Summary
(Before night's end at Goldie's, one man grabbed another by the throat and pinned his head to the edge of the stool I'd been sitting on.) Nevadans' stubborn attachment to the old ways is also evident in a relaxed attitude toward the environmental costs of an industry that, according to the EPA, releases more toxic waste than any other. The Silver State owes its holdout status in part to Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who went from a hardscrabble childhood in a gold town to becoming one of the mining industry's most reliable allies in Congress. [...] the next gold rush, Searchlight struggles to reinvent itself.
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Extract
Gold Member
IN THE BACK OF GOLDIE's, a dive bar in Elko, Nevada, I was talking rocks with a miner with a steadily growing heap of beer bottles in front of him. He was about 50, with a sun-scorched face and a starched cowboy shirt, and refused to give his name. "With a high school degree you can make $70,000 a year here," he boasted, though he fretted that President Barack Obama "will probably screw us with taxes." He was a supervisor for Barrick Gold, a Canadian mining conglomerate with several big operations near Elko, including Betze-Post, a four-square-mile open pit that's the nation's most productive gold mine. Lighting a Camel and flagging a bartender, he ordered a shot of Jägermeister and another for the curvaceous stripper in his arms. "He's got money-and a good heart," she told me, before leaning in to nibble the miner's ear.
Elko is the wind-blasted heart of Nevada's mining country. The five surrounding counties produce all of the state's copper, almost a third of its silver, and nearly 90 percent of its gold. In 2007, mines in Nevada extracted nearly 190 tons of gold-three times the total yield in all other states. Only China, Australia, and South Africa dig up more. A billboard on the edge of town proclaims in a Victorian scrawl, "Discover the new economic gold ru...See the full content of this document
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