Sixty-Five Million Dollars to Not Mine
Near Cooke City, Montana
Starting in the late nineteen eighties, a Canadian mining company called Crown Butte Mines, a subsidiary of the Toronto-based Noranda corporation, drilled nearly a hundred thousand meters of core over several years in the mountains northeast of Cooke City, and around nineteen eighty-nine and nineteen ninety found what they were looking for. The New World Mining District, as the area was designated, contained high-grade deposits of gold, silver, and copper. Crown Butte began the permitting process for what would become one of the most contentious proposed mine developments in American environmental history.
The mine site sat approximately four miles from the northeast entrance of Yellowstone National Park. Opponents argued that the mine's waste rock and tailings would leach acid and heavy metals into the Clark's Fork of the Yellowstone River and its tributaries, degrading water quality inside the park and threatening the park's fish and other wildlife. Beginning in nineteen ninety-three, an alliance of environmental organizations mounted a sustained campaign against the project, and the conflict eventually reached the White House.
On August twelfth, nineteen ninety-six, President Bill Clinton announced that the federal government would pay Crown Butte sixty-five million dollars to surrender its mineral rights and abandon the mine development. Of that amount, twenty-two and a half million dollars was designated for remediating the historic mine workings already in the area from previous generations of prospecting. Clinton called the buyout necessary to protect a treasure that could not be replaced. The settlement was unprecedented in American mining history, a direct cash payment to a company to not mine. Cooke City residents were divided: some had hoped the mine would bring jobs, others were relieved.
