War Eagle is a complicated story. From what I have been
told of the Mountain from my contacts here in Idaho, the
claims are owned by hundreds of little private family
holders. It's also an underground operation, with dozens of
little mines being run with low volume. There's lots of Gold
on War Eagle, but there is no efficiency, and lots of little
feifdoms. It's a mess. No-one has ever been able to
consolidate the land holdings. Some of the land holdings
have been in family hands for over 100 years. Royalty holdings
are the same way, fractured and held by hundreds of people,
each receiving little payments.
Kinross is mostly an open-pit operator. DeLamar and Florida
Mountains are open-pit.
However, with that said, something is going on around the
Mountain. Drilling rigs showed up a couple of weeks ago.
These are obviously not being hired by mom and pop; and this
is what caught the attention of my contacts and why I asked
to moderate this board last week. Something is up.
What DCUT is up to, I don't know. What they have paid for
the royalties so far, I don't know. No-one will talk to me
on management's side. Could be that royalty holders are
converting to share ownership. A publicly traded vehicle
would value the royalties at a higher multiple than the
royalty holders could get in a private deal, each by
themselves, should a suitor show up.
Maybe they have been buying them on Kinross's behalf for the
last year, so that the price didn't spike. Maybe they already
own them, and the LOI news release is just a formality that
ends a process already done. The LOI news release, and the
rigs showing up on the mountain around the same time, point
to someone knowing something before the fact. Once the rigs
showed up, the jig was up, and the eyes were opened.
We will know soon enough, I guess. However, one thing is
for sure. My mining friends in Idaho are talking about it.
Of course, that doesn't mean anything, but it is interesting.
