Photo by: Reuters
The owners of this US gold mine in Oregon are seen in a land-use dispute with the federal government, during which armed former and current law enforcement Oath Keepers personnel patrolled this surface area of Sugar Pine Mine, near Medford. Tensions ran high after the Bureau of Land Management served a federal stop-work order on the mine owners, who resisted, arguing that they had exclusive surface rights and were not obliged to follow federal regulations. However, the bureau countered that the surface rights had been ceded to it in 1961, which had protesters congregating in its parking lot to drive home their point that the miners had legal control over all the resources within the concession area, which they claimed had been continuously mined since the 1800s.