The Living West

I was born in Passaic New Jersey but moved with my parents to Southern California when I was three. So I grew up in the San Fernando Valley (Canoga Park, CA) I spent most of my summers exploring the mines and ghost towns of Southern California—Tropico, Calico, Stanley-Miller Mine, Reward, Death Valley and even Bodie and the Mother Lode country along Highway 49.

My father was an aeronautical engineer but I was always interested in the human interaction with the world. I spent a year at the Colorado School of Mines, but was unprepared to bury my head in calculus books and master the art of using a sliderule. I wanted to grab my pick and head out in the hills looking for a nice outcrop. In my youth I met and corresponded with William B Murray who was a mining attorney from Portland, OR.  He and others encouraged me to pursue a legal education. I have always wanted to have the knowledge, power, and opportunity to prevent the erosion of our personal freedoms. The practice of law allows me to pursue the interaction between human history and economic policy in the development of our country.

My interest in mining started in October 1971 when I first read Odyssey of a Desert Prospector by Herman W. Albert, and that same month published my first article in The California Mining Journal (now ICMJ). I lived only several miles away from Keene Engineering and hung out there and bought my first Estwing rock hammer from them. Later, they helped sell my book on mining history, Desert Fever. My first visit to a real live mining camp untouched by time was to the depression era Stanley Miller mine in the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California. 

I have always been fascinated by the life cycle of innovation as exemplified by mining. Mining starts with discovery, daring, deals and dividends then oft times decline and inevitably disruption—and then the cycle repeats itself. 

I got into photography when myfather gave me his Minolta SRT-101 when he upgraded to Nikon and I haven’t stopped taking pictures since. I have shot in Super8, 110, 120, and 35mm formats. I inherited his collection of Nikon lenses and use a Canon DSLR and my iPhone to take photographs and shoot video. 

My legal experience includes having prosecuted tax protestors, prostitutes, and shoplifters. I have defended parents and businessmen against government and competitors. But the highest satisfaction comes from defending the small miner against government excess and overreach. 

My most interesting travel experience is having flown a sailplane over the Swiss Alps. Well, along the foothills of the Swiss Alps. I soloed at age 16. I have hiked and/or visited 23 countries and logged over 150,000 miles of travel. And I cook a mean Mu-Shu and Kung Pao.

With regard to the conflicts between mining claimants and the FS/BLM, I have seen the steady inexorable erosion of American exceptionalism through government regulation. I started prospecting and became a small miner when there were no requirements to file with the BLM or Forest Service. A simple filing with the county was all that was required. Back then, you could patent a claim after working it for five years, and it became yours. Private property. 

Today we have too many bureaucrats that believe we in the small mining community are trespassers into their private wilderness preserves and they take it upon themselves to make it nearly impossible to prospect and mine a claim. Wilderness is an oxymoron, usually run and administered by morons. Too many bureaucrats want to erase roads and history and then declare parcels of land to be wild again. This destroys mining’s rich historical legacy and perpetuates a falsehood on the American people—that mining is somehow evil, unproductive, and harmful to society.

In order to preserve your rights under the 1872 Mining Laws, we need to know them and make sure our elected leaders respect and understand the importance of these laws and our right to prospect and mine. I was fighting for keeping the 1872 Mining laws intact at their 100th anniversary—I hope to see them still intact at their 150th anniversary on May 10, 2022.

The best way to deal with the BLM and USFS is from a position of knowledge and resolve. We can start out and assume that there are still reasonable agent and agencies out there, but if you find some that are not, be prepared to stand and argue your position in a court of law. 

The 1872 Mining laws are an enduring legacy of laws that have passed the tests of time and in fact are the only workable set of regulations that can even work in the next frontier—the mining of space. Only in America are the laws in place that state that minerals belong to those who find them, not the king, not the crown, but entrepreneurs who take risks and bring mineral values to the surface in order to enrich themselves and their fellow man. I hope to see the 1872 Mining laws serving us for another 150 years. The laws are not outdated just as the Constitution is not outdated. Their understanding and protection has been my life’s passion and my privilege to study.