Westerns from the 1950s address some of the same environmental issues discussed in contemporary films like Crude. Broken Lance (1954) , for example, highlights the negative consequences of copper mining and smelting, especially the cattle killed by a copper mine’s dumping practices. The film is an obvious example where the conflict that leads to the destruction of the Devereauxs, a ranching family in the film, involves a copper mining company and its smelter runoff. Once they discovers that thirty to forty of their cattle have been killed by a poisoned stream that smells and tastes like copper being dumped by the nearby mining company, the Devereauxs, led by Matt the patriarch, (Spencer Tracy), confront the mine and its manager. The mining company stands out against a green tree-filled mountain with its smokestacks and water-filled chutes spoiling the beauty of the land. The Devereaux patriarch exclaims, “the stuff you’re pourin’ in the stream poisoned” the cattle. And he threatens to close the mine if they do not clean up the stream.
But the mine and its workers refuse to comply. Instead, the manager calls Matt Devereaux “a loudmouth farmer with a squaw for a wife and a halfbreed son,” while his men confront the family. The Devereauxs retaliate, shooting at the miners’ feet so that the Devereaux family members can escape with their horses. Matt, Joe (Robert Wagner), Ben (Richard Widmark), Mike (Hugh O’Brian) and Danny (Earl Holliman) Devereaux and their ranch hands destroy the mine, burning it down in what looks like an act of eco-terrorism. Matt Devereaux trusts the courts to support them, but just as in q1907 case Jared Diamond cites, the Devereauxs lose, and the youngest son, Joe, who is half Native American, goes to jail to save his father. Here the poisoned stream acts as both plot device—providing a reason for Joe’s jail time and the father’s death—and as integral environmental message that condemns the mining company for its hazardous waste practices.
Although the conflict between ranchers and miners ends with Joe’s sentencing, the presence of toxic waste from copper smelting in the film serves as a catalyst for a string of personal battles that lead to a paradigm shift in which racial boundaries become more blurred. Joe overcomes racial biases and marries the governor’s daughter. He also kills his racist brother, Ben, in self defense and pays homage to his mother, a Native American princess. These changes in worldview become possible only because Matt Devereaux confronts a copper smelting company for killing his cattle with its runoff. Toxic waste from copper smelters in nineteenth-century Arizona and the rest of the Southwest and Northwest, then, rests on a history of mining waste runoff destroying water sources both by poisoning them and clogging them with sediment.
Mining in the West also rests on an American cultural history that legitimates a pioneer spirit meant to “tame” a wild West by not only ranching and farming, but also mining. Just as there were homestead acts that provided free land for ranchers and farmers, there was also “The General Mining Law of 1872,” which stated:
"All valuable mineral deposits in lands belonging to the United States, both surveyed and unsurveyed, are hereby declared to be free and open to exploration and purchase, and the lands in which they are found to occupation and purchase, by citizens of the United States and those who have declared their intention to become such."
This law applied to all white men but not to Native Americans or married women.
According to Robert McClure and Andrew Schneider in their “The General Mining Act of 1872 Has Left a Legacy of Riches and Ruins” published in the June 11, 2001, edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “public lands the size of Connecticut have been made private under the terms of the 1872 law.” Although the law has its roots in an 1848 push by Colonel Mason to obtain, as Mason put it, “rents for … land, and immediate steps should be made to collect them, for the longer it is delayed the more difficult it will become” (quoted in McClure and Schneider), the mining law evolved into “an incentive to those [miners] willing to push West and settle the frontier” (McClure and Schneider), an incentive that has had dire effects on the environment.
Opening lands for mining meant increased deforestation and erosion of topsoil. It also resulted in the toxic runoff discussed in Broken Lance, since copper ore (like any other ore) is leached “by misting cyanide over a barrel or large vat filled with crushed ore” (McClure and Schneider). According to McClure and Schneider, “The ore is often high in sulfides, and water passing through the rock and soil creates sulfuric acid, which in turn leaches poisonous heavy metals into runoff water, with iron in the rock turning streams an orange-red.” McClure and Schneider’s news report traces decades of environmental problems from 1872 to 2001, when the article was published. The 1872 law remains on the books and still allows private companies to open public lands for mining, and repercussions of cyanide use still have an impact on Western environments. Today the largest liquid waste pit in the United States in Butte, Montana, has become a tourist attraction.
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