On July 26, 1866, the first effective American mining legislation was passed by Congress. Known as the “Chaffee laws,” the legislation basically made what the miners were already doing legal. At first the laws covered the legalization of mining lode, or hardrock, on public lands. The laws were then expanded in 1870 to include the legalization of placer mining, or the mining of sand or gravel for gold. With the original laws, miners could make claims if they had discovered and intended to extract gold, silver, cinnabar or copper.
In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the General Mining Act into law. The new act was more or less a more organized revision of the mining laws of 1866 and 1870, however, there were a few major changes in the 1872 act. Miners were now granted extralateral rights to lode claims which meant that if a miner had discovered a surface outcrop of a vein on his claim, he had the right to follow it and mine it wherever it led him, even under someone else’s claim. The new act fixed the maximum size of a claim to be 1500 feet long and 600 feet wide. One of the more significant changes was the addition of “or other valuable deposits” to the list of materials that could be discovered and claimed, effectively expanding the scope of the law.
While most people know of the Homestead Act of 1862, which brought much attention to the desolate west and an onslaught of settlers, not many people know about the General Mining Act of 1872, although they were both intended to promote the settlement of the west.
Today, private miners and mining companies are able to obtain federal land for next to nothing. Modern mining techniques have also left huge craters in the western landscape, some of them large enough to see from space.
There is an interesting video from National Geographic on YouTube about the General Mining Act of 1872 and its effects on the modern west. I posted the video in an earlier post which you can find here.
Alex, thanks for visiting/joining my neighborhood at Blog Catalog…I look forward to reading your blog sme more and well, doing more re Blog Catalog too. I haven’t done much with it since I joined.
I am an ABD (All But Dissertation, as I am sure you know) from U of Toronto, writer/researcher, genealogist/unpublished mystery novelist, specializing in NYC history. I look forward to learning more about the American West here, don’t know much beyond the basics really. My ancestors all tended to stay put on the East Coast. Anyway, thanks again and I’ll be back!
Thanks for stopping by! I haven’t read through all of your blog yet, but I am working on it. So far it’s really interesting.