By Mike Anton
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

CORTEZ -- This is hard country, full of holes. Holes into which countless men poured their dreams of striking it rich. Holes in which they discovered that breaking your back for a day's pay got you just that, nothing less.

But maybe something more.

"My husband was thrilled to be a uranium miner. Thrilled to be getting $2 a day," Kathryn Hughes says, waving two fingers twisted at odd angles by arthritis. "Perry, my first husband, that is."

Hughes is 88, broke and broken down, living in a subsidized apartment in Cortez full of yard-sale furniture. She has had four husbands. The first three -- Perry, Oscar and Loren -- were uranium miners back in the frenzied '50s, during the boom days when every hand out here held a Geiger counter.

Ed Baird, 78, used a Geiger counter, dynamite and a sledgehammer to hunt uranium in this mine near Dove Creek northwest of Cortez. Uranium mining triggered a boom in western Colorado in the 1940 and 1950s, but the bust wasn't far behind.

All three died of lung diseases.

"They didn't know about radiation," Hughes says. "They were just tickled to death to have a job. Any job."

A block away, Fern Maestas remembers how her husband didn't complain, didn't hold a grudge in the months between his diagnosis and death of lung cancer.

"Fred was not the type to get angry. He didn't blame anybody," Maestas, 73, says. "He did say a couple of times that he hated to leave me."

A cart-load full of pain, but nothing compared to the chain-reaction that exploded through Louie Randolph's family. Her husband, three of his brothers, three of her sisters' husbands. All miners, all dead of lung disease.

"Arnold, he'd sit around with his little spit can all the time," Randolph, 81, says. "The stuff that'd come out, it was black as tar."

Hard country, full of widows. A country scarred by good times gone bad.

Booms and busts fill Colorado history. The cycle is perhaps our most lasting legacy, so enduring it has defined the state's economy just as the mountains define its geography.

Fur trappers and gold prospectors. Silver barons and homesteading farmers. Oilmen and real estate tycoons. All were caught in Colorado's paradoxical web of profit and loss, where big bonanzas often led to bigger cleanups, where fortunes were made while landscapes and lives were destroyed.

Where making a living could kill a man.

Catching a break in the red-rock canyons and bone-dry valleys of western Colorado has always been difficult, like snagging a bullet with your teeth.

This is a West that was still wild well into the 1940s. The decade that introduced the Atomic Age also brought the first paved roads and electricity to much of this remote, rugged region.

When the closemouthed government men suddenly showed up in 1942 wanting all the uranium they could get their hands on, locals were puzzled. They wouldn't hear about the Manhattan Project for years, didn't know that the road to Trinity and Hiroshima ran through their backyard.

To them, uranium was waste, tossed aside in the mining of carnotite, a mineral-rich ore that's as common as sagebrush in the prehistoric sea bottom of the Colorado Plateau.

Carnotite has three byproducts -- uranium, radium and vanadium. Radium launched the area's first boom. From 1910 until the late 1920s, the rare radioactive metal used for X-rays and cancer treatments was more valuable than gold.

When a far richer lode was found in Africa, the boom turned to bust. Then it turned once more. The discovery that vanadium hardened steel got the mines humming again, put money in people's pockets. Until the market for it crashed, too.

In 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission literally created the uranium mining industry, becoming the sole legal purchaser and offering a bounty for newly discovered deposits. Uranium had ended World War II, but now a new war was at hand -- a cold one with the Russians that could turn hot in the time it takes to split an atom.

Overnight, tens of thousands of men flooded these canyons, bitten by the uranium bug. Eventually, more than 4,000 mines would be sunk across the Colorado Plateau -- the Pack Rat and Rimrock Blues, the Bachelor and Lucky Blunder, Mineral Joe, Bonanza and the Merry Widow.

"There's a mine shaft behind every twisted juniper. Prospectors with Geiger counters crawl through greasewood and pinyon and cactus in search of the new gold. Boom towns arise in every canyon," the Rocky Mountain News reported in 1954. "There's a surge of life and drama on the plateau that hasn't been known in Colorado since the boom days of Cripple Creek."

Ed Baird had given up farming once to prospect for vanadium, and he was glad to give it up again. There was a drought, and working the fields earned a dollar a day. Mining paid three times that.

"Three dollars a day," Baird says. "For that, a man would do anything."

Baird and his brother drove to Grand Junction, bought a Geiger counter and took to the backcountry. For two years they lived out of their truck, coming in only for supplies.

They drilled holes by hand, one of them twisting a sharpened steel rod into the rock, the other smacking the back of it with a sledgehammer. A dozen took all day, after which they'd fill them with dynamite, shoot the holes and reach for their shovels.

The next day, they'd begin again.

Fred Maestas was a miner who died of lung cancer. His widow Fern said Fred "was not the type to get angry, he didn't blame anybody."

"There was nothing easy about it," says Baird, whose 78-year-old hands are as big and rough as catcher's mitts.

Nothing safe, either. There were explosions that went awry, cave-ins. Once, Baird was working a drill and slashed off his right index finger below the first knuckle. He was bleeding badly, but it was only noon and there was plenty of day left, so Baird put on a leather glove and kept drilling.

Later, workers comp gave him $750 for that knuckle. "I always figured I had fifteen hundred dollars left in that finger."

The biggest danger, of course, was what Baird and the thousands of others who mined uranium didn't know: They were being exposed to tremendous levels of radioactive radon gas that could, decades later, cause lung diseases, including cancer.

Government officials knew that as early as 1951 but kept the hazard secret to keep production rolling. When, as predicted, lung cancers began showing up in miners at five times the normal rate, that was kept secret, too.

No one -- especially the Russians -- needed to know.

"The federal government made a conscious decision to sacrifice some of these miners to win the Cold War," says Cortez attorney Tim Tuthill. "They were soldiers in the Cold War. But they haven't been treated like soldiers."

Tuthill represents miners and their families who are seeking compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. Passed by Congress in 1990, the act provides $100,000 to uranium miners suffering from lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses who can document extended hours underground.

It's not easy. The passage of time, the transient nature of mining work, lost and spotty records and what critics charge are impossible hurdles for anyone who ever smoked tobacco combine to make many cases difficult to prove. The recent relaxation of some regulations may aid hundreds of miners and widows; Tuthill says only time will tell.

Right now, his scorecard is bleak. He has handled about 400 cases and been successful in 59. Of the 140 still active, only about one in five involve a living miner.

"There aren't many of them left," says Tuthill, a 42-year-old bear of a man whose slumped shoulders carry the weight of his jaded view of legal work.

He has watched old men die waiting for their checks. Watched a Navajo family so appreciative of getting theirs that they blessed the check in his office, a dozen people wailing and crying.

One miner whose doctor suspected that lung cancer was causing him to cough up blood never went back for a definitive diagnosis. Instead, he drove to a cabin, smoked three packs of cigarettes and blew himself and his dog to pieces with dynamite. No diagnosis, no check.

After five years of waiting, Fern Maestas recently got word that her claim had been approved. But the cases of Louie Randolph and Kathryn Hughes remain in limbo.

Grace Pickens waited seven years for her check. At 79, she figured she wouldn't live to see it.

Her husband, Charles, withered to 80 pounds in the eight months it took him to die of cancer, leaving behind nothing but $10,000 in hospital bills. "I paid them $65 a month for I don't know how many years," Pickens says.

"What Charles did was hard and dirty work," she adds. "We made a little money doing it, but he always thought we were going to hit it rich. Never did. Some mines paid off good. Some didn't do so good. But he kept going back to it. He just had these hopes all the time that he'd strike it rich.

"I just let him do it. He was my keeper. I trusted him."

Outside her trailer in Mancos, a sign welcomes guests: Charles & Grace Pickens, it reads. It has been 16 years since he died. "He was a good man," she says.

Over three decades, billions of dollars of uranium left here destined for weapons plants and a once-thriving nuclear power industry. Yet the region doesn't look like it ever experienced a boom. This is a Colorado with more trailers than trophy homes.

The truth is, few who were bitten by the uranium bug got rich. Sure, there were stories, like Charlie Steen coming up from Texas, living in a tar-paper shack, striking a lode worth $300 million. Most stories didn't end like that.

"Three or four guys made big money. But thousands of us were out there starving," says Ed Baird, who mined until 1968, when the government stopped buying uranium.

Still, it was good work while it lasted. "It was a lifesaver," Baird says. "This uranium boom, it was like the Lord put something there for you, because out here if you didn't mine, you didn't live."

Radiation never scared him. Even now, Baird laughs at the memory of a saucer of refined uranium yellowcake he kept in his living room as a souvenir. "My brother's kid got into it and ate most of it. Kids'll eat anything. Didn't do him any harm, though."

He sits in a recliner that also serves as his bed. Baird hasn't been able to sleep lying down for a dozen years, ever since his breathing went from bad to worse. He's not sure what's wrong; X-rays don't detect cancer, and he hasn't sought further advice from doctors.

"Can't do anything for me," Baird says, his voice a raspy foghorn.

Like many old-timers out here, Baird doesn't trust doctors. Or lawyers. Or the government.

One of Tuthill's clients so mistrusted banks that he buried the $100,000 he got from the government -- minus $10,000 in attorney fees -- in his backyard.

"He's one of the few who still have it," Tuthill says.

Most who get the government money rip through it quickly, he says. Maybe nine out of 10 people he has helped.

"They make bad investments. They get into a business without knowing what they're doing. This and that," he says. "It's their choice. That doesn't mean the money didn't change their lives for awhile."

Bev Baird, Ed's wife, heard of one widow who filed for bankruptcy five months after getting her check. "I know one woman who blew it at the casino on the Indian reservation," she says.

Hard country, where booms and busts are part of life, a hard cycle to break.

"First thing I'll do if I get a check is help my grandson go to college," says Kathryn Hughes, who gets $367 a month in Social Security and is waiting on three compensation checks. One each for Perry, Oscar and Loren.

"Then I would help my second son," she adds. "Because he has a dream, a big dream, and I know that he's capable of carrying it out if he had the finances. He's got a mine and that mine was a big, big, big operation back in 1900. Gold and silver and copper. And he, being a geologist, knows the potential of that area. But he can't get any finances to do anything with it.

"It might be risky," Hughes says. "But on the other hand, if his dream would come true, he'd make good money."

SLEEVE

Booms and busts

Fur: As fashions change in Paris and London, the price of a beaver pelt drops to $1 during the 1830s. A collapsing market and overtrapping decimate the fur trade in Colorado.

Gold: Thousands of gold-seekers flood mining camps in 1859, but many leave Colorado empty-handed. These "go-backers" are just the first to find ruin in a state where boosters claim everyone can strike it rich.

Farming: Homesteaders in the 1880s are convinced by land speculators that the nation's "rainbelt" is moving westward. It is not, and many abandon their farms during the drought and economic depression of the 1890s.

Silver: A silver boom sweeps the state in the 1870s. But a plunge in silver prices in 1893 throws Colorado's economy into a depression and turns mining camps into ghost towns.

Coal: Industrialization and a huge demand for coal feed boom towns across the state. By the 1920s, however, oil and natural gas begin to replace coal as the nation's primary fuel, and Colorado's coal towns begin a long decline.

Uranium: The discovery that refined uranium can be used to fuel nuclear bombs and power plants sets off a frenzy of prospecting across western Colorado in the 1940s and 1950s. The good times evaporate in the late 1960s as prices and demand for uranium fall.

Oil: Skyrocketing oil prices in the 1970s benefit Colorado. Energy companies produce high-paying jobs in Denver while development of western Colorado's oil shale field promises a bonanza. But oil prices drop in the early 1980s and jobs vanish.

Real estate: In 1984, dropping oil prices and layoffs in other industries burst the speculative bubble of Denver's booming real estate market. Colorado becomes the foreclosure capital of the nation. By 1991, newcomers flocking to the state begin a remarkable turnaround that has sent land prices soaring ever since.

October 3, 1999

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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