Tom Zoellner

by Uranium - Rock That Shaped the World

  The gulag labor force was supplemented with regular wage-earning mine workers, who were free to visit the main street of St. Joachimsthal after their shifts. “On Saturday nights, the place rolls and rocks like a Klondike shantytown, blessed with a particularly rich strike,” said one contemporaneous account. “Cheap music, cheap liquor, and cheap women abound.” The saying was that there were three shifts at St. Joachimsthal—working, sleeping, and drinking.

  The paid miners were the only ones who could enjoy it. The valley had become a security zone—nobody was allowed in or out without papers. Military checkpoints and barbed wire were set up at the bottlenecked entrance. The spa resorts became barracks for the Russians; one notorious unit interrogated suspects in the cells of a former nunnery. By the autumn of 1953, more than 16,100 inmates were being forced to dig, crush, and load uranium at St. Joachimsthal. More than half this number had been jailed on political charges. But this would represent the population apex for the uranium camps in Czechoslovakia. The mad thirst for uranium had dissipated somewhat after Stalin’s death. By then, the Soviet nuclear program had developed an estimated 120 atomic bombs. Uranium had also been located and mined in the Urals and in the secure regions of Kazakhstan, and production on the German side of the mountains was also outpacing Czechoslovakian production by nearly six times. Prisoners who completed their sentences were generally not replaced with new ones.

  The town had earned the nickname Jachymov Hell, and the valley that had given its name to the American dollar had been choked with tailings piles. Pyramids of waste, gently fuming with radon gas, were miniatures of the medieval hills that brooded over them in all directions. “The western part of the town disappeared under the waste banks,” noted a local historian, “and the valley along the banks of the Klinovec brook with the playground, swimming pool, and vacation restaurant were buried under the waste.”

  Frantisek Sedivy was transferred to a new set of uranium diggings near the town of Pribram. Conditions there were markedly better. Most of the laborers were regular wage hands, and the free men shared food, warm clothes, and cigarettes with their incarcerated companions. They could also be persuaded to smuggle uncensored letters in and out. Inmates also worked out a kickback scheme with their free colleagues—if a prisoner happened to discover pitchblende, he would pretend as though the free man had found it; the resulting bonus would then be quietly split between them.

  Sedivy was released from the uranium camps in 1964, having served a total of twelve years. There was nobody to welcome him home when he returned. His mother and father had died when he was in the camps, and his girlfriend at the vocational school had married another man a long time ago. Sedivy set about the task of restarting life. He found work as a welder and went back to school to earn an economics degree. Later, he worked for a book publisher and then for an agency that ensured the safety of roads and bridges.

  I met with him in the back room of a tavern in the rural town of Revnice, where he had retired after his final government job. He was eighty years old at the time, but had a face free of wrinkles and a checkered tweed jacket pressed clean. His hair was still mostly black, though striped with white in the middle.

  He told me about his years at St. Joachimsthal in a calm and untroubled voice, a nonalcoholic beer barely touched on the table before him. Almost all his friends from the camps are dead, mainly from lung cancer, but some from other ailments. Tobacco had been a major cash commodity in the barracks; it was one of the only little pleasures in an otherwise dreary existence, and it was usually smoked inside a roll of newsprint, for lack of any other paper. Sedivy never developed a taste for these improvised cigarettes. It may have saved his life, for he never showed any signs of cancer.

  He lives in retirement with his wife and adult son and has tried to let go of bitterness.

  “I don’t hate uranium,” he told me. “I don’t even hate the Russians. They were mostly simple people, only doing what they were told. They would go to the gulag themselves if they hadn’t made us work. . . . They wanted their smolinec. That was all.”

  In the narrative of American mineral exploration, few myths are as cherished as that of the busted prospector, discouraged and about to quit, who sinks a final hole only to happen on the strike of a lifetime.

  A man named Alvinza Hayward, for example, was said to have been obsessed with a gold claim he had purchased in Amador County, California, in 1856. Indicator minerals were present in the samples, but the ore itself was too poor to mill and got no better as the shaft deepened. Most of his crew eventually walked off the job, believing the enterprise to be hopeless. Hayward’s friends started to desert him after he begged them for more money. Only one hopeful rancher could be persuaded to front a final grubstake. Hayward burned through his last friend’s $3,000 and still there was no gold. Near the end, bankrupt and despairing, he claimed to have been unable to buy a new pick and had eaten his way down to a bag of dried beans. That was when he intersected the main ore body. The Hayward Mine became the most lucrative in that part of the Sierras and earned $5 million for its indefatigable owner.

  A parallel legend is associated with the Enterprise Mine of southwestern Colorado. A luckless prospector named Dick Swickheimer had borrowed heavily to dig a shaft on Dolores Mountain and seemed headed for ruin when a winning lottery ticket gave him the money he needed to sink his borehole a few feet deeper. And then: silver.

  In Arizona in 1877, U.S. Army officers had warned the ragged wanderer Ed Shieffelin that “all you find out there will be your tombstone” when he told them of his intention to explore some hills inhabited by hostile Apaches. He instead found the top of a silver vein protruding from the ledge of an arroyo; the unruly town that sprang up around it was named Tombstone.

  No less a figure of frontier mining than George Hearst, the father and bankroller of William Randolph Hearst, told a story about nearly quitting on the side of a trail in 1859, just before he made his fortune at the famous Comstock Lode in Nevada. “I felt old and used up and no good,” he told the San Francisco Mining and Scientific Press. “My sense told me to turn back and make my fight where I was known. There was safety in that anyhow. But I’d been camping night after night with the boys ahead of me, and it made me lonesome to think of parting company with them. So after switching and switching the dust on the trail and feeling weak and human because I yielded, I mounted my horse and went after the party. I got to the Comstock, and in six months I’d made half a million dollars. That was the foundation of what I’ve done since.”

  These stories are part of a body of mining lore called discovery tales, which tend to be attached to substantial finds. Other common themes include the prospector being shown where to dig by a tribe of local Indians, seeing the landscape in a dream, or accidentally kicking over a stone in the middle of nowhere only to find it flecked with precious trace metal. A big strike seems to demand a romantic backstory. Perhaps the reality of most mineral exploration—plenty of rote physical labor and monotonous data analysis—seems unequal to the grandeur of the unearthed treasure, and the discovery tale becomes a means of crediting more ethereal forces of destiny or Providence or ancient aboriginal wisdom.

  What the stories gloss over, however, is the necessary element of manic depression associated with mineral exploration, which was—and is—an endeavor where the vast majority of propositions end up in failure, where financing is always precarious, and where the few schemes that succeed do so because of the generally irrational faith of the central actor.

  Geology is an inherently mysterious business; what lies underground is a matter of deduction and inference. Enormous amounts of energy and capital must be expended in the cause of theory. Such a profession tends to attract the gambling personality, a man willing to stake his reputation and livelihood on a hunch. Risk is the drug. Failure brings only temporary depression, soon to be replaced with the refreshed insanity of staking new claims. There are always more holes to drill, more investors to tap. Millionaires who claim to
have been on the verge of quitting when they found a jackpot had simply been living normally; their material salvation most likely arrived on an otherwise unremarkable day. The brink of failure had always been a comfortable place for them to pitch a tent.

  In any event, the American uranium rush was to have its own piece of nick-of-time mythology in the person of Charlie Steen, who had been obsessed with the idea that uranium could be found in an anticline formation—a theory that others thought was nonsense.

  In July 1952, broke and discouraged, Steen took a diamond drill out to his Mi Vida site, where the walls of a canyon parted like a pair of outstretched legs, and managed to dig out some multicolored core samples down to 197 feet. Then, on July 27, the drill bit broke off the pipe and got lodged in the hole. His core samples seemed worthless. There was the usual deep red clay and some grayish rock that looked like frozen tar, but none of the yellow carnotite he was seeking.

  Steen tossed the pieces into the back of his jeep and drove back to Cisco in a bleak frame of mind. He was nearly out of cash. Before going to tell his family the bad news, he stopped at a service station near his tar-paper shack. Steen’s son Mark would later write that his father was on his way to Grand Junction, Colorado, for new equipment and that he had every intention of continuing to drill. But his mood on that summer evening was one of despair. The owner of the station, Buddy Cowger, had a “Lucky Strike” Geiger counter and, as a grim joke, Steen asked him to wave it over the useless cores in the back of his jeep. The reddish sandstone showed nothing, but the gray cores sent the meter’s needle all the way to the edge. The dingy rock turned out to be uranitite, otherwise known as pitchblende. Steen had never seen this particular oxide outside of a museum. But he had just tapped into a huge vein of it. Steen whooped all the way to his shack, nearly decapitating himself on a clothesline. “It’s a million dollar lick!” he yelled to his wife.

  In 1953, the same year that the slave labor force reached its apex in Czechoslovakia, Charlie Steen became fantastically rich overnight and built himself a space-age mansion atop a mesa on the north edge of Moab. He named it Mi Vida—“My Life,” after his mine—and then proceeded to memorialize almost all aspects of his former poverty. He bronzed the worn-out boots he was wearing on the day he found the uranium and displayed them on a mantel in his house. He had his lantern plated in gold. In a public act of sweet revenge, he bought up shares in a bank in Dove Creek, Colorado, that had refused to lend him $250 when he was poor. “Don’t ever bounce a prospector,” he told reporters. “He might come back someday and buy the bank.” When he won $10,000 with four of a kind in a poker game, he had an oil painting commissioned to commemorate the lucky hand. He was written up in Newsweek, Time, BusinessWeek, and Woman’s Home Companion, bringing more luster to the uranium effort than the AEC ever bargained for.

  “I couldn’t have been more delighted because he was one of our first millionaires,” an agency official told the journalist Raye Ringholz. “That was what we needed . . . that flair, publicity attached to someone who was on his uppers. We need guys like that. He’s a departure from the norm and that’s the kind of guys that civilization makes advances on. We’re not going to make much progress with the ordinary pedestrian-type individual.”

  Steen used to complain he had to spend more time hunting grubstakes than uranium. Now he seemed to be occupied primarily with hunting headlines. “One of the things that kept him busy was seeking publicity,” recalled his onetime partner Dan O’Laurie, who was squeezed out of Steen’s Utex Exploration Company early on. “He liked publicity, good or bad. It didn’t make any difference, just as long as it was publicity. That was the nature of the man.” Steen booked speaking engagements around the country, telling audiences about the future of nuclear power and his own role in helping build it up. “Moab will never go back to what it was,” he told one audience. “Atomic bombs have saved more lives than they destroyed.” The Pentagon rewarded him with a top-level “Q” security clearance and warned him not to disclose the size of his ore reserves, lest it give the Soviets a picture of American strength.

  At his hilltop mansion, he threw parties such as Utah had never seen before, with free-flowing champagne and oysters flown in from Maine. Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn were among those invited for dinner. Steen himself took weekly chartered flights to Salt Lake City to a dance studio where he was learning the rumba. When there was a television program he wanted to watch one evening—Jackie Cooper portraying him in a live drama called “I Found Sixty Million Dollars”—he went out to his private plane, which was equipped with a television, and ordered his pilot to fly around in circles above the mesas where the signal was stronger.

  Another uranium celebrity was Paddy Martinez, a Navajo shepherd who lived in a hogan outside the highway town of Grants, New Mexico. He had been tending sheep atop a peak in full view of Route 66 below when he got a hankering for a smoke. “I was on horseback, going along a trail to Rattlesnake Trading Post for the cigarettes, when I saw this little yellow spot under some rock,” he told a journalist. “I dug it out with a stick because it reminded me of the time in 1947 when I bought a bus ticket in Grants at the Yucca Hotel. Three white men were talking about an ore called uranium and saying it was worth a lot of money. They were showing some of it to each other and I got a look at it. It was the same yellow stuff I was holding in my hand on that trail. Well, I got my cigarettes and came home and told my wife I’d found some kind of ore. She didn’t believe me.”

  The rock was carnotite, and Martinez had found a patch of it big enough that five different mills were necessary to process it all. The population of Grants tripled in three years. The claim Martinez staked turned out to be on the property of the Santa Fe Railroad, however, and he received only a finder’s fee, paid to him in monthly stipends of $250.

  “This damn uranium,” he complained. “My friends don’t like me the same anymore.”

  A man who saw a better payday was Vernon Pick, an affable Minnesota electrician who claimed to have wandered into a field of carnotite in a desolate patch of desert near the base of a towering ledge called San Rafael Reef. Almost out of food and delirious from drinking arsenic-laced water, he built a raft of driftwood and floated his way down Utah’s Muddy River to report his claim. Critics later maintained that a pair of colluding Atomic Energy Commission agents had tipped him off as to where the ore could be found, hoping for a kickback. The FBI investigated. No criminal charges were brought. But the mythology was too good to resist. In Life magazine the nation read the gripping story about a simple man who overcame the wilderness. “He fought storms, rattlers, poison, death itself to find a uranium bonanza!” enthused the subtitle. As a discovery story, it was first rate, even if it probably wasn’t true. Pick sold his mine, which he had named the Hidden Splendor, for $9 million and a used airplane. It seemed that the hope of America was once again on the Western frontier and buried underground, where anybody could come and find it.

  A prospector’s basic gear included a sharp-pointed pick, a pair of binoculars, a jeep or a mule, a “Lucky Strike” Geiger counter, and a battery-operated ultraviolet lamp that made radioactive rocks glow. The seekers would spend weeks alone in the desert, hiking the blistering wastes and eyeing the cliffs for the hints that might give away a prehistoric stream with some fossilized trees buried within. These could usually be found in the Shinarump layer of sandstone, which was like a wedge of crunchy pink mortar between the Chinle and the Moenkopi formations.

  “It’s a little different from other mining because it’s dried vegetation, animal life, trees,” said a driller named Oren Zufelt. “One time we followed a vein of ore down what looked like a little creek and some timber had fallen in it. We worked down into the rocks and followed that vein up around the rocks and there was this dinosaur. He had jumped into this mud and got stuck, died, and made uranium. It was just like he had fallen in there yesterday.”

  Some of the uranium-soaked trees, known as trash pockets, lay so shallow that all
a finder had to do was shovel the ore into a burlap bag and load it onto a mule. The ore itself was yellow or gray, but it was known to have wildly prismatic effects on the rocks it adjoined.

  “I saw a man once find a whole tree that was just high-grade uranium. It came off like black powder, really soft, like pepper,” recalled Jerry Anderson, who prospected with his father. “It was a tree about two feet in thickness and the branches went off maybe ten feet in each direction. He blasted that thing out of there and got sixty-five hundred dollars. When the tree was depleted, that was the end of his uranium ore.”

  Even little old ladies could get into the game. Edna Ekker was the matriarch of a ranching family whose roots traced to the Utah frontier; as a young girl, she had once accepted a piggyback ride from the bank robber Butch Cassidy, who had stopped by to hide a bag of money in the fruit cellar. She quit raising horses in her seventies and turned to uranium, which practically could be picked up off the ground with a few turns of the shovel. “It was really shallow work where we were,” she told an interviewer. These surface diggings, small enough to be worked by one or two people, were known as dog holes, and they began to sprout up off the dirt roads. Prospectors marked these claims by building cairns and writing their names on forms they sealed inside tin cans—usually a Prince Edward tobacco can—at the base. They liked to bestow fanciful names on their mines: Bull’s-eye, Black Hat, Whirlwind, Hideout, Royal Flush, S.O.B., Payday.

  The richer prospectors searched with helicopters or airplanes. Jerry Anderson’s father rigged up an ultrasensitive scintillation counter that hung from the tail of his light aircraft as he cruised through canyons and past mesas. His sons were told to drop bags of powdered lime or flour on top of anything promising. They would hike in later to find the white mess and examine the spot up close. Paranoia ran so high that some of the company pilots refused to make a second pass over an area that registered a spike, according to the historian David Lavender. They were afraid somebody would be watching them through binoculars and barrel in to claim that ground before the plane could even land. A story made the rounds about a haul truck that dumped its load of uranium ore on the highway. Somebody quickly filed a claim on the highway.