects of the law, its uncertainty, and its consequences.Thiswas a custom at the Comstock Lode and found its way into federallaw courtesy of Senator William Morris Stewart of Nevada.Suffice it tosay, Curtis H.Lindley, America s first academic expert on mining law,wrote,  no branch of mining law presents so many intricate and variedquestions, and there are none more difficult to treat comprehensivelyand concisely. 1 How to deal with uncertainty varied over time, but legaland business sense frequently meshed.62Spurs, Dips, and Angles / 63With hard-rock miners hacking away spitting distance apart on aledge, suspicions of creative tunneling and ore theft abounded.Edgar W.Smith of Goldfield, Arizona Territory, told George U.Young of Phoenixof a suspicious neighbor in 1911. Morris of Mesa, 1/2 owner in the Wasp,south extension of the Mammoth, was out last Sunday, he wrote,  to seewhat we were doing.Heard we were in under his ground.Fixed him allright & he left satisfied apparently. 2 The problems of extralateral litiga-tion were severe, as O.H.McKee, a San Francisco attorney, explained toRobert Keating, the superintendent of the Savage Mining Company ofVirginia City, Nevada, in 1879.First, such a suit would set off  the howlin the newspapers, and that could adversely affect the value of companystock.Second, delay was costly because an appeal to the U.S.SupremeCourt would  thus tie the matter up for a couple of years more dur-ing which time new arrangements can be made if desirable. 3 Litigationregardless of the merits increased negotiating leverage because the orewas fixed in the inertia of the law.As hard-rock mining became big business and capital invest-ment grew, the question of extralateral rights, as the spurs, dips, andangles came to be known, increased in significance.N.B.Ringeling ofMontana described part of his problem to Charles A.Cuno in St.Louisin 1891:The fact is our vein has dipped out of our north side line andinto the Fraction Lode a portion of which claim is claimed bythe Garnets.The vein is being worked as rapidly as possible.The miners posted outsiders as to we were working and theresult is the Garnets thought we were taking their ore.They no doubt will survey, and try to get out an injunc-tion, restricting us from working within the disputed ground,Fraction Garnet adverse ground or rather the S.S.portion ofGarnet claims.I will be in shape soon so that I can get at ourore without entering ground in dispute or within the so calledGarnet lines.If an injunction should be granted the damage would be64 / Chapter 7very great as it no doubt would prevent us from getting oreenough for the Mill.4Ringeling would get as much ore out before an injunction could haltthe work, but that was not always his solution [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]