Army tests ravaged family's land

Siblings Louise, Douglas and Allan Cannon inherited a gold mine. But they say the Army is giving them the shaft, figuratively, as some of its old, dark secrets have turned their dream of rich income into a nightmare.

They found belatedly that the Army's nearby Dugway Proving Ground attacked the old family mines with 3,000 rounds of chemical arms at the end of World War II. The purpose was to simulate what the Army would face against Japanese bunkers and caves.

The Army also bombed the surface of 1,425 acres of Cannon family-owned land above the mines with more than 23 tons of chemical arms, including deadly mustard agent, hydrogen cyanide and the choking agent Phosgene, plus high explosives and incendiary arms that included napalm, butane and gasoline (from flame throwers).

"They bombed the heck out of it and contaminated our lands — and the surrounding (public) lands. And they won't clean it up," Louise says.

She worries that a new Army proposal to expand Proving Ground boundaries is an attempt "to try to surround us and landlock us," making it impossible to access and work the mines, eliminating the need to clean up the Cannons' land or lowering the value if the government were to take it under eminent domain provisions.

Also, it turns out that the Cannons had been quietly discussing the possibility of a repository for nuclear waste on their contaminated lands if a similar plan for the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation fails. The Dugway expansion also could block their proposal for a waste site.

It all prolongs years of frustration, lawsuits, threats and counterthreats among the Cannons, the Army and the state of Utah and related but unheeded pleas to Congress for help.

Family inheritance

The siblings' grandfather, Jesse Cannon, "patented," or bought, the land from the government in the 1920s (and his father had started working the land years earlier). Miners have sought gold, silver, lead and copper on those claims in the Dugway mountains. The inheritors say that when Jesse died in 1954, he did not pass along any knowledge of Army contamination there to their father, Floyd.

Floyd made his children partial owners of the mine areas in 1957. They became full owners when he died in 1980. Douglas, one of the siblings, said neither his father nor grandfather ever mentioned to him any knowledge about heavy bombardment of the area.

Louise said her father "did find some (chemical arms) canisters in a tunnel. He didn't know what they were. He called the Proving Ground to see if they had been doing anything in the area, and they said they had not been over there."