Mine, All Mine

Montana's citizen-passed ban on cyanide leach mining may be repealed in a November initiative supported by the group Miners, Merchants and Montanans for Jobs and Economic Opportunity. The group receives almost all of its funding from Colorado's Canyon Resources Corp. - which may explain a "little-known part" of the initiative "that would restore mining rights that any company or person had when the cyanide method was banned in 1998." Initiative opponents, concerned at the environmental effects of cyanide mining, have formed a "Save the Blackfoot" group, whose board consists "largely of southwestern Montana residents, some of them Blackfoot River users."