Miner Dave vs USFS

Miner Dave is once again being forced off his claims and into possible homelessness.

Miner Dave

170 Years ago Oregon was carved out of the wilderness by rugged individuals who were willing to work hard for little to no pay in search of gold, fame and fortune. 

Forgetting the very pioneering spirit that built the great state: the Forest Service and local county have criminalized the very type of person who built it. 

Preferring those living on food stamps than those who would be self-sufficient: the deep state has declared war on a lone prospector: David Everist, or simply: "Miner Dave".

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 Kerby Jackson of the Galice Mining District sent the following letter to assist Miner Dave in retaining the right to live and work on his mining claim.

To the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors, I would like to offer you a bit of insight into the e-mails that you have been receiving from David Everist, which I am sure, by time you receive this, will probably number into the many dozens. For your own information, Dave lives at Irongate Lake Estates on some bare land which he is the exclusive owner of. Prior to obtaining this property with what was basically his life savings, he lived on a mining claim here in Josephine County where he was involved in several high profile legal disputes with the United States Forest Service for occupying his claim without their permission. On one of these occasions, the dispute reached such a point that he was arrested by USFS and served 30 days in the Jackson County jail. According to documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, the federal government spent in excess of eleven million dollars prosecuting him over his mining claim occupancy cases. He is well known in the mining community due to having stood his ground against the USFS over his mining rights and he was actually the first miner in this country to ever to be incarcerated just for living on his mining claim. Due to his notoriety, he has been interviewed on the subject by local, regional and national media, as well as been a guest on talk radio about mining and property rights issues. He is commonly known by people interested in these subjects all around the country simply as "Miner Dave". A few years ago, Dave was in the midst of possibly entering another dispute with USFS, which he was willing to do, but at the prompting of relatives, chose instead to sell and leave his claim instead of risking serving another jail sentence over it. It also took a lot of arm twisting on my part to get USFS off his back and to give him time to move off the claim and sell it with the promise that they wouldn't pursue him a third time. Dave was tired of them and they were tired of dealing with him as well, so it worked out. Dave had a little money from a pension from his early years working for Pacific Power and used it to buy two lots at Irongate, as well as for a used RV and support infrastructure (solar power, generator, etc) for the RV. For the most part, his last few years in Siskiyou County have been peaceful ones that have dramatically improved his living situation and his lifestyle. When he lived on his mining claim, following his run in with USFS, he lived in very rough conditions with no power, no heat, etc. in a very remote area, and often didn't even have food. Often, he was reliant on the charity of others for his basic survival. His health suffered to such an extent that he developed kidney problems serious enough to have spent some time in the care of the hospital and for awhile, some people who he was close to wondered if he would atually survive the ordeal. Through the first year at Irongate he was also often very reliant on the help of others for food, water and other basics (and USFS of all people had to rescue him during the Klamathon Fire evacuations) , but over the last year his situation has improved considerably. After almost a year's effort, some of Dave's medical conditions have now been semi-diagnosed and he is now receiving disability benefits from Social Security, was able to purchase a vehicle and auto insurance again, keep up on his property taxes and begin to lead some sort of semblence of a normal lifestyle again with enough security to start to look forward to the future again. This is something he has not been able to do in nearly 20 years due to his medical conditions which include Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, ADHD and what is believed by many to be a form of Aspberger's Syndrome, which is a high functioning variety of autism. He's happy in Siskiyou County and appreciates his privacy since being around too many people causes him much stress which then does much to aggravate his conditions. Eventually, he hopes to build a house on his property and plant an orchard, as well as to eventually do some mining again. Unfortunately, recently, Dave received a warning notice from one of your Code Enforcement Officers that he is to vacate his property due to the fact that he is living in an RV without proper sanitation and relies on bottled water for his needs. From what Dave was told, he at minimum, needs a porta-potty on his property to live there. Though Dave is very willing to comply with this reasonable request and can now afford to do this to improve his living situation, there is however, an impediment stopping him from accomplishing this. This is the fact that the companies providing such portable toilet services will not deliver and maintain such a service without a physical street address. Further to the above, it appears that Dave cannot get a physical street address for his property without first obtaining a building permit through your Building Department. Though Dave would like to eventually build a small house, in addition to being unable to currently afford to build a house or to hire a licensed engineer to draft an acceptable plan for the house he can't afford to build, his medical conditions are such that he is not in a position to deal with the administrative impediments that your county department is putting in his way to obtain a street address. To further worsen this situation, Dave literally has nowhere to go and will become a transient and a burden on society if your county forces him off of his property by physical or judicial enforcement action. It was apparently suggested to him by your CSO that he could go live on Public Land and camp on his own property periodically. In the first place, Dave's view (and I agree and know many attorneys who would agree) that Siskiyou County is not a land management agency over the private property inside the county's boundaries, but may only engage in reasonable regulation pertaining to its occupancy. With that in mind, I do not forsee Dave abandoning his property at an administrative say-so of one employee, especially since he had multiple clashes with USFS over similar issues where considerably lesser property rights were involved. To go further, the suggestion of your CSO that he go "live on Public Lands" is not only encouraging someone to do something unlawful to comply with his own order, but in fact, due to his past conflicts with USFS, Dave is actually under a judicial order by the Federal Court in Medford to not engage in occupation of Public Lands (even temporarily) without an approved Mining Plan of Operation from USFS or BLM. Needless to say, if your county CSO proceeds upon the road that he is currently traveling, the end result is that a disabled man with a serious health condition that has struggled to improve a bad lot in life and made much headway in the last year or so, is going to be made a transient just because he cannot obtain a physical street address for a piece of poperty that he owns outright and has always paid taxes upon. Over these past weeks, Dave has been in contact with your Building Department to try to solve this issue, but I believe that due to his condition, your staff there are unable to understand his requests for assistance. With that in mind, I would like to humbly request the inteverntion of your County Board to try to assist in this matter in such a way that Dave can obtain a physical street address for his property so that he may comply with your county's sanitation requirements and have a portable chemical toilet delivered to his property and maintained by its provider. I am certain that somewhere inside your county administration there is some mechanism that can help to solve this issue. I should also add that if some special permitting process is needed, even though Dave receives only very meager benefits from Social Security Disability each month, it may be possible for me to assist him financially or to help him obtain financial assistance from others in the mining community. As well, as I have my own personal plans to relocate from Josephine County to the vicinity of Montague in the short term future to better pursue my mining and agricultural interests, some of which are already established there to a small degree, I am going to be in a much better position to insure that Dave's living conditions on his property can be greatly improved over the next few years. With Regards, Kerby Jackson Recorder - Galice Mining District