The Arizona Territory was only 9 years old in 1872, four decades away from becoming a state. Phoenix had started its first school, 20 students making do in a courtroom, and wouldn't be incorporated for another nine years.

Virtually everything has changed in Arizona since then. Except one. The law that governs gold, uranium and other hard-rock mining on our federal lands is still the one that President Ulysses S. Grant signed in 1872.

Written to stimulate development and attract settlers to the West, the law is an enormous freebie. It allows prospectors to file claims on any federal land that hasn't been withdrawn from mining, with the right to extract the materials with no royalty payments.

While the law originally applied to all types of mining, Congress excluded oil, gas, coal and many other materials over the years. Royalties from those operations put many millions of dollars into the U.S. Treasury every year. Yet, companies haul off tons of gold and other "hard rock" from your public land without forking over a penny.

What private landowner would tolerate this deal for a minute?

Last year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to end the giveaway. House Resolution 2262, would charge an 8 percent royalty on new mines and 4 percent on current operations. That's comparable to other materials mined on federal land. Coal, for instance, is charged 8 percent of gross income for underground operations and 12.5 percent for surface mining.

The bill would end the "patent" process system that lets miners buy federal land for a couple of bucks an acre, a provision so outrageous that Congress has kept it on hold for years. The proposal would also add badly needed environmental protections and provide funding for restoring thousands of abandoned mines.

Now, the Senate must move. There are hopeful signs that a bill will be introduced in April. Arizona's Sens. Jon Kyl and John McCain should help update this 136-year-old law that affects so much of their home state.

In the 19th century, no one could imagine that federal land would be valuable for such non-mining uses as recreation, habitat, scenery, archaeology and major watersheds. We don't live in the wide-open Wild West, where Maricopa County's first sheriff won hands down, because a shoot-out between the other two candidates had left one dead and forced the other to withdraw.

The 1872 mining law is long overdue for a change.