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Show 752 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT tainly his discovery was one of the major uranium strikes in the United States and worth, according to contemporary reports, around $60 million.378 Another, Fred Schwartzwalder, a school janitor and by all accounts not impoverished, had for years engaged in prospecting as a hobby. He found one of the few vein deposits containing high-grade uranium ore near Golden, Colorado.379 Another, Vernon J. Pick, an electric motor repairman who went out of business in Minnesota when his plant burned down, made a discovery near Razor, Utah, which was eventually sold to the Odium interests for a trifling $9 million.380 And still another-the Happy Jack mine found it could not mine the copper which prompted the original location because there was too much uranium in it. This unmitigated blessing 378Jebson v. Spencer, 61 I.D. 161 (1953) (prior permit had expired at the time of location) . If the location is not valid at the time of the lease, the lease is good. See, e.g., Webster v. Knop, 6 Utah 2d 273, 312 P.2d 557 (1954) ; Norris v. United Mineral Products Co., 61 Wyo. 386, 158 P.2d 679, 683 (1945) . 377 The mining locator could without too much difficulty check the records in the Bureau of Land Management to determine whether oil and gas leases or applications had been issued or filed or whether the land was reported valuable for leasing minerals. A lessee or applicant for a mining lease had more difficulty in ferreting out dormant mining claims. It is possible to find location notices in the county recorder's office but it is extremely difficult. The Bureau of Land Management, of course, keeps no records of unpatented mining claims. Even if the mining location is discovered from the records in the county office, there would be no way of determining whether it was valid, i.e., whether the location notice was posted, whether the claim was monumented, whether there had been an actual discovery, etc. See 1 American Law of Mining § 1.35 (Martz ed. 1960) . 378 See 28 Business Week 28-30 (August, 1953); 62 Time 60 (August 3, 1953) ; 43 Newsweek 100-105 (April 19, 1954) . 379 64 Time 31 (Dec. 6, 1954). 380 64 Time 76 (Sept. 6, 1964) . netted the discoverers $30 million, it was said.381 Reports like these were enough to induce hordes of amateur prospectors3S- to mortgage their homes to buy Geiger counters. The get-rich syndrome appealed to the generation of the fifties as it had to the "poor but honest" miner in 1849. However, few profited as did those mentioned above. Some small operators, claiming that they were being squeezed out by the "big boys," set up the Uranium Miners' Protective Association, a historical hangover from the mining camps of the 1850's.383 Their difficulty stemmed from the fact that skyrocketing costs of mining and prospecting meant that only a real bonanza would pay off. Uranium companies with quaint Indian names (and even "quainter" financial structures) sprang up overnight, and queues of $20-a-week stenographers filled the streets in front of local stock exchanges to buy stock as low as 1 cent per share. One day during the summer of 1954 over 7 million uranium shares were traded on the Salt Lake Stock Exchange. Timco went up 6,900 percent above its initial offering price.384 No one seemed to care whether uranium stock was purely speculative. And speculative it was for, even with a strike, it was impossible to tell the extent of the uranium ore in a particular cache. By late 1955 some of the magazines were beginning to talk about the "uranium bust"385 in a way that was 381 66 Time 94 (Dec. 5, 1955) . 383 Lang, The Coming Thing, 29 New Yorker 92 (March 21, 1953). 383 43 Newsweek 27 (March 22, 1954) . 384 44 Newsweek 67-70 (Dec. 20, 1954) : "Prospectors and promoters descended in a crescendo of newspaper, magazine, radio, and television ads touting uranium stocks which promised fortunes for pennies. Back rooms were transferred into brokerage offices. Local merchants caught the fever. They gave away uranium stock as a sales come-on. Hamburgers were called uranium burgers, ice cream sundaes, uranium sundaes. And, of course, millionaires became uraniumaires." |