'A wounded mountain spewing poison'

LODGE POLE, Mont. -- Gus Helgeson stands atop Spirit Mountain and scans the gashes, pits and piles of rock that once was his tribe's most sacred land.

The strong man weeps.


	Joseph Azure, a member of the Gros Ventre tribe, holds a chunk of moss that he says was killed by pollution from mine runoff. He is standing at the junction of the healthy North Fork of People's Creek and the polluted South Fork. Gilbert W. Arias / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

More than 115 years ago, his ancestors were forced to give up the ground where he stands -- 40,000 acres of the most hallowed land of their reservation. In return, the government promised to feed, clothe and care for them. Federal Indian agents said nothing about the gold they knew was buried in the mountain, but they made it clear the tribes could either agree or starve.

The coveted land, called the Little Rockies, is an island in the flat prairie. It is cherished by American Indians who long ago made it the burial ground of spiritual leaders and a place for sun dances. It was the best place to find deer, bighorn sheep, herbs and natural medicines. It was also the most dependable source of pure water for the reservation.

All of that is gone.

"The first time the mining company let me up here, let me see what they had done to our land, the pain surrounded me. It was like watching our ancestors die, raped of their honor," said Helgeson, the president of Island Mountain Protectors, a tribal environmental and cultural organization.

"They destroyed this place, took their gold off in armored trucks and left us a wounded mountain spewing poison on the people the mountain was stolen from."

Gold discovered in 1884

When the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine were forced onto the area that would become the Fort Belknap Reservation in 1855, the government assumed that the bitter enemies would kill each other off, eliminating a problem for the Indian agency. But they were still on the land in 1884, when a vicious winter killed much of their livestock. That same year, gold was found on the eastern slopes of the Little Rockies.

Among the army of prospectors and miners looking to strike it big was Peter Zortman, whose Alabama Mine would become the richest of the lot. The fact that he and others were digging on land they did not own wasn't considered important.


	Heavy equipment moves soil in the pit at the Zortman mine near the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation. Over 20 years, Pegasus tore more than 200 million tons of waste ore and rock from the mountain. Paul Kitagaki Jr. / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

A year later, Gen. George Bird Grinnell arrived at the reservation with an ultimatum for the tribes: Sell the mountains or die. The sale price would be $9 an acre, paid for with cattle, hogs and assorted services of the Indian agency. Houga Dju Shi Na, known as Little Chief, put his X on Grinnell's document. On Oct. 9, 1895, the 54th Congress made it law.

Attached to the treaty was a provision that the land could be bought at $10 an acre under the auspices of the General Mining Law of 1872. Miners already burrowing into Spirit Mountain were allowed 90 days to file claims.

Within a year, Spirit Mountain was honeycombed with tunnels and shafts. The biggest mining camp became Zortman, home of six saloons, three general stores, two hotels, a brothel, a church and a newspaper. Today, it is a ghost town.

In 1893, Powell "Pike" Landusky and a partner were prospecting along a ridge on the west side of the Little Rockies when they found a vein of rich ore 13 feet wide. Landusky didn't live long enough to enjoy it. Less than two years later, he was shot and killed by the infamous outlaw Kid Curry in a barroom argument. The town near his mine still bears his name.

Over the decades, scores of shafts were driven into the Little Rockies, and an estimated $1 billion in gold and silver was taken out of the ground -- more than $300 million by the last owner of the mine, Pegasus Gold Corp. of Canada. None of the bonanza went to the tribes or to the U.S. government.

Shaft mining ended in the 1950s with the closure of the Little Ben Mine. There wasn't much gold left, so the miners brought cyanide to Spirit Mountain, adding the poison to vats filled with crushed ore to tease out the small yellow flakes.

As records of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality put it: "The cyanide just got away from them." And for the first time, the pristine water of Spirit Mountain was tainted with cyanide.

Heap-leach mining

Large�scale mining returned to Spirit Mountain in 1979, when Pegasus bought the Zortman and Landusky mines, which offered the lowest�grade ore in the industry -- just 1 ounce of gold in 100 tons of rock.

The only way to make the mines pay was to rip off the tops off the sacred mountains and bring in still more cyanide. But where the Little Ben had small vats, Pegasus dug pits the size of football fields and lined them with plastic or clay. Crushed ore was dumped in mounds as high as 15 feet and soaked with a mist of cyanide. It was the largest cyanide heap�leach operation in the world, but it still wasn't working out well.

Pegasus and operations like it could show a profit only if gold was selling at $400 per ounce, and the price bounced around that level throughout the 1980s and '90s, making the mine financially marginal at best.

The company called it quits when gold fell below $300 an ounce. In January 1998, Pegasus filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Over 20 years, Pegasus had torn more than 200 million tons of waste ore and rock from the mountain -- rock that became wet and generated a weak sulfuric acid that, in turn, leached out heavy metals such as lead, arsenic and cadmium. The cyanide�contaminated piles of spent ore worsened the problem.

The heavily contaminated water trickles and flows through fissures in the mountain, into the surface streams and underground aquifers that supply drinking water for 1,000 people who live in and around Lodge Pole and Hays, reservation towns north of the mountains.

The impact from years of mining is obvious. John Allen, a tribal spiritual leader, stands at the base of the mountains, at a fork of two small creeks. The one on his left is fed from a spring. The water is clear. Tiny fish, frogs and water bugs abound. The mossy vegetation is vivid green and healthy.

The other stream comes off the mountain. It is cloudy and absent of life. The rotten�egg smell of sulfide is strong.

"This is death," Allen said, scooping up a handful of the putrid muck. "The mines take millions in gold from our land and leave us poisoned water. The miners and the government experts have argued for years about whether the water is bad. All they have to do is look, but they choose not to see."

Allen, the 46�year�old cultural instructor for the tribe, now worries about the health of those living in the southern portion of the reservation. His family is proof that something is wrong, he said. He and three siblings have thyroid problems. His father has lymphatic cancer.

"The Indian Health Service says nothing is wrong, but the experts we have brought in, doctors who specialize in environmental medicine, say the diseases we have are from the water we drank and washed in as children," Allen said.

Pegasus agreed to pay for a health study that was started in 1996 by environmental medicine specialists from New York, but it languishes, unfinished, after the bankruptcy.

"There are health problems among some tribal members, but our work was halted before we could make the association between the illness and the mine waste," said Angela DeVito of the Long Island Occupational and Environmental Health Center.

David Chambers, an environmental scientist for the Center for Public Participation, has since the mid�1990s been analyzing the pinkish mine dust and the tainted streams, studying the contamination and proposing remedies. He shares the tribe's frustration at the slowness of accomplishing a meaningful cleanup, but says it is to be expected.

"Any time you get involved in natural resources controversies, whatever you do affects a lot of different interests and everyone has an opinion that must be considered," Chambers said.

Most of the heavy metals and cyanide problems have been stopped or at least slowed, he said, but King Creek, which flows onto Indian land, is still contaminated with nitrates and selenium. The nitrates, which can cause health problems, come from decades of using ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel as explosives.

An unusual number of stillbirths and other health problems prompted the Island Mountain Protectors; an Indian environmental group called Red Thunder; the Indian Law Resource Center; and the Montana Environmental Information Center to bring various lawsuits aimed at protecting the tribe and its water.

The first suit was filed against Pegasus in 1994, claiming violation of the federal Clean Water Act. It resulted in a $37 million settlement -- the largest in Montana history -- and an order that mine operators instantly address the contamination of water flowing onto the reservation.

In January 1997, the tribe filed another suit, against the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, seeking to stop Pegasus from tripling the size of the pits, to more than 1,200 acres.

But Wayne Jepson, who manages the Zortman cleanup for the state agency, said the department had no choice in granting Pegasus' request. He said the "agreements reached in settling the 1994 suit, in effect, gave Pegasus a clean bill of health. There was no legal reason that would prevent us from issuing the permit for expansion."

Now the effort to clean up the mine is a merry�go�round, with the Department of Environmental Quality, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Interior Department all going in circles.

Pegasus illustrates the danger of allowing mines to operate with inadequate cleanup bonds, said Chambers, the environmental scientist.

State officials say Pegasus provided $43.5 million for cleanup -- far short of the $76.5 million the state and the tribes agree must be spent, and much less than the $100 million or more the tribes initially said was needed. The tribes point to state constitutional requirements that all land disturbed by the taking of natural resources be reclaimed.

The tribes want restoration, while the law calls for reclamation. There is a major difference. There is no way to restore the Little Rockies to their original condition, said the Department of Environmental Quality's Jepson.

And while critics say the Indians want the land back so they can mine a new mother lode, the tribes say otherwise. They note that in the early 1990s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs gave them $180,000 to drill core samples on the reservation. Gold was found at six locations, said Helgeson, president of Island Mountain Protectors, and at a much higher grade than what Pegasus was mining.

"Most of the tribe wanted nothing to do with mining our land. It was voted down," Helgeson said. "Most of us thought it was silly -- Indians destroying the land they love after we've already seen the harm that mining does."

P-I senior national correspondent Andrew Schneider can be reached at andrewschneider@seattlepi.com or 206�448�8218.