MINING: The Cisco Kid

Lean, stubborn Charles A. (for Austin) Steen was so full of troubles that it was only natural to think of him as Bad-Luck Charlie. A onetime oil geologist for Socony-Vacuum, he spent two years in the South American jungle where no white men had ever been before, then went to work for a Texas oil company. When he was fired for telling off his boss, he found that no other oil company would have him. He scraped along in the contracting business for a while, but never forgot a romantic dream of his days at the Texas College of Mines: prospecting and finding a million dollars. In the Atomic Age, he decided, his best chance was uranium.

With $1,000 borrowed from his mother in 1948, Steen packed his wife and three children off to southeastern Utah, where there are uranium mines. He "sniffed around" without the help of a Geiger counter, finally staked out claims on a high sandstone ridge in the Big Indian district near Cisco—land which AEC had officially declared "barren of possibilities." Time after time Charlie got promises of money to help develop his property, but when people took a closer look, they always backed out. The Steens lived on oatmeal and beans; the only meat they had was venison which Charlie bagged on hunting expeditions. In 1950, his savings gone, Steen moved to Tucson, went to work as a carpenter to get a grubstake. After a year, the Steens sold their trailer for $375, climbed into the family jeep and headed back across the desert for Cisco, where they rented a shack with no plumbing or electricity for $15 a month.

Sugar & Salt. Charlie's wife came down with pneumonia. For a while the Steens . owed $300 in grocery bills, had no money to buy milk for their ten-week-old baby; they fed him weakly sugared tea instead. Winter evenings, Steen foraged for coal at a nearby railroad. Then, when things looked blackest, Bad Luck Charlie's luck began to turn.

He got $1,000 from one old friend, borrowed $100 from another and bought a secondhand drilling rig. On his first try, at a depth of 73 feet, the rig broke down. Steen, who had no money to buy a Geiger counter, borrowed one from a friend to test a sample of the greyish black rock brought up by the drill. The needle nearly jumped from the dial of the instrument. "We've found it!" cried Charlie. "We've found a million dollars!"

Nobody believed him. For months AEC did not report back on his ore samples; neighbors gossiped that Charlie had salted "Steen's Folly" with pitchblende to raise money from the gullible. But Steen soon proved them wrong. He got $15,000 from Texas Construction Man Dan O'Laurie, incorporated as Utex Exploration Co., and started selling his ore to refiners at $50 and up a ton. AEC finally classified "Steen's Folly" as probably "one of the major uranium strikes" in the U.S.—an estimated 1,350,000 tons of uraninite ore reserves with a value of more than $60 million. Most uranium miners can stay in business if their ore shows a uranium content of .20%; Charlie's lowest grade ore assays at .49% uranium.

Rumba Lesson. As the first checks rolled in, Steen bought himself a flaming red Lincoln and sports jacket to match, now tours his mining properties with a Dalmatian sitting beside him in the car. Occasionally, he flies his private plane up to Salt Lake City for rumba lessons.