NOBODY ASKED HER

By Patrick Dawson/Livingston

"They lived and they died for the dream these mountains gave them, and as in tribute...the wild forget-me-nots blossom every spring." --MARGARET REEB

Margaret Reeb is somewhere in her 80s. In her Livingston, Mont., sitting room stands an ancient upright piano. On a wall hangs a photograph of Reeb and a smiling Eleanor Roosevelt. The topic of her verse--the mountain's beauty, the nobility of the pioneer gold miners who wrested their destinies from it--is a variation on an old frontier theme. Were she merely a wistful ex-schoolteacher, one could dismiss Reeb as a member of a familiar but vanishing species: the Western romantic.

But as things stand, it would be imprudent. Because Reeb, although she did teach school for decades, does not merely admire the forget-me-nots on the sides of Montana's Henderson Mountain; she owns the rights to millions of dollars in gold ore lying somewhere beneath it. Ore that President Clinton vowed publicly would never be mined. But about which he may have spoken too soon. For Margaret Reeb is not simply the eccentric heroine in her own romantic western. A bona-fide scion of the mining heroes she celebrates, she has the financial leverage to throw a shudder into the massive federal machinery she believes would grind up their dream.

It has been nine months since Clinton played federal marshal in the Great Yellowstone Mine Shootout. The dispute began in the late 1980s as new techniques for locating pay dirt suddenly turned old claims on Henderson into a $1 billion lode of extractable ore. The glitch was that the peak is a scant 2.5 miles upstream from Yellowstone National Park. Environmental groups, warning that a megamine would poison the park's ecosystem, threatened massive lawsuits against Crown Butte, the company planning a round-the-clock extraction effort. Then the Administration stepped in, and after months of secret talks, Crown Butte agreed to swap the mine for $65 million worth of government holdings elsewhere. Clinton was able to upstage the first day of the Republican Convention last August by posing in a beautiful alpine meadow flanked by an environmentalist and a mining executive, announcing that "Yellowstone is more precious than gold."

But a key figure was absent from that photo op. Margaret Reeb spent the summers of her girlhood on Henderson's slopes, where her father supervised a mine. Her family has owned claims in the district for over a century. "It was gold seekers who settled the West," she notes crisply. "They built the churches; they built the towns." Her purchase of dozens of nonproducing Henderson claims over 50 years probably struck some as more sentimental than savvy. But now her holdings, on lease to Crown Butte, constitute at least 40% of its goldfield--a portion so large that the pact is specifically contingent on her selling her rights to the company so that they can be part of the exchange.

But Reeb will not play ball. "I knew nothing about" the negotiations, she claims. "And when I finally got a copy of the agreement, I practically went into shock." Had any of the parties approached her, she says, she would have informed them, "Well, I'm not interested in selling my property." In part, the stance is just age-old miner's shrewdness: Don't sell your stake unless it's running out. But her rebuff also reflects a century of skirmishing between Western miners and the feds: "We Montanans feel pretty strongly about our love of the land," she says. "It is not American to be trying to wipe out selective private property."

The head of Crown Butte's new corporate parent has come calling at least twice since August, entreating her cooperation. But Reeb does not seem receptive to his blandishments. David Rovig, a former Crown Butte head who spent years talking her into leasing her claims to the company, doubts she will sell. "At the end of the day," he says, "Margaret doesn't give a damn whether the thing gets mined or not. She wants her property."

That may be all she ends up with. Katie McGinty, the chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, says ominously, "There are other ways for us to arrange this agreement." One might involve Crown Butte's swapping only the land it owns, leaving Reeb's real estate an island in a sea of government property. Although her underground holdings are vast, her actual surface lot may be too small to accommodate a large-scale extraction operation.

Meanwhile, other problems have come up. Since signing the agreement, the Administration has not found any politically acceptable properties for a swap. It may have to try to pry $65 million out of a Republican Congress through deferred agricultural subsidies. By comparison, Margaret Reeb could come to seem a pushover.