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Show milling process was later used to make the first atomic bombs. With the advent of the atomic age and the subsequent arms race with the Soviet Union, the United States was oo to buy ninety percent of its Fadipactive materials from the Belgian Congo and nada. The country’s need for uranium for national defense was so urgent that the government decided it had to stimulate domestic prospecting and production through an incentive program of guaranteed prices, discovery bonuses and development loans. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 created the Atomic Energy Commission (the AEC), and the government initiated an extensive exploration program to find domestic sources of uranium. The AEC encouraged individuals and companies to increase production by more than doubling the price per pound for high-grade uranium ore to $31 and with a $10,000 bonus for the first man to produce 20 tons of ore assaying at least 20% uranium in the United States. Hundreds of government geologists and mining engineers scoured the Western States, searching for enough uranium ore to feed the two uranium processing plants that were being operated under strict security and behind highly guarded enclosures. While this resulted in an increase in uranium production, almost all of the mines on the Colorado Plateau were located in the Morrison Formation and were relatively small-sized, shallow, and low-grade. In decades of searching on the Plateau, prospectors had uncovered only three ore . deposits amounting to as much as 100,000 tons of this much lower-grade ore, and there CHARLES AUGUSTUS (CHARLIE) STEEN 1919Charles Augustus (Charlie) Steen’s -discovery of pitchblende in the Chinle Formation in southeastern Utah’s Bi Indian District changed the course ofthe . uranium industry by proving that large, high-grade uraninite ore deposits could be found on the Colorado Plateau. Charlie Steen’s discovery helped ignite the 1950s uranium boom and made the impoverished prospector-geologist a wealthy and world-famous figure. In 1943, Charlie Steen graduated from the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy at El Paso. He worked as a petroleum : geologist in Bolivia and Peru before he began his determined search for uranium in 1949. Together with his wife, M.L., and four young sons, Charlie endured years of privation and hardship while he prospected the remote and desolate canyons and mesas of the Colorado Plateau. Charlie’s four-year quest for uranium was not an erratic wandering but was based on his original geologic theory that uranium would be found concentrated along the flanks of anticlinal structures. In 1951, Charlie Steen was drawn to the Lisbon Valley anticline, where lowgrade uranium occurrences in the Cutler Formation attracted his attention. Although the area had been condemned as uneconomic by government experts, Charlie figured the better grade uranium would be encountered down-dip and further back from the meager rim outcrops. During the spring of 1951, he staked twelve claims covering this groun After raising a grubstake and obtaining a dilapidated, second-hand drilling rig from Bill McCormick, Charlie Steen had a four-mile road built into his roperty and in July 1952 started drilling on his Mi Vida claim. At a depth of 70 bet , the drill cored through 14 feet of a dark-colored sandstone unit in the Chinle Formation that proved to be the first commercial discovery of uraninite ore in the United States. After staking more claims, Charlie sank a shaft near his discovery drill hole and mined the first of more than 10 million tons of uranium ore, worth more than $1 billion, produced from the Big Indian District during the next 30 years. Charlie Steen’s rags-to-riches saga caught the imagination of the press and public, and he became famous as the country’s Uranium King. In 1953, Charlie and Bill McCormick bought the Big Buck claims for $2 million and formed the Standard Uranium Corp. to e xpos the ore body adjacent to the Mi Vida Mine. In 1955, Charlie and Bill formed the Uranium Reduction Company and built the first privately financed uranium mill in the United States. Charlie sold the Mi Vida Mine and his interest in the Uranium Reduction Company to the Atlas Corporation in 1962. Charlie Steen’s venturesome nature and a series of bad investments cost him most of his fortune, and a serious head injury curtailed his prospecting career. In 1992, the town of Moab, Utah, honored Charlie and MLL. Steen with a celebration to mark the fortieth anniversary of Charlie’s discovery and to recognize their many contributions to the Moab area. 12 From the Ninth National Mining Hall of Fame Induction Banquet September 8, 1996 at Las Vegas, Nevada were scores of small mines that had been worked out and abandoned. Since few of these smaller ore deposits held more than 10,000 tons of ore rich enough to be mined at a profit, the outlook for a large-scale uranium industry seemed pretty bleak. These geologic and economic conditions discouraged most of the larger, well-established mining companies from even looking for uraniumdeposits. And, while there were dozens of local prospectors and miners in southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah who were making a living off these smaller mines, nobody was making a fortune and no one had discovered a major ore body. Most of these prospectors were part-time uranium seekers who had gained their practical knowledge working in these small mines, or cowboys and sheepherders who were just about the only people who had penetrated one of the most SLO unsurveyed areas left in the country. Even though you could stake a mining claim on public land with four claim posts and a dollar, it cost real money to prospect and explore for ore. My grandmother, Rosalie Shumaker, mortgaged her home in Houston and contributed a thousand dollars to buy a small portable drill; and my mother’s sister, Tera, talked her husband into loaning my father enough money for a second-hand jeep. By the time that my father set off on his quest for uranium in the summer of 1950, my parents were already raising my three older brothers and I was on the way. Dad drove the jeep and a 20 foot trailer to Dove Creek, Colorado; and a few weeks afterI was born, my mother and brothers and I traveled with my grandmother to join my father while he searched for the uranium that would change all of our lives. A Grubstake, a Dream, and a Theo Charlie Steen began his search by studying the geology of the uranium deposits of the area. He couldn’t afford to buy a Geiger counter, but Dad figured that unless he used his education and training as a geologist, he had no better chance than the other prospectors who spent their time walking the rim rocks looking for uranium outcroppings on the | surface. Because most of the readily accessible uranium deposits that outcropped were already staked by the time Dad arrived on the scene, he began to look for the geologic conditions that would cause uranium to collect and concentrate in certain favorable locations where it could be discovered with a drilling rig. During the time we lived near Dove Creek, my father became friends with Bob Barrett, a slightly prosperous pinto bean farmer who had a pretty strong case of uranium fever. He also became well acquainted with William R. McCormick, the owner of the Dove Creek Mercantile Store. Bill McCormick’s honest, generous nature was combined with a very shrewd business sense, but he had a weakness for uranium prospectors and a fondness for the mining game. The Steens lived on rice, beans, oatmeal, rabbit stew and venison from the deer that my father shot regardless of the season while he prospected and examined other people’s properties for McCormick and Barrett. On Christmas Day, we moved to the Yellow Cat Wash area south of Cisco, where Dad staked some claims and drilled out a small uranium deposit on the promise of an interest in anything he found from a mining engineer who later reneged on his agreement. Somehow my parents managed to get by with small advances from my grandmother and loans from friends that didn’t average $70 a month. All of the AEC and company geologists who had examined the area had written off the Big Indian mining district as an important potential source of uranium... There were simply too many better places to explore... than a mining district that was missing the most important host rocks to waste much time or money. Early in 1951, Bill McCormick introduced Dad to Dan Hayes and Donald Adams, two local prospectors and mine owners who had been involved in uranium mining for many years. Hayes and Adams owned the 14 Big Buck claims that had been staked in 1948 to cover a meager exposure of oxidized uranium in the Cutler Formation on the southwestern flank of the faulted Lisbon Valley anticline in the Big Indian mining district of San Juan County, Utah. The Morrison Formation had been eroded off this upthrown portion of the anticline, and there were only three small uranium mines located in the entire district. These mines had produced a little more than 2,000 tons of low-grade uranium ore from host rocks in the Cutler Formation. The nearest producing uranium mine was more than twenty miles away from the Big Buck claim group. All of the AEC and company geologists who had examined the area had written off the Big Indian mining district as an important potential source of uranium by the time Charles Augustus Steen was attracted to the area. There were simply too many better places to explore for uranium on the Colorado Plateau than a mining district that was missing the -most important host rocks (the Morrison Formation) to waste much time or any money on the Big Indian mining district. After examining the geology of the uranium bearing formation that Hayes and Adams had exposed with four short mine adits and bulldozer cuts along the rim, my father hiked above the Big Buck mine and began his geologic reconnaissance. As he walked and climbed over the rock formations, he began to formulate a theory that the lower grade exposures of uranium in the Cutler Formation would be enriched or concentrated down dip from the outcrops along the escarpment overlooking Big Indian Wash. The terrain was very rugged and without a single road into the country behind the Big Buck claims. Dad noticed that the crest of the Lisbon Valley anticline was situated just about the same spot where he had hiked in above the rim, and he figured that any uranium that was Story continues on page 18... |