Abstract
Acquisition of mining claims on federal land is a right granted by the Mineral Location Law of 1872, also known as the “1872 Mining Law” and the “Hard Rock Mining Law” (17 Stat. 91). This law, passed by Congress on May 10, 1872, continued a policy of opening mineral lands to exploration, and the acquisition of mining rights on federally owned land is, for the most part, still governed by this law. The principal exceptions are a series of leasing acts that have made certain nonmetalliferous minerals and all land on the Outer Continental Shelf exclusively leasable and not open to acquisition by claim staking, and the Materials Disposal Act of 1947 (61 Stat. 681) as amended by the Surface Resources Act of 1955 (69 Stat. 367), which defined and withdrew a group of salable minerals, or “common varieties,” from mineral entry. There are, of course, numerous additional federal statutes relating to mining on federal lands, and state laws are permitted to elaborate on some aspects of mining law where the federal laws are silent.
“Laws and institutions are constantly tending to gravitate. Like clocks, they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up, and set to true time.”
Henry Ward Beecher
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© 1983 Plenum Press, New York
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Tank, R.W. (1983). Federal Mining Laws. In: Legal Aspects of Geology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4376-9_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-4376-9_13
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