While nothing like a true “gold rush,” at first the search for uranium was big business in the early 1950s; the Cold War and the U.S. atomic bomb production needed more uranium. For a few years prospectors descended on the Southwest with their Geiger counters over one shoulder like a purse. As a child I remember my father calling me over to look at a box full of rocks a uranium prospector had in his jeep. They were beautiful — bright glowing colors of lemon yellow and lime green on yellow sandstone.
My father showed a prospector the rock collection he and his brothers and Grandma Lillie made from their hikes in the hills, and sure enough, one rock they’d carried home made the Geiger counter buzz. They picked up the piece of uranium so long ago no one remembered where they’d found it.
Carnotite is the vivid yellow or green powdery mineral that coats the sandstone where uranium chiefly occurs. It is a secondary mineral formed by the change of primary uranium-vanadium minerals through intense heat and exposure to water, possibly during volcanic activity. Pure carnotite contains about 53 percent uranium and 12 percent vanadium minerals. Carnotite is radioactive and easily soluble in acid and in acid rain.
My father took me along with him when I was in junior high school to one of the Kerr-McGee yellowcake mills at Ambrosia Lake, near Grants. He’d photographed the facility previously and was bringing the proof sheets to the mill manager. He thought it would be “educational” for me to go. I liked to see how things worked so I went.
We got a mini tour of the facility by the mill manager who took us to the shipping room where the fifty-five-gallon drums were weighed and sealed prior to shipment by truck or by train. The shipping drums were ordinary steel drums. The manager lifted the lid on one of the barrels to show us the pure yellowcake refined at the mill. Another open drum contained pitch-blende which occurs as small grains of black or brownish black or dark gray nodules of uraninite, uranium oxide in sandstones which often weathers into secondary uranium materials.
The yellowcake and pitch-blende were powdered so finely they resembled velvet; the yellow was so bright and the black so intense I had the impulse to touch them; of course I didn’t. We stood eighteen inches away from the open drums but none of us wore a mask. Of course the U.S. Government kept secret the reports that proved the dangers of these materials, but they and Kerr-McGee didn’t want the workers and people who lived around the mills and mines to become alarmed.
As it was, the Laguna and Acoma people refused to work underground. Whites and others from the Spanish-speaking villages in the area were hired to go underground in the shafts to mine. The Laguna and Acoma people refused to desecrate the Earth by entering her. Work in the open-pit mine was permitted, and for twenty years the Pueblo miners worked in the dust of the rich carnotite but wore no protective gear for their lungs or skin.
In the early 1960s, Anaconda discovered that Paguate village sat on top of sandstone with very rich deposits of uranium. The company proposed to relocate the entire village, to move every household into a brand new settlement with new modern houses and modern conveniences. The Tribal Council discussed the proposal for weeks, and many at Paguate are still angered that a number of Council members from other villages argued for the relocation of Paguate village. In the end sanity prevailed, and Paguate was not destroyed.
Instead the mining company sank deep shafts under the village to reach the rich ore. The huge open pit continued to grow, swallowing entire sandstone mesas in a few years’ time, and the pit moved ever closer to Paguate village. The sounds of the mine resounded in the village night and day, three shifts of workers, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
During this time, in the early 1970s, seven young people, high school students at Paguate, apparently made a suicide pact. The students were in their junior year and were among the brightest and most popular at Laguna-Acoma High School. Their families were financially secure. They seemed to have a great deal to live for, but they chose otherwise. I always wondered if it might have been the presence of the mine — I could hardly stand the sound for the hour or two I visited my cousins Rachel Anaya and Esther Johnson at Paguate in the seventies while the Jackpile Mine was in operation. These young people heard that terrible mechanical roar of compressors and generators without cease, around the clock, every day of the year; they heard their elders rant about the destruction the mine wrought, they heard the old ones cry whenever they recalled the lovely orchards of apples and apricots that once grew where the open-pit mine left nothing.
The suicide pact ran its course, and then in 1980 something amazing appeared at the mine. Two Jackpile Mine employees whose job it was to inspect the tailings piles for instability or erosion had found a strange object only thirty feet away from one of the mountainous piles of tailings. The two employees made the same round of inspections of the tailings twice each week. Sometime between their last inspection of the southwest edge of tailings, a twenty foot long sandstone formation in the shape of a giant snake appeared only a few yards from the base of a tailings pile. The sandstone formation looked as if it had been there forever — but it hadn’t.
For hundreds of generations, this area had been familiar ground to the Paguate people who farmed and hunted the area every day, yet no one had ever seen the giant sandstone snake before. Traditional medicine people came from all directions and all the tribes to see the giant stone snake. What a wonder it was to find something so sacred and prophetic; it was as if Ma’shra’true’ee, the sacred messenger snake, had returned, but not to some pristine untouched corner of the land, but instead to the uranium tailings of the Jackpile Mine.
That day I visited the stone snake, only three loose strands of barbed wire enclosed the sandstone formation. Some scraps of chain link from the mine were loosely strung up on one side. The effort at fencing off the sandstone was to protect the giant snake from damage by grazing cattle or horses in the area. I saw scattered bits of shell, and mother of pearl with small pieces of coral and turquoise, left with pollen and corn meal to provide ceremonial food for the spirit of the giant snake.
A few years later Laguna Pueblo got the state highway relocated away from this area. Paguate Hill was notorious for car wrecks; now the highway swings east and then continues north, closer to the remains of the open-pit mine that ceased operation with a world glut of uranium thirty years ago.
Aunt Susie told me that a spring flows out of the basalt ledge on the west side of Paguate village. In times past the medicine people used to send their patients to soak in the spring water because it cured certain maladies. In their natural undisturbed state, the uranium-bearing minerals in the earth beneath Paguate village were healing mediums, not killers.
Some years ago the U.S. Public Health Service tested a sample of the water the Paguate villagers drank for as long as the people lived there. The water was from a spring under the village and was slightly radioactive. As a “down-winder” exposed to fallout (and yellowcake), I pin my hopes for good health on my genetic inheritance from my Paguate ancestors who over the centuries might have acquired a resistance to radiation.