Uranium Frenzy: Saga of the Nuclear West

by Raye Ringholz

Overview

Now expanded to include the story of nuclear testing and its consequences, Uranium Frenzy has become the classic account of the uranium rush that gripped the Colorado Plateau region in the 1950s. Instigated by the U.S. government's need for uranium to fuel its growing atomic weapons program, stimulated by Charlie Steen's lucrative Mi Vida strike in 1952, manned by rookie prospectors from all walks of life, and driven to a fever pitch by penny stock promotions, the boom created a colorful era in the Four Corners region and Salt Lake City (where the stock frenzy was centered) but ultimately went bust. The thrill of those exciting times and the good fortune of some of the miners were countered by the darker aspects of uranium and its uses. Miners were not well informed regarding the dangers of radioactive decay products. Neither the government nor anyone else expended much effort educating them or protecting their health and safety. The effects of exposure to radiation in poorly ventilated mines appeared over time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780874214321
Publisher:	Utah State University Press
Publication date:	09/11/2002
Edition description:	1
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	141,797
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

Read an Excerpt

Uranium Frenzy

Saga of the Nuclear West

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By Raye C. Ringholz

Utah State University Press

Copyright © 2002 Raye C. Ringholz
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-432-1

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Chapter One

THE SIREN CALL

Charlie didn't quite know how to tell M. L. There she was, her body all swelled up with a baby due in a couple of weeks. Their cramped rear apartment already teemed with three high-decibel kids under four years of age, crawling all over each other and on the few rickety pieces of furniture. There was barely enough money coming in to stock the fridge. Charlie felt guilty as hell but he knew he had to say that he was heading for the Colorado Plateau in a few days.

M. L. understood. It wasn't unexpected. He had read the article to her, and said it was the only way out. Life with Charlie Steen had never been dull.

It was the winter of 1949. Houston, Texas. Charlie was twenty-eight years old. He was working as a carpenter-adding a bathroom here, remodeling a kitchen there-a job he tolerated out of necessity.

His real love was geology. That was his training. He had a B.A. in geology from the Texas School of Mines and Metallurgy in El Paso. He had started a promising career as a geologist with the Standard Oil Company of Indiana. They even gave him a fifty dollar raise after his first six weeks. He spent two years with them doing field work, locating potential oil deposits. It was in the field that he was at his best.

But the job required paper work, as well. Reports. Analyses. Financial statements. Most of them nonsense as far as Charlie was concerned. Finally, he balked. He refused to submit a report he considered unnecessary. The boss thought otherwise. Charlie shot off his mouth and was fired for "rebellion against authority." To make matters worse, he was blacklisted as a geologist throughout the entire oil industry.

Charlie figured that carpentry was just a stop-gap until he could get back into the field and do a bit of wildcatting for oil on his own. Maybe make a fortune. But it took a lot of cash to work a claim. More than he would ever make pounding nails and it didn't look as if anyone was willing to back him. It seemed hopeless.

Then he picked up that December 1949 copy of the Engineering and Mining Journal and heard the siren call.

"CAN URANIUM MINING PAY?" a headline challenged.

The accompanying story answered the question: "Yes." And it told of a potential uranium boom evolving in the ragged badlands of the Colorado Plateau.

"... risks are being taken and profits are being made," the article said. "This speaks well for the independent producers there because many of them are newcomers to the mining field, having been farmers, ranchers, fruit growers, etc. It should also be a challenge to experienced mining men to come into the area and do as well or better."

Charlie saw the article as a personal invitation. If a bunch of farmers and ranchers could locate ore certainly he, a professional geologist, could succeed. His mind soared like an eagle over the vast, rocky stretches of the Colorado Plateau.

The timing was far from ideal but Charlie wasn't one to waffle over decisions. He knew this was his only chance. Sometimes a man has to take the high dive and hope he hits the teacup of water.

Those who knew him wouldn't have said that Charles Augustus Steen looked like your classic adventurer. Prematurely balding, he was a stick-figure of a man who seemed skinny enough to slither through a keyhole. Thick round glasses veiled eyes like faded denim in a face that carried a wide grin or a black frown, depending on his mood. He liked to wear suntan drill shirts and pants that blended with his hair and complexion in a kind of protective coloration for the sere desert backcountry where he loved to roam.

But you couldn't exactly say that Charlie blended into the background. He had presence. Whether people considered his personal traits strengths or weaknesses, he was noticed. Some thought him bullheaded. Others said he had the courage of his convictions. Some considered him adventuresome. Detractors called him rash. He was labeled impulsive and patient, lucky and methodical. Certainly always in high gear; nothing in moderation. A man of extremes.

It hadn't been easy for Charlie. In his early years in Caddo, Texas, he was caught in a war zone between his mother, Rose, and his father, Charles Augustus Steen, Sr. His father had made and squandered $100,000 wildcatting for oil before he was twenty-two years old. He was thirty when he married Rose. At fifteen, she was too young to realize that he wasn't the most reliable of husbands. They broke up in 1923 when Charlie was four and his baby sister, Maxine, was only six months old.

Then came a succession of new "daddies." Lisle, in 1924; he died in a construction accident. Howell, 1928; Rose divorced him after a few months. Then came Nixon, in 1929. Rose shunted the kids from town to town with each new start. During one term, Charlie attended school in eight different states.

Another divorce brought the fatherless family back to Houston. Charlie started scrambling for 65-cent-an hour jobs to work his way through high school. He sold papers, jerked sodas, clerked groceries and did clean up work in a bookshop. At one time he supervised the mail room of a Federal Reserve Bank. When he enrolled in John Tarleton Agricultural College in Stephenville, Texas, he worked summers as a waterboy and timekeeper for Chicago Bridge and Iron Company, where his first stepfather had been employed. The company, feeling responsibility for Lisle's death, helped finance Charlie's education as partial compensation to the family.

Perhaps it was a long-held dream that decided him on a geology major during his freshman year. The idea of prospecting had always fascinated Charlie. His father had been a prospector. He had made it big, but then he lost it. Charlie figured if he studied hard and got the right kind of experience he could make his own mark in the mining world. But he would do it scientifically. He would keep his winnings. And he concentrated on his studies at Tarleton so hard that, when he met Minnie Lee Holland, a popular, dimpled brunette who preferred to be called "M. L.," he "barely lifted his eyes from his geology book to acknowledge the introduction."

The next year he transferred to the Texas School of Mines and Metallurgy at El Paso to start his major in earnest. By then, he had run into M. L. again and had been more attentive the second time. And thereafter. It was a full-blown romance in 1943 when he received a B.A. in geology.

World War II put the courtship on hold, however. Following his graduation, Charlie discovered that he was ineligible for the draft, classified 4-F due to poor eyesight. Disappointed that he couldn't serve his country, he decided to further his career and signed up as a geologist for a Bolivian tin mine. Since he would be gone, M. L. enlisted in the W.A.V.E.S., the newly-created women's branch of the U.S. Navy.

Following a few months in Bolivia, Charlie moved into the Peruvian Amazon to conduct field reconnaissance for the Socony Vacuum Oil Company. While one of Peru's richest gas fields was discovered and drilled there some twenty years later, Socony's efforts did not bear fruit. The experience, however, strengthened Charlie's resolve to strike pay dirt on his own. He vowed to find his bonanza "if it takes me the rest of my life."

After the war, Charlie returned from South America and M. L. received a medical discharge from the W.A.V.E.S, due to a back injury. They got married and moved to Chicago, where Charlie completed one year of graduate school at the University of Chicago and M. L. got pregnant. It was the beginning of rapid-fire parenthood that would bring them four sons within the first five years of marriage.

When family responsibility put a damper on further education, Charlie got the job with Standard Oil that didn't pan out. "In retrospect I had it coming to me," he later admitted. "It taught me a number of lessons, including that the boss is not always right, but he is always the boss."

Henceforth, resolving to be his own boss, he took up carpentry and formed his own contracting business, intending to pinch pennies until he could strike out again for oil. Instead, he read the article about uranium in the mining journal.

Uranium was suddenly the most critical material the United States had ever known. It fueled atomic weapons. It promised environmentally-clean electrical power, gas-free operation of cars, planes and locomotives, preservation of meat, distillation of sea water. Uncle Sam was desperate for the mineral and willing to pay for it. By law, the federal government was the only buyer.

America needed a domestic supply of uranium to keep a nuclear edge in the cold war that was developing with Russia. To encourage prospectors like Charlie, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) established minimum prices for the ore, guaranteeing the rates for ten years. An additional incentive was a $10,000 bonus for each separate discovery and production of high-grade uranium from new domestic deposits. What's more, a man could stake a uranium claim on public land for a dollar.

Charlie couldn't help himself. One part of him said to stay put in Houston and the other pushed him toward the vast unknown where anything was possible. He asked himself why he would want to leave a steady paycheck and his family for the exhaustion, hunger, thirst, danger and loneliness of prospecting. Deep down he knew the answer. He wanted that red Lincoln car. A house and jewels for M. L. College degrees for his sons.

Once formed, the idea consumed him. He pored over geology books describing the Colorado Plateau and lost himself in the infinity of rock and sand sculpted by the winds and waters of geologic ages. He heard the silences. He burned with the heat. He relished the solitude and being dwarfed by massive arcs and pillars of sandstone.

In the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Report Upon the Colorado River of the West, 1861, J. S. Newberry, the first geologist to visit the region, said of it: "Perhaps no portion of the earth's surface is more irredeemably sterile, none more hopelessly lost to human occupation...."

But to Charlie it was the ultimate challenge. The prehistoric seas and riverine marshes, as extinct as the fish and dinosaurs that once inhabited them, masked treasures that had lain petrified over hundreds of millions of years. Nothing was as it appeared. What the eye measured as ten miles turned out to be a hundred miles of flat desert slashed by deep canyons. What looked to be a lake dissolved into a sea of sand. A city skyline became a cluster of standing rocks carved from frozen dunes.

And, perhaps, here was the last American Dream. The gold rush and the western movement rolled into one. The final opportunity for a man to bet on himself and stake his own knowledge, instincts and sweat against the hidden riches of a formidable land.

Charlie knew he had to beat the flood of fortune hunters that would surely rise to the AEC's bait. He added his meagre savings to the $1,000 his mother pressed into his hand after mortgaging her home. It was enough to buy a second-hand jeep and a broken-down drill rig. M. L. assured him that she and the kids could get along fine for the time being on the monthly thirty-eight dollar disability check she received from the navy. Rose would help her when the baby came. She and the children would join Charlie later.

Charlie was well prepared. He knew the uranium mining history of the area by heart. He had followed the long story of boom and bust that had repeated itself over the centuries. It was a strange progression that found the waste products of one era becoming the sought-after prize of the next.

The Ute and Navajo Indians were the first to inhabit the Colorado Plateau during historic times. Theirs was not a search for riches, however. They dug up the red vanadium and yellow uranium-bearing rocks of their homeland unaware of any value or hidden powers in the ore. They pounded the stones into dust and mixed it with animal fat to make war paint for their bodies.

The actual mining of uranium started by accident in the mid-nineteenth century. Gold miners in the Central City district near Denver, Colorado, were exasperated by a thick, black substance that clung like tar to their mining and processing tools. The annoying material was called pitchblende. The miners tossed it into their tailings dumps where they discarded waste products.

Some years later, yellow uranium oxide became valuable as a coloring agent for porcelains and ceramics. The piles of gold mine tailings took on an importance of their own. People started to mine the cast-off mineral out of the dumps, and for over a decade the ore was shipped to London china factories.

Shortly after the turn of the century, a vital use for pitchblende developed when Madame Marie Curie and her husband Pierre discovered the "miracle element" radium. They isolated the radioactive material that seemed to promise a possible cure for cancer from pitchblende.

Most of the ore that the Curies used came from mines in the Erz Mountains of Germany and Czechoslovakia. But after a few years, those deposits were depleted. Luckily, a French chemist discovered a new source of radium in carnotite, the yellow, red and black uranium-vanadium-bearing rock that the Indians on the Colorado Plateau had used for their war paint.

The news triggered a rush of prospectors into the backcountry. When compared to the hardships entailed by most mining, the search for carnotite was a lark. Men could find a deposit within a few hours. Often outcrops showed right on the surface or in petrified logs. In the month of March 1912, alone, ten claims were staked. From then on, the Curie's primary source of radium came from carnotite on the Colorado Plateau. Mining thrived there until 1923, when discovery of high-grade ore in the Belgian Congo led to closing of most of the mines.

During the radium boom there were few known uses for uranium and vanadium was considered a waste product of carnotite. But not for long. French chemists, studying the effects of vanadium on steel, had found that if a compound of vanadium oxide and iron was dropped into molten steel just before pouring, it would greatly increase the tensile strength, wearability and elasticity of the steel. Prior to World War I, the mineral was mined in Peru and in roscoelite deposits of Colorado. With the declaration of war, exporters persuaded the British to use vanadium steel as armor for their warships. But by 1934 the mines had played out. American manufacturers of automobiles, planes, locomotives and industrial machinery forced the steel industry to seek vanadium on the Colorado Plateau. The abandoned radium dumps were mined again and a vanadium run resulted with prospectors returning to redrock country for a second mining boom.

History was to repeat itself twenty-five years later. This time uranium was the prized element. Uranium-the waste material that had been dumped in the tailings during the vanadium era.

In the early 1940s, the Manhattan Project of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was created to develop an atomic bomb. The key element for the bomb was uranium. But the metal was in short supply. The only known deposits of the ore were in what was then called the Belgian Congo and Canada, but these mines were nearing depletion. Thus, the Manhattan Project began to conduct a covert campaign to locate domestic sources of uranium ore.

Shortly after the highly-classified operation got underway, a secret shipment of uranium was escorted to a Canadian refinery by Phil Merritt, director of Raw Materials for the Manhattan Project. One thousand tons of uranium oxide from the Shinkolobwe mines in the Belgian Congo had been diverted to the United States when Germany invaded Belgium. The shipment, ordered by Edgar Sengier, chief executive of the Union Minière de Haute Katanga-because "America might just need it"-had been stored in a Staten Island warehouse since 1940.This was the uranium used to build the original atom bombs.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Uranium Frenzy by Raye C. Ringholz Copyright © 2002 by Raye C. Ringholz. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction....................ix
Acknowledgments....................xi
1 The Siren Call....................1
2 The European Experience....................16
3 The Dawn's Early Light....................30
4 Deadly Daughters....................43
5 Bonanza At Big Indian....................57
6 Uranium Frenzy....................71
7 Dirty Harry....................87
8 The Burden of Proof....................96
9 The Future of America....................109
10 The Colossus of Cash....................132
11 Success and Subpoenas....................147
12 The Bubble Bursts....................175
13 Leetso-The Monster That Kills....................191
14 The American Experience....................203
15 Senator Steen....................215
16 A Widow Fights Back....................235
17 Full Circle....................250
18 A Standard Is Set....................267
19 Compassionate Compensation....................284
20 Aftermath....................304
Notes....................324
Index....................337

Editorial Reviews

The 1952 discovery of a large deposit of uranium in the four corners region of the American West set off a brief economic boom in the area and in Salt Lake City, "The Wall Street of Uranium Stocks." The author recounts the activities of the businessmen, stock traders, miners, and other characters associated with this short-term boom. This revised edition adds more discussion of atomic testing, the impact of the testing on downwinders, and the effects of the mining on the miners themselves. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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