AMERICANMADE
A 154-year-old law still lets Americans claim free gold
Dear Friend,
In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a law called the General Mining Act.
Its purpose was simple: encourage Americans to settle the West by letting them stake claims on federal land and keep the minerals they found.
Gold. Silver. Copper. Every ounce.
No split with the government. No hidden royalties.
154 years later, that law is still on the books.
Congress has tried to kill it. Environmental groups have pushed for repeal. Regulators have tried to restrict it.
Every attempt has failed.
The law remains fully in force today.
And with gold hitting record highs — up 161% in recent years — while central banks around the world quietly hoard every ounce they can get…
This forgotten statute may be more valuable now than at any point in American history.
But here’s the thing — you don’t need a pickaxe or a 4x4 to profit from it.
Dylan Jovine found a much simpler way.
See how to profit from America’s oldest gold loophole >>
In 1916, the founder of the Great Northern Railroad asked a small woolen mill in Oregon to make a blanket for Glacier National Park. The Bishop family — who had been weaving wool in the Pacific Northwest since 1863 — created a striped design based on frontier trading blankets. Traders used to hold up fingers to show the weight: three stripes meant three pounds.
That Glacier Park blanket is still in production. A hundred ten years later, the National Park collection covers dozens of parks from Acadia to Zion. Each design uses colors drawn from the park it represents. Every one is still woven in the same Pacific Northwest mills.
A National Park blanket costs about $270. Here’s where that money goes.
Estimated breakdown based on textile manufacturing benchmarks. Pendleton is private and does not publish per-unit cost data.
Start with the wool. Pendleton buys virgin wool largely from American ranchers. The company has relationships with growers that stretch back generations. The raw wool is cleaned, carded, and prepared for spinning. That takes about $55 — 20% of the blanket’s retail price.
Spinning, dyeing, and weaving take the biggest share at $65 — 24%. This happens entirely in-house. Pendleton spins its own yarn and mixes its own dye formulas in a dedicated dye house. The fabric is woven on looms that run three shifts a day. The Washougal mill alone is 300,000 square feet with over 180 workers.
Finishing and factory overhead take $45 — 17%. The woven fabric is napped — combed for a softer, thicker feel. Then it’s cut, hemmed, labeled with the park name and image, and inspected. Both mills are STeP by OEKO-TEX certified for sustainable and socially responsible manufacturing.
Marketing and brand take $30 — 11%. A portion of proceeds from every National Park blanket goes to the National Park Foundation. Distribution and retail take $50 — 19%. Pendleton profit is roughly $25 — about 9%. That stays with the Bishop family.
America once had over 1,000 woolen mills. Now there are four. Pendleton owns two of them. The Pendleton, Oregon mill has been weaving since 1909. The Washougal, Washington mill since 1912. A steam whistle still sounds four times a day at the Washougal plant — just as it has for over a century.
An important note: Pendleton’s blankets are made in the USA. Much of the company’s clothing line is now imported. The mills focus on what they do best — weaving wool — while apparel production has shifted overseas. This is common across American textile brands and worth knowing when you shop.
Pendleton is private, so you can’t buy shares. But the economics tell a story that echoes across every issue of this newsletter. An American wool blanket costs $270. An imported equivalent costs $80. The difference pays for American ranchers, American mills, American workers, and a family that chose to keep weaving here when 996 other mills did not.
This is the textile version of every story we’ve told. The tariff wall protects steel. The Jones Act protects shipping. But nothing protects wool weaving except customer choice. Pendleton survives because people pay three times more for a blanket made on an American loom from American wool.
The Glacier Park blanket has been in production for 110 years. The stripes still mean the same thing they meant at the frontier trading post. And the wool is still woven in the same corner of the Pacific Northwest where the Bishop family set up their first loom. Some things survive because they’re protected by law. Some survive because they’re too good to let go.