The end of World War II brought the Four Corners a uranium boom. Eight decades later, yellowcake may be making a comeback, but the deadly effects of radioactivity seem to be forgotten.
In the 1950s the search for uranium ore spawned a southwest Colorado and Southeast Utah boom as a wave of prospectors driving surplus Jeeps sought to make fast fortunes. Moab proudly proclaimed itself “The Uranium Capital of the World.” Prospectors probed thousands of “dog hole” mines and hardware stores ran out of batteries, flashlights, picks, shovels, tow chains and snake bite kits. Salt Lake City hosted a highly speculative market in uranium mine stocks and the big boom was featured in stories from Arizona highways to Life Magazine and Popular Mechanics. Westerners love a good boom and returning World War II veterans thought this would be their main chance.
Prospectors lived in shiny aluminum travel trailers often made from former airplane wings. They slept on newfangled air mattresses, lit Coleman lanterns at night and looked for just the right rock strata in the Shinarump Conglomerate formation. Few wanted to move the waste rock, haul out the valuable ore and truck it over rough roads to uranium mills in Durango, Mexican Hat or Monticello. Instead, they wanted to stake dozens of claims and sell them to mining companies that were furiously peddling mining stocks. Everyone wanted to get rich.
The Atomic Energy Commission had a guaranteed base price for uranium ore. All one had to do was dig it out of the rock. What could be easier? When the AEC offered a $10,000 bonus for the discovery of new uranium deposits, prospectors flooded the Colorado Plateau. Families lived in trailers along sandy washes wherever cottonwood trees provided shade.
In San Juan County, Utah, the Shumway brothers sold 84 claims in Red Canyon, White Canyon and Deer Flats for $200,000.
The financial bonanza was “the first government-promoted, government-supported and government-controlled mineral rush in American history,” reported Fortune. “Uranium fever” included prospecting parties and a rapid rise in the sale of clicking Geiger counters. Every prospector wanted to peg the needle indicating a rich ore body. Few ore bodies held more than 10,000 tons of ore and prospects seemed dim for a U.S. uranium industry – at first.
Americans love a rags-to-riches story and the tale of geologist Charlie Steen, down to his last dollar and desperately needing food and gasoline, created a hard hat hero. In Lisbon Valley, in July 1952, Steen struck a huge ore body of high-grade uranium near Big Indian Road. He made national and international news with his Mi Vida claim and the Atlas Mill he helped build along the Colorado River at Moab. Steen had suffered through hard times. For 2½ years he begged and borrowed money, equipment and food. He could not afford canned milk for his baby. With a borrowed drill from the merchant who had grubstaked him, Steen drilled down 177 feet into rock that he thought might show promise at 200 feet. The drill broke. He was broke.
Dejected, he threw some sample rock into the back of his battered open Jeep and returned to Cisco, Utah, where he lived in a small shack with his family because he had been forced to sell his trailer. At the local gas station as Charlie complained about his bad luck, the attendant randomly tested the ore with a Geiger counter. Furious clicking erupted. The needle pegged. “We’ve struck it – it’s a million-dollar lick!” Steen yelled to his wife.
He had found a vein containing a million tons of ore. Steen jump-started a uranium rush for concentrated uranium oxide or “yellowcake” based on the mineral carnotite found by deep drilling into the Shinarump layer, which is a member of the Chinle formation. With his sudden wealth, He built a large contemporary-style mansion high on a hill in Moab. As the nation delighted in new television shows, Steen did, too, but Moab had poor reception. If there was something he really wanted to watch he’d circle above town in his private plane to view TV. He got a clearer picture and less static that way.
In Grants, New Mexico at the Uranium Café, a miner could order a plate of yellow cakes for breakfast and for lunch or dinner the uranium burger – a hamburger slathered in Tabasco sauce. Small towns had Miss Uranium pageants and Grand Junction featured Miss Atomic Energy. There was a uranium rush board game where players began with a $15,000 grubstake. A popular rockabilly song had guitarists singing “the Uranium Rock.” At the dedication of Moab’s new uranium mill, Steen joked about:
“Prospectors whose sunblistered brow, bunioned feet, seatless pants, crock haircuts, and insanely glittering eye show that they have qualified as bone-fried desert country-type prospectors and uranium hounds, thoroughly tested by blazing suns, freezing winds, reddish sandstorms, hungry scorpions, and the tall tales of crossroad and county seat barroom liars and promoters; prospectors who have blistered their rumps riding burros and jeeps, have gone without baths and women, have trekked over deserts, climbed buttes, swum rivers, run rapids, and jumped arroyos – not to mention a few claims.”
By 1955, the formerly broke geologist Steen began grossing $250,000 per month. The nuclear age was upon us with brides and grooms getting married and having little mushroom clouds of white frosting on their wedding cakes. Attractive women were nicknamed “bombshells,” and far off in the South Pacific as the military tested atomic weapons on an island in the Bikini Atoll, a new two-piece swimsuit was created because just like the island, which had been irradiated by an atomic explosion, the swimsuit was “hot.”
No one worried about the immediate and lingering effects of radioactivity. Waste rock from uranium mines became used in construction fill for houses and schools from Grand Junction to Durango. Across the Navajo Nation, no one warned Navajo miners about the health impacts of uranium mining. After working all day in nearby mines, Navajo men came home in their dusty work clothes, hugged their children, kissed their wives and went out and fed their livestock. If they lived adjacent to the mines, their children played in the yellow dust and families used the loose rock for house foundations. The Navajo Nation has since permanently banned uranium mining on its 17 million acres.
In Monticello, Utah, the uranium mill spewed so much dust that women had to get their clothes out early on the line to dry them in the morning before afternoon winds coated clothes, cars and screen doors with radioactive dust. Now 80 years later, we seem to have forgotten the grandfathers who coughed their way through the night, whose organs failed, who could not walk without assistance, who died a painful, lingering death often unable to see their grandchildren graduate from high school.
As taxpayers, we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on uranium-related cleanups. We have passed federal laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires Environmental Assessments or Environmental Impact Statements. The current Trump administration is avoiding those important lengthy steps essential to protecting uranium workers. In May, the Department of the Interior approved reopening the Velvet-Wood Uranium mine after a mere 11-day review claiming an “energy emergency.” The mine is in Lisbon Valley where Charlie Steen made his millions, which he later lost in a rags-to-riches-to-rags family story.
“The Velvet-Wood project will bring new jobs and infrastructure to the area, reopen and expand the existing underground mine, and restore the land once mining is finished,” according to the Department of the Interior.
“We’re reducing dependence on foreign adversaries and ensuring our military, medical and energy sectors have the resources they need to thrive,” says Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. “This is mineral security in action.” His comments echo those from the uranium frenzy of decades ago.
If we experience another uranium boom, who will remember the tragic deaths from the last boom? Which agency will monitor health and safety conditions when federal budgets are being slashed and regulations ignored? Yellowcake fever always comes with environmental consequences. Mining companies have historically privatized their profits and socialized their losses leaving American taxpayers to cover cleanup costs. For families whose male miners die prematurely, there is never adequate compensation.
Parts of this column are excerpted from “Bears Ears: Landscape of Refuge and Resistance.”
Andrew Gulliford is an award-winning author and editor and a professor of history at Fort Lewis College. He can be reached at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.
