In late winter 1951, a geologist stood overlooking Big Indian Wash, a massive gash in the rocky desert southeast of Moab, Utah. Mountains rose like green islands to the north and south, and to the west the land disintegrated into the fractured canyon country carved by the Colorado River. Deep layers of sediment left by ancient seas had been lifted, folded, broken, and laid bare by eons of geological forces and erosion. Somewhere in the tortured topography below him, he was sure, was a fortune.
With his receding hairline and thick-framed glasses, 32-year-old Charlie Steen looked more like an accountant than a prospector. But his beat-up work boots hinted at the mix of tenacity and poverty that had brought him here to the middle of nowhere, on his own in one of the roughest landscapes in the country. He had already put in so many miles that the heels were worn to almost nothing and the soles were starting to fall off.
It was the dawn of the atomic age, and the United States was desperate for uranium. The radioactive element had fueled one of the bombs that won World War II, and the government was offering big money to anyone who found a dependable domestic source. Small deposits had turned up on the Colorado Plateau—the high, arid expanse where New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona come together—and prospectors were already starting to arrive.
Steen had his own theory of where the uranium was, one that had earned nothing but ridicule from government scientists and fellow miners. But Steen had a wife and four sons to support, and by the time he started drilling, after years of chasing his dream around the West, they would be reduced to living in a decrepit shack with no running water or electricity. He would be hundreds of dollars in the hole for groceries and gasoline, with no one left to beg or borrow from.
The question was whether his geological instincts were right. He was sure the uranium was down there, somewhere. It had to be. All he had to do was find it.
As he said later, “I knew I’d be either a millionaire or nothing.”
Steen’s Texas childhood was marked by extremes. His father was an
