All the claims on the 1.2 million acres appear to have been filed by small-scale miners in Utah with an interest in uranium.
Page F7From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 28 September 2026
Bears Ears opened to business; the business turns out to be Utah prospectors staking uranium claims
As it ran on the front
You are waiting for the foreign buyer, with a logo worth being furious at. There is none. Every claim staked on the 1.2 million acres opened at Bears Ears appears to have been filed — appears, the wire is careful — by small-scale miners in Utah with an interest in uranium. Neighbours. Shovels and filing fees.
And what did they owe the public for the uranium underneath? The question does not arise. The 1872 law holds that valuable mineral deposits are free and open; whoever locates a claim on locatable ground keeps what comes out of it. Free and open ... and the terms have not moved since 1872.…
…(cont) On July 13, 2026, the Administration announced 2.93 million acres cut from Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears, the latter left at approximately 121,000 acres, under "common sense land use."
Nothing was got around. The statute was read, and obeyed.
Your royalty on the uranium is zero.
All winter the gate stood open. A man walks his cattle through it.
“They open a million-plus acres and then point at the guys who showed up with shovels, like that settles it — small operators, salt of the earth, nothing to see. The con is the 1872 law sitting underneath it: the ground you own gets staked first-come, and the public's cut of the uranium is nothing. Somebody's kid's school is short a teacher while a mineral deposit walks off a federal map for free.”
“These are mom-and-pop miners in Utah, not some multinational — did I say mom-and-pop? Family operations, American families, that doesn't sound like something I'd need to defend. And the law is from 1872, which makes it settled law, which is the thing you people are always telling me to respect.”
The receipts
· Trump’s Land Grab is the Latest Chapter of Indigenous Cultural Genocide from the morgue, 23 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.