INTERVIEWEE: Edward J. Johannsen
INTERVIEWER: John McFarland
SUBJECT: East Utah Project - Uranium Mining
DATE: July 1, 1971, 2:30 P.M., Nucla, Colorado
TRANSCRIBER: Pauline A. Preator
DATE: January, 1987

JM: Mr. Johannsen would you please state your name, your age and your place of birth?
EJ: Edward J. Johannsen. I was born in Salt Lake City, April 13, 1913.
JM: Mr. Johannsen, when did you come to this particular area?
EJ: In 1932 in August.
JM: Did you go directly into the mining business when you came here?
EJ: No, I engaged in farming a little while, that was during the depression and things were pretty rough around here. The mines were all shut down. I went into the mining business in 1939.
JM: Was this vanadium miring that you went into?
EJ: Yeah, I went to work for Union Carbide.
JM: And what mine did you go to work in?
EJ: Tripod Mine.
JM: Was this a particularly good mine as far as the production of the mine?
EJ: Yeah, it was a pretty high grade mine. It had quite a lot of ore in it. We shipped, oh I don't know how many thousands of tons out of it. Several.
JM: What was your particular job at the mines when you started in?
EJ: Well, I started in as handmucking, we used a track and car them days and we loaded all of the cars by hand and I started in as a handmucker. Did that for about eight or nine months and then I broke in on a machine.
JM: Did you do any prospecting before you went to work in the mines?
EJ: No, Huh-uh. No this was my first contact with mining.
JM: And what was your rate of pay when you went to work for the mucker?
EJ: Four dollars a day. A dollar after board.
JM: And when you moved up to Machinist?
EJ: When I got to running the drill I got $4.75. That was for an eight hour a day.
JM: Eight hours a day, forty eight hours a week?
EJ: No, we worked forty hours and six hours overtime on Saturday.
JM: Were you paid a bonus for any thing extra that you pulled out of the mine?
EJ: No. Straight time.
JM: Can you remember some of the men that you worked with at the mine?
EJ: Yeah. There was one guy by the name of Tom Banarsdale, he is the guy that taught me how to run the drill. A guy by the name of John King, he worked in there as a trammer. Another guy by the name of Ralph Hickman, he was a mucker and trammer. Oh, Nate Woods was another guy, a guy from Oklahoma, I mucked with him for a while. Another guy by the name of Jim Smith. He was a partner of mine when I was hand mucking. They put two men on a car for the hand mucking. Then production was around out every day. The machine men put a round in and we use to muck it out every day. It took a full eight hours or if we got it out sooner so much the better. A lot of times we got it out in six hours. Around fifteen for eighteen ton rounds.
JM: About eighteen ton that was a days work
EJ: Yeah, it was classed as a days work.
JM: When did you start prospecting out on your own?
EJ: Well, I went to contracting in 1949. You see the war come along in 1941 and then in January of '42 I joined the Navy and was in the service until November of '45. Then I went to school, I thought I would get out of the mining business but then I couldn't get interested in any thing so I came back and went hack in the mines again. First just for wages then I went to lease my own in '49.
JM: In what particular area did you lease in?
EJ: Out on the Wedding Bell group in Bull Canyon.
JM: Did you have pretty rood success at first out there?
EJ: Well, yeah, we made pretty fair there for a while and then I was with Joe Rise, he was a partner of mine and then he developed silicosis and had to quit, so he just turned the lease on over to me. Well, that is when I really got in debt. We ran out of ore and I was in mining country. I stayed with it and finally got some ore and come out with it.
JM: Did you stay with this particular mine, you stayed with it and ?
EJ: Well, I stayed with it for, oh, I don't know, about a year or a year and a half something like this and then moved to the Mary Jane Mine and the Broadway Mine, they belonged to private people by the name of McKeys. Elna is George McKeys widow she owned them at that time and I leased off of her. And then we ran out of ore and quit. We've staked some claims. Where did I go from there? After I left the Wedding Bell? Oh, yeah, then I went to lease off the Union Cardine, you know, the spud patch over at Slick Rock. I was over there for a year and a half I guess, then I left the company and went out alone on a private lease down in Little Gyp where Albert Bavereno and some of his properties and I was there for about two years. I left there and took another lease with a company, left that. I was up there one summer then took a lease off a company but that was in '56. Yes, in '56 that was when we started building the Hotel. Well they had the Norma Jean and one more (?) in the mine down there. Oh the Full Moon. There were seven Moons over there and they called them Half Moons, Full Moons and well, seven little holes you might say. We did pretty geed en them. Just pretty fair. Then in '58 I stayed with a company there until '58 then I had one lease ever in Utah down the Strawberry, that was the name of the property, the Strawberry down Montizuma Canyon. I had one going ever there for Union Carbide. I had nine leases going at this particular time and then we shut the price of the vanadium off. Most of these property leases were geed vanadium and pretty hungry in uranium. It was after vanadium that I had to quit.
JM: The vanadium was the Government the one that was buying this is this what happened?
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EJ: The companies were buying the vanadium but of course the uranium was
subsidized by the Government, you might say, they were buying it.
JM: New you were active during the uranium boom which would be in the late '40's and up to about even the '60's.
EJ: Yeah, well the boom actually fizzled out around 1957 that is when all of the stocks went all to pieces. A let of these penny stocks turned out to be worthless and the promoters started to get out of the picture. That was about the size of it.. From '53 to '56 it was real active around there, into '57.
JM: Were most of the geed claims leased from the big companies?
EJ: Well, net necessarily. The companies had a let of the bigger properties, bigger ere bodies staked out because they had the hired geologists and all this, you know, they knew hew to trace that ere out and the rest of us we just kind of stumbled along and started in with the rent showing and just kept going.
JM: Out of all the mining properties that you leased on your own which one would you say produced the best grade ere?
EJ: De you mean as far as I was concerned in my experience? Well there was a Northern Spitz mine ever in Slick Rock, it was a Union Carbide mine. It was a shaft mine.
JM: About hew deep was the shaft?
EJ: Around 450 feet.
JM: And did you use the Navajo's as laborers at the mine?
EJ: Yeah, a geed percentage was Navajos. Yes, I had a turn ever of seventy of them in one year.
JM: Did you find them good miners?
EJ: You bet. There's some of them was excellent miners. As a whole, you take them as a whole they were kind of unreliable. In this respect you would pay them off and they would go to the reservation and wouldn't show up.
JM: Now, did the Tribal Council set the wage that they worked for?
E J : No.
JM: You paid them the going wage?
EJ: Yeah, I would start them out at a low wage. If they proved to be geed men and pretty reliable then I would raise them. This way I could weed them out.
JM: Can you remember any stories about some of the miners in this area during this time?
EJ: Well, they have to be clean, they say. JM: No, not necessarily. (Laughter)
EJ: No, we have had our ups and downs in this business, I'll say that. Some of them are kind of humorous some of the situations that we got into. Some of them weren't. Paul Carver down here, he was a high graden ore at Union Carbide. He said, now I guess I can tell it being you said so but anyway he spent all night loading this old army four by four truck and coming out from under the ore bins he had a little steep hill to pull and he broke an axle on his truck. He walked all the way from Bull Canyon clear in to Naturita which is about 20 miles. He was really sweating it out to get that truck out of there before they caught him with the ore on it. It was high grade ore, you see. He finally made it. Another time the

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same guy, I was mining over in Bull Canyon and I came out, I had an old army
four by four and I would haul about 6 ton on it and I was on the old Monogram road. It was real rough and crooked and I broke down so I just got the truck off the side of the road and started pulling it, you know, off to the side of the road and dumped my load. Then Scooby, he was a contract hauler and his truck came in and they hooked on to me and pulled me into Naturita so I could get my truck fixed. Anyway Paul was coming out of the Bull Canyon and saw that pile of ore there so he loads it on his truck. He hauled it into the ZCA Mill and dumped it he got the assey back on it and it wouldn't run. So we was down at the beer joint having a beer one night and ho come in there and jumped all over me and said, "Boy, you're sure a poor minor, that ore you mine don't even run." (Laughter) I was out in the mean time trying to find my ore whether it was stolen. If I had some better grade in he would have sweetened her up. The average was to low to sell. I thought it was kind f ornery to steal a load of ore off me and he come back and jump me out because it wasn't good enough grade. Oh, yeah we have had some characters around here in the years past. Yeah, one time we were sitting down there in Git Valley, me and a guy by the name of Pearl Bell, we just took to eating supper and Pearl stuttered and he said "Hhhhow are you doin' Eddy Jjjjoe? (Laughter). We heard music, by golly I wondered what the heck was going on, so by God there wasn't no windows and so we went out the door and looked and here was Woody Drudge down in Naturita and he had his two daughters with him and one daughter and her girl friend had a guitar and here they drove up out there and they were singing religious songs and they told us we had Letter change our way of living. See the light. Pearl told them, he said "Well, you can change your way but I'm hungry. I'm going to eat this buckskin." (Laughter) It was way out in the boon docks and we never dreamed of anything like this coming up. Yeah, the trouble is most of them old boys are dead now. I had one guy working for me, his name was Swede Carlson. He was a Hell a hand to drink. He had been drunk for months, I guess. I finally got him out of Naturita and got him out of town and went to the mine and the next day he had the shakes and was in terrible shape. He was using Carbide lights in them days. I had the Carbide can sitting, just sitting back inside the portal behind the pillar so, he went in there to fill his light and fumbled in there and it was about half dark, you know, and he reached for that Carbide can and there was a big old bull snake back there. Just in the shade there in the summer, you know. So, he seen that snake, you know, and boy he throwed his light down and he came a running out and he said, "Eddy Joe there is a snake back in there, by God Eddy Joe there is a snake, there had better be a snake." So I went back there and looked and sure enough there was a snake. He said if there ain't no snake there, boy I'm going to the cabin, I've had it. We found snakes that day, they come in to the portal we had kind of a big open portal and a lot of gob in there and got in there where it was cool in the summer. But I got a big kick out of that. We ate a lot of beans and buckskin them days, that was our staples. We use to average a deer a week. When I was out on the Wedding Bell there was seven of us. There was two different mines. I had two guys working for me and then there

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was another several leases on another hole. There was seven of us every week and we would get a young buck or something to feed them. In the summer we took the meat and salted it. We would get Morton's liquid salt, you know. We would get these three pound glass coffee jars, you know, and put a layer of meat and a layer of salt and a layer of meat and boy it was real good eating. We would have to par-boil it to get the salt out, you know. It was whole lot like ham. This is what we'd eat most of the time with the beans. We always had a pot of beans. Them days that was where they had (?) or anything like that. Work all day and half the night a lot of the times and then the truck would show up at day light in the morning and would want a load of ore and we would have to go muck it off the ground and fill the truck. It was pretty rough.
JM: Would you say that the Naturita was the center of the week end for the miners in this area?
EJ: Yeah, Naturita, most every body congregated around the bars, you know. If you wanted to know anything about what was going on in the whole industry, why, just go to the bars and listen awhile and visit awhile and you would find out. The low grade always went to the high grade and get to the bars and there was always some guy always left some ore some place that they never could find it again. There has been a lot of deals been made right in the bar. Folks leasing, buying claims, selling claims especially during the boom it was real rough. They had one guy down there, his name was Floyd Blair, he was a character. He sold some claims, he got $17,000, he had plenty of money. He would come in and lay $100 bill on the bar and never pick up any change. He would give the house a drink, and when that was gone he would lay another one down. So, we were sitting there at the bar one evening and Colmer, the bar maid, she went to answer the phone and she said, "For you, Floyd somebody wants to talk to you". He went up and talked for a little bit and he was kind of a short, kind of an important looking guy, he talked a little bit and come back there "Well, Eddie Joe, I just made another $1,000, I sold another claim." There was an old boy that had a good sense of humor was sitting down at the end of the bar and he fell off the bar stool and no body gave it much thought why he fell off his stool on to the floor, you know, some of them thought he just slid, they didn't think much about it. He got up on his feet and got back upon his stool and went back to drinking again. Pretty quick the phone rang again and old Floyd he - it was for him and he hustled back to that phone, you know, and talked awhile and came back and he said "Well, I just sold another claim, another $1,000, give the house a drink." O.K., so they set the house up and this old guy fell off of that stool again. The third time this happened, this was an hour or two later the third time he got a phone call, I think it was actually his wife trying to get him to get home for supper. (Laughter). Then the third time, why, the same thing happened and old Floyd come back and lie turned to me and said, "What in hell is the matter with that son-of-a-bitch down there? I said, "Hell, I don't know". This woman who was bar maid come up to Floyd she said, "Oh, there's nothing wrong with him he is just allergic to bull shit, that's all" (Laughter) But that didn't stop him one bit, he just kept right on buying the house drinks and

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just kept right on a going.
JM: Did he come out of the boom with anything?
EJ: No, he blowed it all and gambled it all away and drank it all up. He ended up broke.
JM: Do you know of any thing about the gambling end in Naturita? There was a couple of comments made about the game that went on in the Cafe across the street from the Texaco station there'?
EJ: Oh, Yeah, they use to go down in the basement there and shoot craps and play 21 all night long and all day. They had some terrible games down there. I saw one guy go out of there with a whole beer case full of money one time. He had ones, fives, tens just crammed in it, walked out of the door with a whole - well, you know how big a beer case is. I don't know how much he had in there but he was up in the thousands. Oh, they would shoot for 500 bucks when they would throw them dice. Work all week for the money and take you check and go down there and grab the dice and double or nothing and here they go. If they lost it, O.K. they borrowed some money and make out till next pay day.
JM: Can you remember any thing about the law enforcement?
EJ: Well, at that time we had a Deputy Sheriff over here, this was several years back and he kind of lived and let live, you know. Unless some body called him out for something serious, or something like that he would have to do something, otherwise he would kind smooth everything over and turn his back.
JM: Did he serve both Nucla and Naturita?
EJ: Yeah, he was the Deputy in the west end here.
JM: Was there any feeling towards the people or the miners that came down from the Urivan mines up there. I understood that they weren't allowed to have the booze in the city up there so they came down there.
EJ: Yeah, Urivan was a dry, company old town. There was years there you couldn't even buy a bottle of beer. But they have changed that now.
JM: I understood they use to come down, this was their only
outlet was to come down to Naturita, is this right?
EJ: Yeah, that was the reason they had one up here all the time had a pool hall and beer joint and then they finally got in the shop joint and well, they had two here at one time. Course Naturita always had a couple down here. It was just split about equal. Naturita was more on the main drive from Grand Junction through here and there was a lot more traffic.
JM: Were the miners from the Urivan area - were they accepted alright down here. I've heard some stories they got their lumps when they oame down.
EJ: Oh, they had a little rumble every once in a while you know. Especially between the mill hands and the minors. This is where they had problems. The mill hands always looked down on the minors as a bunch of clogs, you know and not realizing all of the time if it wasn't for the minors they wouldn't have a job. Yeah, they looked down their noses at us. We didn't associate too much together, you know. Oh, on rare occasions, I've seen rare times but there was a lot of good guys at the mills, too. But the minors kind of hung to them selves cause they talked the

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same language. Where the mill was a foreign language to us. They would talk about their uranium surges and vanadium surges and that didn't interest us, we wandered what the grade of uranium and how much and where at and how many holes and drive this drift and sink that shaft and we all knew this, it was our business. How much for doing this type of work and who was making money and who wasn't. You could always tell the guy making money cause he was the big spender, the big boss. There was a lot of fortunes made and a lot of it spent as fast as they made it. One guy, Swede Lewis, made $30,000 in 30 days and in a year he was flat broke. He lives at Monticello. I see he is still here now and he has both legs off and he has a little cart and a little shetlan pulling that cart. He is crippled, probably on welfare now, I don't know. A lot of guys made some good money, I was out during at the Wedding Bell and when I started off arid went to, about a month after the last round they were pushed. I drove a dredge stick on a street of ore about two inches thick, it was good ore, good grade and it just stayed the same. I just kept driving with the hand muckin and the wheel barrow and hell, I owed a bill grocery bill out here in the Basin store, owed Jack Cloud about $300 and I just got to where I just couldn't see to pay these guys wages and wasn't making enough ore, I was just crawling in a hole all of the time. So, a guy by the name of Soot Kaisin and Tom Eldon was working for me and so I went out there one day and I told them, "Hell, lets just button her up, I can't afford it any longer." So we quit, just mucked that round out about half way out and left her. Then there was three guys, Homer Rosenquist, Melvin Connley and Melvin - oh I can't remember his name, they were the one that took the lease right behind me and they went in and mucked that thing out and that two inch streak went up to four inches. It started to open up. It was right on a point and I had my compressor sitting out on this point and the drive had driven back under my compressor and there was eight feet of ore buried between my compressor and this ore that they mined out later. But they went in there arid they took out 157,000 out of there in six months. It was pure old yellow, it was just one log after another. They took 157,000 and the way it all boiled down, Connley divorced his wife, bought a new car, new pickup, got in trouble with his wife, they divorced. Rodgers he wasn't married but he was buying every body in the country good drinking whiskey. Homer, he kind of saved his money a little bit and he staked some claims and done pretty good. He kind of hung on to his money. All three got in trouble with their money. They use to kid me afterwards when they would see me, they would say, "Eddy Joe, where are you working? When you get ready to quit, let us know we want to lease on it. (Laughter) Yeah, this is mining, you know, you get a good deposit of ore and money oomes so fast you don't know where it comes from. Then you can put it right back into mining.
JM: Do you ever get the urge to go back to the mines?
EJ: To the mines? Oh, Yeah, I like it. I always wonder what is behind that next round.
JM: Are you still active in the mining business? EJ: Oh,Yeah, Yeah, I'm still contracting.
JM: I guess it sort of gets in your blood, is that right?

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EJ: Yeah. Well it is just like - I was aworkin for Ton Banardsdale and Joe Rice and I classed my self as a pretty good machine man in them days, and they was paying me a little above the average and I was getting a $1 an hour and I thought I was making real good money. But then I went to
leasing and I had this old four by four truck. I would mine all day and haul ore at night and we went out there, me and another guy, left Nucla and drove out there, it was forty-five miles and I was building a piece of road that come to an old mine port and I wanted to clean this dump up and pick up a little shoring ore that was left on the outside and in the mine too.

Beginning Part 2

There was a bunch of big boulders laying out there, oh, some of them 10 or 12 foot in diameter, you know, and I had to more a couple of them in order to get this road up to this dump so I pulled the compressor down there and drilled this one and Hell, it was ore. I shot the damn thing. Well, Danny and I went out there one morning, left here about 7 o'clock, 6:30 or 7, we went out there and shot that one boulder, loaded it in the truck, six ton and had it into the mill and was back out to the mine at midnight that night and it brought me 160 bucks. That's when I quit working for wages. (Laughter)
JM: Can you remember any particular instances about the ways that you came on to some rich ore? Like the boulder incident you just talked about now?
EJ: Yeah. Well, I don't know I moved all the deposit ore I found. I done a lot of underground drilling. When I took that Northern, see that was one of the better mines I've had. I don't know, I have had hundreds, this one here the company sent me over and they said three months to clean it up. Pull pillars and mine the streaks and clean it up so I went over there and these guys that had the lease ahead of me they just mined all the easy stuff and when the ore got down two or three foot then they would quit. Anyway, I went in there and started pulling a few of the working some of the bigger pillars you know, slabbing them off and timbers support the Ground and these little streaks kept intriguing me you know, and this had been my theory in mining all through the years where ever you get into an area where you've got big ore they don't get it all. There's always another pod some place sticking around in my experience of mining and this is found to be pretty true all the way through. So any way I went to Uraine and got two guys, hard rockers, come down here and I took an old 89 meter saw and a Garner-Denver hammer and mounted it up on a shelf with a four foot chain of steel and went to long hole underground and I could get in 110 or 120 feet with this chain. I paid these guys $700 bucks a month to come down here to do nothing but (?). Well, consequently when they got through I had as much as eleven feet of ore. I had one roll there that was eleven feet high, twenty foot wide and run for 300 feet. We were shipping 1,000 to 1,100 to 1,200 ton and as high as 1,600 ton a month and it was good grade. Good money. I had 22 men working at the time and had a big overhead and a big overhead on the shaft. Always maintain you couldn't open the door on the shaft and go into the hole for less than a $100 bill and at that time you start your blowers, compressors and got a hoist operator and mechanics and everything. It takes about a 100 bill to start off every morning. But we were there three and a half years at that one mine, produced a total of 27,000 tons before I

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cleaned her up. Union Carbide, John Emerson is superintendent of all the mines over here, I went to a mining cnvention in Denver and he went clear out of his way to come and see me and told me as long as I wanted to mine I never had to worry about getting a lease from Union Carbide. That I had done a remarkable job. The mine was in the red when I took it over and spent over $250,000 sinking the shaft and setting up the head rig, and they hadn't got their investment back and by the time I finished up why they were running 50,000 tons of ore a month. So they come out and made the books black and they felt real good about it. Then I went down over the hill and bought another shack from a guy by the name of Fennel Fitten from Dove Creek. I gave him $25,000 for his head frame and all of his machinery and the lease on this shack. There was ore every place I looked in there and every time I would see e streak of ore end drive into it two or three feet it would sink. I just barely broke even and spent a year and a half in that hole. So this is the story of money. I was so disappointed, I thought sure there was another big pod in there but it didn't work out. Finally, I had to salvage the head frame, and all the hoists and all of that stuff and peddle it in order to come out end break even on it.
JM: Has this particular mine been worked since?
EJ: This last one I've been telling you about? No. No I sold the head frame and everything off from it. They went in and cemented the shaft off. Yeah, it was - I sweated it out with a bang too, that $25,000. They were sweating it out with me, let's put it that way. But - oh, we have had some good holes, some bad ones but over the years take it all the way through why it has been a good business. It is the only business I know of where a man with a little determination and strong back without any education you might say and make a fortune. If your lucky, I wouldn't say luck, I don't believe in the word luck, I believe you make your own luck by planning and just doing a little bit more than the next guy all of the time. Put in one extra hole every day and the breaks will finally come your way.
JM: You are one of the few independents left around, aren't you?
EJ: Yeah, Yeah, Carbide had as many as 130 contractors at one time and they cut back and they are clear down to 11. I thought sure that I would be one of them to go but they hung on to me as a clean-up artists. They would call me the clean-up artist. Any time any mines that any body mined would hole out and say was out of ore and true then they would call me to go clean them up for them. Especially company operations. Because they have got such a terrific overhead, you know with geologists, surveyors, drilling crews, production engineers and all of this which they can't mine. It is small stuff and sit right on top of it and keep their finger on it all of the time it just gets away from you too much overhead. So they turn it over to me to cleanup and I call them the old dogs. Kind of like a ghoul in the grave yard. I would just go in and salvage what is left of it. Some of them are pretty rough too. If a mine sits for a period of time the timbers get rotten, she caves, you got a lot to clean up, retimbing and bad ground and had air. This is got to be the thing now is your ventilation. I guess you know some of those old holes is real hard to clean up.

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JM: When you go in to clean up one of these areas do you have to meet all of the safety standards and if it wasn't done before you got in there you have to put in the ventilation and the rest of it.
EJ: Yeah, that is my terms with the company. They furnish the ventilation and supplies it just that we have to maintain in working in their mines. But it gets to be a problem, course I never did work with any artificial ventilation until '61 when I went to the Northern Mines. We never had artificial ventilation - just natural. A lot of days I've come out of the hole and puked up my breakfast at noon and come out at night and puke up my dinner from powder smoke, dead air, everything. Some of those holes after we started cutting (Tape damaged) seven years work (?).
JM: I was going to ask you about the radium poisoning and do you know of some of the miners that have gotten in some?
EJ: Well, there has been a lot of these guy that I worked with are dead now but they have died of lung cancer and various other causes that they - most of it has been lung cancer. But I don't know if you can nail it down, a lot of these doctors do today they nail it down to radiation but most of these guys that I worked with come out of the hard rock country and had a touch of miners con most of it was real dry years ago and they used water you know and they were all, you might say, was dusted up and wouldn't come in to this story and then of course the constant explosion of vanadium hole was bad news and they ended up respiratory troubles.
JM: Did the government or the company keep a close - a real close watch on you, whether you are meeting the standards at all times?
EJ: Oh, yeah. We have company inspectors, state inspectors and federal inspectors. We have the three sets of them to go by. And they don't none of them jive. They all three got different ideas so it keeps us jumping one way and then the other to keep up with them. But any more we have to give all of our men physicals every year. Spit tests, complete physicals, always. Just got a bunch of samples back today on our lab what: we had all our men went through.
JM: About how many men do you have working?
EJ: Well right now I'm down. We've only these three small holes and (?) all together. I have been working up there and well about a year, ago I had seven contracts going. We were working out 21 or 22.
JM: Have you, yourself, ever been trapped below ground in a cave-in or any kind of an accident?
EJ: No, 1 new was trapped in a cave-in. I've crawled through some cave-ins. I remember one in particular, there was a load of clay in there and it sluffed in and filled the mine pretty well full and I wanted to get back behind this cave and see how much ore was in there so I scraped this clay and crawled through this little hole and went in and looked around and then started back out through this hole and I noticed this hole got, a little smaller. Kind of panicked me for a little bit but I - Hell, I knew damn well that ground couldn't shift that fast so I just scratched out a little more clay, it was a distance of about 10 feet, pushed it behind me and

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slid on through and come on out. But for a little bit it panicked me.
JM: In any of these lease's you have had, have you had any problems on them as far a cave-in or this kind of disaster?
EJ: We have had cave-ins but I have never had a man killed or even had one seriously hurt in all the years I have been in the business. I have had two or three lost maybe the end of a finger or broker leg. The guy that got a broken leg got it on dump outside, sorting dump. I had a big brain storm. Up town along the park the wall was pretty shallow, 25 or 30 foot deep and it was mined in under here years back (Tape damaged) Yeah, I went to Mt. Rose had a guy working for me and he was a heavy equipment operator. He was kinda, well, he put twenty years in the business operating bulldozers, drag lines and stuff like that and he kept telling me, he said, "By God, Eddie Joe, why in the Hell don't you sink on that." I had some big pillars, had one in particular that 50 foot in diameter and 16 foot high and I took the figures down to Carbide and they estimated around 700 tons of good ore in this pillar. But to get it, this was the thing cause there were were caves all around and we couldn't get in to it. So we went over to Mt. Rose and I bought an old clam shell at the junk yard over there. Took me 2 days and 3 blow outs before I got it back over here and up on Long Park. There was an old timer with a chain drive on it and I took it up to Long Park and every body in the country thought I had lost my marbles. They were wandering what in the Hell I was going to do with that clam shell, it was a 3/4 yard clam shell. So I set it right over that damn pillar and 90 hours actual working time we were on top of that pillar. We just put a 12 by 12 hole and shafted it right down and picked it up with the clam. In one month we had that pillar out of there and it made a hell of a stake out. The old clam is still sitting up there right now. We have used it off and on, different
holes. But there was nothing like this ever been tried here before. I felt kind of good about it, you know. In fact, I made that money so quick, the company started looking down their noses cause I was making too much money on them. They wanted to change the contract on me. But they didn't, they finally let one go. But they had all the safety men that was in the organization up there and making
me put a fence and every thing around the shaft, afraid somebody was going to fall an or something like that. Which was alright, you know, so we build a fence around at, but we had no random problems or nothing, we just sunk right down on that. We just packed that ore out in great bag chunks and shipped her.
JM: Is at particularly dangerous to shaft an an area where there has been mining before?
EJ: Well, I don't thank so. You know you got to use common horse sense, you know, keep your walls scaled down and don't let anything loose be hanging and mate the guys wear hard hats because a little pebble dropping 30 foot, you know as only 2 inches diameter as going to hurt like Hell when it hats you. As long as a guy uses common horse sense and scale down, why there's nothing to at. In fact this last one mane, we were on I can't remember the name of at, but any way we went out there and I had a wagon drill and I moved off and started drilling there and I got 14 foot ore so we set over at and clamped shell at and at was down on at and at

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was 20 feet to the top of the ore. After we got down then we toot bob cats and scoop crates an there and went ahead roomed at all out and left a bag pillar and groomed at out and then we went an and put an these great bag crips and toot the pillars out and we took 7,000 tons of ore out of that one pod. So then the company told me no more exploratory drilling. I could drill within 20 feet of my immediate working but no more drilling. It was mating their geologists look. Bad. But at was strictly luck that we hat that. I’ve punched a lot of holes since and haven’t topped anything near equal that.
JM: In your mining now are you using the rubber tare?
EJ: Yeah, we use front end loaders and scoup crates or young buggies they call them, you know, rubber tires on them. Two and three ton.
JM: Now, this a great increase on what you can take out of the mane?
EJ: Oh, yeah, this as the only way to mane. Well, all of the costs run so high, labor and every thing, you got to move fast.
JM: This hasn’t increased your cost? Has it decreased your costs?
EJ: Oh, yeah. Yeah, you bet. We can put an incline down well, the last one was 110 feet an 10 days. It gives us about a 12 degree and we run our own tractors and front end loaders. Two rounds every day – 10 to 12 feet every day. JM: Now are you considering your rounds about 18 tons?
EJ: Well, 5 by 7. At 5 by 7 draft you can usually figure a 6 foot steel about 17 or 18 ton. But the way we are going now with front end leaders we are driving about 9 by 9 now.
JM: Would a round be a 9 by 9?
EJ: Oh, I would say, possibly 30 ton or 35 ton an that neighborhood.
JM: Do you pay your operators by the amount of ore they move out or just by the week?
EJ: Well, 1 split check in on mine. Then we hire labor. We take all mine costs off and split the profits. This is the way to combat (?).
JM: That could add to your costs too.
EJ: Yeah, oh I have paid this one guy $5,200 for one months work. But at the sage token I made $5,200. I think this is the way the world should run. Think of all the big corporations and companies that go in and share the profits, why it would do away with a lot of hard feelings and a lot of unions – do away with unions, strikes and everything.
JM: Well, this particular kind of a contract the man is going to work a little harder also.
EJ: You bet. I have had them as black as midnight. If they are working for a days pay and if 5 o’clock comes and if their pick is up in the air they leave it hang and they are gone.
JM: Do you think that the industry now is on a decline? They are calling it a deterior. Do you agree with that?
EJ: Yeah. Because the big bodies and it is the known bodies that have been mined out. It is down to the small streaks and bodies now and consequently it is more ways to more and more costs. But I think the prices of the finished product will

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probably increase in the next year or two.
JM: Do you expect the prices to go up?
EJ: Yeah. Let me tell you the ecology bit.
JIM: I was going to ask you about the ecology bit. How do you feel about the ecology now?
EJ: Well, I kind of like it in once sense. In another sense I think they are going clear over board with it. Now like these reserve blocks that belong to the Atomic Energy Commission. We would probably would have them released right to day where they could be mined if it wasn’t for the ecology groups. They have entered into the picture now and they say if we more a cedar tree we are going to have to put it back. The waste that has been taken out of the mine has to be put back it the mine when we get through. We have to leave it as it was before. Well this to me is stupid cause you can take a waste dump and smooth it out and plant grass on it, and in ten years you won’t even know it is there, it will be covered up. Nature has a habit of kind of healing the scars.
JM: Now you have been in the business a long time, do you feel that you took ecology into your scope when you were working or did you just work for or get what you could and then moved on to the next place?
EJ: Well, it all boils down to economics. You are in it for a gain. A living and gain, this is the whole thing. That is if you see a bunch of ore you want to get it just as cheap as you can and any way you can. This is what it all boils down to – economics, in all situations.
JM: Are the ecologists now making you, the mines you are working right now, are you going to have to put them back in their primitive state when you are through with them?
EJ: No, not now. If this does happen, see I’m under contract to Union Carbide. I do have property of my own but if they come this way Carbide will have to go the expense, like on my strip pits, I’ve got two strip pits up there and it does, it looks like Hell these strip pits when you get through cause it is just a big jumble of rocks and stuff and they might have to come back and smooth it over. In fact they have been thinking about giving me the title to the property so I will be stuck with it. (Laughter) Well, it is just like these strip coal mines back east, even right out here, they should make them come back, it will make the country look a lot better.
JM: How do you feel about this power plant, this coal power plant?
EJ: Well, I think it is alright. The ecology group is getting a little bit carried away. I think we can whip that air pollution if we can just give the industry a chance. In fact they have admitted that they can. But they still want to close them down. Why? What they ought to do is go to these city’s and turn everybody’s lights out for a week and then then they would start burning coal. Put everybody’s car in the garage for a week and it would probably clean up a lot.
JM: Yes, you bet. But you don’t have the real air pollution problem out here, do you?
E J : No.
JM: The sky over here is blue. I haven’t seen a blue sky for days from out the area I come in.

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EJ: Yeah, you take – we get KUTV on the T.V. at Salt Lake, you know and they will take pictures of the city, you know and you can see the haze hanging out over there on a heavy day. Actually, it is foolish. I don’t know how they are going to combat it all – they never will as far as that goes. They can help some by kinda of controlling the heavy industry’s, like the steel mills and stuff that belches smoke all of the time.
JM: On this ecology thing if – on the claims you still hold, your property now, do you have to do the $100 a year improving up on them?
EJ: Yeah, definitely.
JM: Now if they would go along with the ecology thing, if you went in and you fenced the hole off and you fill in the shaft would the $100 toward the $100 you would you be –
EJ: Well, there wouldn’t be (?) on that really. Anything that pertains to improvement on the mine. I can work on the road a mile away from my property that is headed toward my property it would still be classed as assessment. Because it is an access road that has to be maintained and is still part of the
JM: Well if they were to come out and say that if you make this type of improvement would you in favor of this?
EJ: You mean of putting the waste back into the ground?
JM: Either putting the waste back in the ground or replanting some of the area?
EJ: No, I don’t say that. I say level that waste off and plant some grass and put some fertilizer and plant some grass, that’s all you need. That hole in the ground, we may need it one of these days if we get an atomic attack. (Laughter) Especially if it’s got water in it.
JM: But, to go back. If they would say that you would by leveling off a stack of wastes and in planting this if they would count this as improvements. Would you then be in favor of it?
EJ: Yes, you bet.
JM: That seems to be a pretty fair way of doing it if you have to do it.
EJ: Yes, if it is leveled off and fertilized and planted so the grass can grow again, but the grass isn’t going to grow if you don’t put any fertilizer on it. Cause that rock is pretty barren, you know. If it is necessary just take some surface soil and put three or four inches thick and plant your grass and in a matter of five years or ten years you couldn’t hardly find it.
JM: I talked to the gentlemen that put minerals and this is one of the things they are doing toward their $100 assessment. I was just wondering if this – if they never came out and offered (?) this way of putting in you $100 (?).
EJ: I’ve never heard of it as yet, you know, but tomorrow is another day.
JM: You, as a mining man, do you see as you look at the side of the hill, do you see a scar on the side of the hill do you see as mined and that: there was good that came out of that? You don’t see it as a scar?
EJ: No – not any more than a canyon that a river has washed down over a period of centuries, you know and you might take a nice flat plain and run a stream of water through it for centuries and you’ve got a canyon there. Well that is scarred,

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whether it is man made or nature made. What’s the difference? What I would do strictly again is take a mountain you know, that has a good stand of timber on it just burn it off and make a real unsightly sore. This I don’t like at all, you know. If they go to a selective timber and mine, I say “mine” I mean harvest the mature trees and leave the young grow, well this is good for future generations.
JM: Are you happy that your son is going into the mining, has a mining interest?
EJ: Well, yes, I think if’ he is interested it is a good business. It-is a good clean business.

Beginning Part 3

You are out there and the air good, stay in a cabin, now we have trailer houses and they are modern and everything like that but you are out there and you go in and you mine a nice clean bunch of ore and you sell it and it is clean. There’s no middle man to clobber it up and if you have a $20 a ton rock why, that is good clean money and you take it home. Of course you have to file all the time on income tax.
JM: With the setting of rates, does this hurt you also. Uncle Sam setting the rates?
EJ: How do you mean, setting the rates?
JM: Well, he sets the price on what you can sell and you can only cell to him right?
EJ: No, that is gone now. They quit buying.
JM: Then who is buying?
EJ: The private industries, the power companies. They are buying the finished product now. Uncle Sam went out of the picture the first of January, they quit buying. Their buying program is over.
JM: Well is this what you based your assumption then that it will pick up in the next couple of years, that the private industry will come in?
EJ: Yeah, through power plants, mostly.
JM: Have you heard anything about the problems they ran into at Grand Junction about using the tailing in the construction business up there?
EJ: Yeah.
JM: Do you think that this is just a scare on the atomic energy scare or is there really something to it?
EJ: I think they are carried away. We have lived in this country well, I can chow you people that have lived to be 90 years old and we got the ore out here all the time. This is suppose to be putting out a little radiation all the time, you know, breaking down and how come we aint all dead over here?
JM: Well, the way it was explained to me was that the concentration where they fill on top of it and then this keeps it from going into the air and it builds up and this is one of the problems that they are having where they are getting the high readings off of it. But out here in the open you would go into the air and it would disinpate, you wouldn’t get any of it.
EJ: Well, I have two working levels in an open pit. But that was on a muggy day, you know when the air is sitting heavy and there ain’t nothing moving. But it – I don’t thing any one really knows how many working levels is really destructive to you. We have mined, ac I told you a little bit ago, ac high ac I have, 600 working levels, day in and day out with no ventilation at all. And I’m still here. Now they are clear down to .4 of one that they are trying to hole that goes into effect the

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first of July on this Federal. Four tenths of one was – why that is -.
JM: Is this going to be pretty hard for you to maintain?
EJ: Well, not the way I am situated right now. But is is going to real hard on these old work ins and the big coal mines. They are going to have to put in filters and air and every thing to screen this radon out. To bring it down.
JM: Do you feel that the Government Regulations are hindering you rather than helping?
EJ: Yeah, they are. They are causing a hardship, an economic hardship on the whole industry. Union Carbide spent $300,000 just for filters already. To try to bring their working levels down to this four tenths mark. Even come of these coal mines that is running one or two working levels and that is going to be hard to bring them big old coal mines that has miles of underground workers to bring that level down to where they can keep operating.
JM: They will shut them down if they can’t meet them?
EJ: Yeah. It’s the law. (tape damaged) for some body that has stumbled on to a pretty good bunch of ore.
JM: How much have you relied on the geiger counter or do you use that at all?
EJ: Oh, yeah we do any more. We use to just mine by eye all of the time, years back, but now they find ore in black and white sand you know. You can’t even see it without a
geiger counter you can’t detect it at all. I went back and shipped a lot of old dumps that the old timers missed, I would just mine with the eye just put the counter on it and got pretty good ore.
JM: Do you use a core drill in your mining now?
EJ: No. We use a widing drill. It is so much faster and cheaper.
JM: Have these underground explosions up on the – where they are doing the atomic testing on – does this shake you up underground?
EJ: No. We never felt them here. No it never reached this far. There are a lot. Of faults between here and there and I think the faults absorb them.
JM: If you had it to do all over would you stay in the mining business, would you start in it again if you had it to do all over again?
EJ: Yes, it is a fascinating business to he in to. One day you are eating chicken the next day you are eating feathers. But never two dais it; don’t seem like they are a like, there’s two rounds alike in the mine. I’ve got up at mid-night and went down in the mine to see how that last round pulled that I shot at 5 o’clock cause there is something in the water that comes out of the holes that are off color and I just wanted to know if I was coming into a bunch of ore and I just couldn’t wait ‘til day light to get down there so I would get up and go look. Crawl in through powder smoke and by golly feel my way up to the face and see if I had ore or what I had. It grows on you. It is the same as gold years ago, you mention gold to a lot of people and boy they would sell their farm and every thing and go mine a little streak of gold some place.
JM: Are you familiar at all with the Cash-In mine?
EJ: I have been over to it but I never was down in it. It was shut down and there was a

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lot of water in it and I was afraid to trust the timber to go down in.
JM: Do you know any of the history of that mine?
EJ: Nothing, mostly hear say. I know that they’ve got some really got some real good copper there that runs as much as 98% pure. I’ve seen samples come out of there. In fact I was over there one day and went through the dump and tried to find some pieces of it just for samples, you know, I wasn’t fortunate to find some real high grade stuff.
JM: Now, what is this problem, why can’t they open this mine again? I understood that one time that they have the high grade ore and at the time they were mining it they weren’t able to separate it and now they they have the methods they
can’t mine it.
EJ: Well, it is too pure. Copper is a soft metal. You take a drill bit and it won’t cut it it just bends. It just won’t cut. I use to lay awake at night trying to figure out a way to mine that thing. It layin’ in there in curtains, it is a fissure vein almost a 90 degree horizontal vein threading down there. Fisure, we call them fisures. Then they can mine the low grade on either side of the curtains but they can’t take the curtains because there is no acceptance. I’ ve wondered about a diamond saw. If a guy had a diamond saw and would go in and pull it out in chunks, you know, trying to get it out that way. I don’t know, maybe it has been tried, I don’t know.
JM: I understand they have a water problem over there too.
EJ: Yeah, the lower levels is all plugged with water. Then, too, this is an other one of the old mines that got in the
hands of a speculator and a promoter. Some guy would take a lease on it and incorporate it, sell a bunch of stocks and the next thing you know he was gone and so was the money and the guys that bought the stock was holding the sack. Everything would be shut down. They would go over there and they would take pictures of it and build a new tin shack on it or something, take pictures of it and sell stock on it and then –
JM: This went on quite a bit during the boom time?
EJ: Yeah, you bet. A lot of it went on. Speculation, that ruined a lot of good property and a lot of good industry.
JM: Well, do you think the boom – as it was in this area, was this really good for the economy over here?
EJ: It was while it lasted, about three or four years. But then the whole uranium industry got a black eye. Then we were hurt. You could have a real good property and we couldn’t sell it to no body cause everybody thinks you’re promoting. People would go out here, we call it Gold Patch you know, where there? Is no chance of ore, stake up a bunch of open sage brush land or cedar trees and put it into a corporation and sell stock on it and then just walk off with the money and leave thousands of people holding the sack in penny stock.
JM: When the boom hit this area now what did it do for the Township or Naturita?
EJ: Well, the the bars did a thriving business, and the restaurants and the hotels and then there was always work. Hell, you couldn’t hire any body to go to work they were all out prospecting and selling claims.

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JM: Well, how do you feel about it, there was a few fortunes made and there was a lot that weren’t made, now how do you feel about the outsiders coming in, were you against the outsiders coming in?
EJ: No, not at all. I figure it is a free country and every body is entitled to do his thing. By golly, it was alright. Some of the outsiders came in and stayed and made some money. Lot of them brought in new ideas. They worked in various kinds of jobs, you know, railroads or anything else and they would come in with different ideas about how to mine that stuff. Some of them even thought about drilling holes and pumping in water and dissolving it and pumping it back out again. This kind of thing, you know. There was several things tried and then they started perfecting the jack lay. Years ago I use to take a hammer, I would get in a hurry to get around in, I would tear my set up and might cut an arm off and I would cut the machine off and take a piece of steel and bent nail and put two side rods on a hammer and stick it in the end of the steel it would help me hold that hammer up so I could finish my round out and it worked pretty good. From this I think they started making Jack lays, well the first one VCA made it out of two inch pipe. Put an inch and a half pipe in a two inch pipe and put a leather on it and there again you can put a valve on it. They build them right down here in their shop.
JM: To you, yourself when the roads took off, what did this mean to you as far as your personal comfort here at home?
EJ: I sold a bunch of claims. (Laughter). I paid my house off. JM: Well, what about your telephone service and added electricity power that came in. Do you deem this as a fortune thing or unfortunate?
EJ: Well, I believe in progress. I don’t believe – I think
when a man, a community or a nation as a whole. When they quit growing they start to rot. This goes right down to an individual man, once he seeks his goal or quits growing and quits producing he starts to rot, you find him sitting up at the bar playing poker some place.
JM: Are your roads that came in here, now this opened up the area, right?
EJ: Right.
JM: You feel that the big companies that had a hand putting in the roads then it did help the area?
EJ: Oh you bet. When the AEC first started working in here and was surveying the country they did a lot of drilling and they had, oh I don’t know how many rigs a running, they were blocking out this country. They reserved these blocks and would drill for ore, you know. Even on private property. One of them came up to me one time and he said, “What do you think that the AEC could do for the country? What in your opinion the best thing that we could do to help the uranium industry.” They were after uranium real strong at that time. I said “Build roads”. We had mines that had no road to it and every time it rained you would mire in clear to the axle with your pick up and trucks and some times it would rain for a week or two or three weeks and you couldn’t even get to the mine. No roads, no gravel and by golly it wasn’t more than a year they started fixing up the roads. I don’t know whether my saying so had any thing to do with it but I think a lot of

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the people felt the same way as me arid between the whole country we got some of them done.
JM: Well then you are what I would classify as definitely optimistic that in the next two years the business is going to pick up.
EJ: Yeah, I think the pr-ice of uranium is going to go up. There is going to be a bigger demand for it. In fact one guy told me a while back, I think he is a little carried away, he figures it -'is going to go to $75 a pound. I think he is a little carried away on this. I don't think it will go that high.
JM: Do you think that they will come up with any means of using some more of these tailings for some thing else and will go back to finding another use for it like you threw away the uranium when you were mining vanadium.
EJ: I think they will improve the circuits and remelt all of the tailings. Recapture every thing that is left in it. There is about ten different minerals in this type of ore.
JM: If that comes in, will you go back into the business of working over the tailings of the mines?
EJ: Well, I imagine the rills will do most of that.
JM: They would just haul it directly out to the mills?
EJ: Yeah. Like I told Union Carbide one time, I told them I would like to have a lease and they said "Where do you want one?" I said right on that big stock pile you've got there. (Laughter) He said, "Damn right you would like to have it". Yeah, one time the Union Carbide built a Hell of a big stock pile down there and found out they didn't own the land that it was sitting on. Boy, they had the surveyor up there surveying that thing out, they really jumped on that in a hurry. In fact, if I could have been a little bit quicker I could have staked that damn thing and had that stock pile. I'd sure made them pay then.
JM: How did you feel about the mill closing over here at Naturita?
EJ: I think it was a sad mistake. It was poor management on the part of the corporation there. Because it centered here in the biggest producing area where there were more mines. They closed the mill here and opened in Durango then tried to truck the ore. Consequently, when the ore got below fifteen hundredths in uranium the trucking costs would eat it all up. It hurt the company and this mill should have been kept going.
JM: Would you care to speculate on the reason they closed the mill here and went to Durango?
EJ: Personal reasons. The union and Benny Vaas was superintendent of the corporation there and he said he wasn't going to have a union in there and then the guys formed a little union, and he got mad at the whole community and moved her out. Even closed the coal mine down when they went on strike up there. Put 17 men out of work. Hauled oil in here to fire the furnaces with. But he was a big hard headed Swede. It was going to go his way and that was all there was to it.
JM: Do you feel that he definitely hurt the company by moving out?
EJ: I do.
JM: I've encountered quite a bit of bitterness from the individuals about the mill

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closing here.
EJ: Yeah, and another thing he was never a guy that was real progressive. He would go buy an old Model A engine or an old V-8 wore out car engine to go on the compressors and try to mine with it and it was just a bunch of junk, that is all he went with. You would take a lease off from them and they would send you out an old compressor and the damn thing wouldn't run and you would have to get a mechanic to work them over and get them to going. If he drove an incline, they would authorize an incline they would have it so steep that you couldn't hardly walk up it and so small you would have to stoop over to get in the holes and then when he would come up against the radon problem there was no way to ventilate it so they had to shut them down. Too costly to go in and enlarge them. Yeah, he offered me a lease up on Fall Creek one time and the rock slide. There was 3/4 mile tram and I said, "How do you get that ore out of there?" He said, "Burros". I said, "How much you paying?" He said "l5¢ a pound for vanadium, no price on uranium". Of course there isn't much there anyway, low grade uranium but good vanadium. I said, "Burros, I don't want no part of that". He kind of got sore because I wouldn't take that. You go try them, three cars is all the burros will pull out of there. Three quarters of a mile, well, Holy Hell, you would spend all your time on your haul. You wouldn't have any time to mine. You couldn't make no money. Two or three guys took a shot at it and went flat broke and they all went belly up. He broke them. "I just broke them a little worse than when they started" he said.
JM: Can we talk a little about this mine that you had used in Utah, the one over in Strawberry?
EJ: The Strawberry Mine? Yeah.
JM: Was it a good mine?
EJ: Yeah, it was a pretty fair mine, but when they cut the price of vanadium off' I had to close it too. Then it was
to far away from Headquarters, see. It was about 110 mile drive one way and it was just to far away to sit on.
JM: Do you know if this mine has been worked since you gave it up?
EJ: Yeah, Shumway and Beatty had a lease on it. The last ones I think and now I understand that Carbide quit doing assessment work and thrown it opened and it has been restaked.
JM: Was Shumway's very prominent in this area?
EJ : Yeah. Yeah, they made some good money and they dumped most of it into hard rock up the mountain. Crept Butte.They were in there trying to mine that wet mine and hard rock with rubber tired equipment and they stuck all of the time. This guy Johnny Day put most of his in it but Devore Shumway he invested most of his money in ranches and stuff and he's pretty well fixed. He bought a lot of stock that was good, I don't know financially what he is worth but he is wealthy.
JM: Were they pretty well thought of in this area?
EJ: Yeah. These were the aggressive miners. They had good heads on them, they knew what they were doing.

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JM: You say "Aggressive miners", now what do you mean that term.
EJ: He always was looking and drilling and sticking their necks out, taking a gamble on one hole and another hole and they just kept a going. The had a whole bunch of them working, a chain of them. Then they hired a foreman to take care of them. They was always on the go.
JM: Now, this is your kind of miner, right?
EJ: Yeah, John Shumacker that was another one. I've tried to get him to incorporate himself and sell me a little stock in him cause he came over here flat broke, he went to Canada and lost mints of money one time. Went to Canada and dropped it all up there and then come back here and he had an old '54, I think it was a Plymouth or Chevy, two door car sedan and he slept in the back seat. He would go out here and look this country all over and made camp in the back of that car and come back and made some good money. I don't know, a quarter of a million probably. Built a $40,000 home in Grand Junction..
JM: Have you dealt with Lowell Steff?
EJ: Yeah.
JM: Did Lowell do pretty well in this area?
EJ: You bet, yeah. Done exceptionally well.
JM: Was Lowell a local product here?
EJ: He come from, he lived on a farm over at Olatha. He come over here, he and his wife. I first met him in 1939 and him and his wife had lived in a tent up on Long Park and his wife done my laundry for me. She took in washings to help pay the grocery bill. Then he had this Hummin Mine and he got a lease off Carbide and he run it for 17 years, that one mine. He made a lot of money out of it.
JM: I've seen various pick-ups going around with his advertisement on.
EJ: Yeah.
JM: Is he very active right now?
EJ: Yeah, well, he's got a good private lease going down here at Martinmakes and he has one or two from Union Carbide. I don't know which right now. He claims he's not making any money on Union Carbid right now but this you will never know because he is the type of man that don't tell you all his business.
JM: Is he pretty well thought f in this area?
EJ: Oh, you bet. He is always behind a public works deal, the city, the school, the REA's and he is President of the Association here. He's been president on the Ditch Board and in the Soil Conservation District, he is on that and he is a Mason and he is very active in all community activities.
JM: I have heard from several people and they have all said about the same thing.
EJ: Yeah, I think all the world of Lowell. I think he is one of the finest guys that hit the country.
JM: He has consented to an interview too. I am going to talk to him.
EJ: Yeah. Well, he's got a good mine. He can give you some good stories too. One time I was mining out on what we called Ham Bench out here and there was two guys, three guys. They had a little old diamond drill out there and were staking claims and drilling holes and trying to promote these claims. And mining a little

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bit, they had a little streak of ore they were mining. They came to Naturita one week end and they got on a big drunk and they headed for the mine. It was in the winter time, it was colder than Hell, zero weather and I left town before they did and I went on out to the mine, I was mining right next to them, you know. So I got up about daylight the next morning why, I heard a. banging on the door you know and I got up and it was Clare Lewfelt, Chuck Lewfelt and another guy, a Warren, I can't think of his last name. Anyway they was drunk and froze to death, shivering, you know and they came in and said, "Build us a fire, Oh God Damn, I'm froze to death". I said "O.K." so I had an old coal stove there and I built up in a fire in it and got them thawed out and I said, "What the Hell happened to you guys?" He said, "We were coming across Dry Creek Basin and the damn radiator froze up on the pick-up". It had a leak in it and they just had water in it and it was froze up on them. So, they had this whiskey in there and they were drinking this whiskey, you know and one would insult the other and to get out and they had a heater in the pick-up to get out and do something about that radiator cause their old Ford just got hotter than Hell, you know, it was froze up. So Chuck crawls out and finally he gets under and they had a blow torch in the back seat and so he was under there with a blow torch and a hole in the bottom of the radiator and was trying to thaw it out., you know and on the motor and they had a five gallon can of white gas that they used for the lanterns. And anyway, Clarse he stumbled out of the pick-up and reached in the back and got this five gallon can of gas and he said, "I'll show you how to thaw this son-of-a-bitch out" and he took the top off from it and sloshed this gas into the radiator. Well Chuck is down under with a blow torch. (Laughter) SWOOSH, a big flame. It set Chuck's clothes on fire and he had to roll around in the snow to get his clothes out and they got the fire out on him and well Hell, that old pick-up was burning real good, you know, so they just sit around and got their hands warm on that thing and drinking their whiskey until they got cold. Then they had to walk. I'll be God-damn if they didn't turn that into the insurance company and they paid off. (Laughter) It was a shiester outfit. He was taking claims up there on the Grassy Hills one time and I went up there. He was sitting up there with a .30-.30 rifle keeping every body off the hill and I knew him. I went up there to see him and he said, "By God Ed, you can stake here but go on over there". He pointed to a big tree squared up and cut off and squared up for corner posts. He said "I don't want any thing from here to there, you want to take from there on, go ahead". O.K, I went over there and looked on that tree and he had written on there: I, Clare Lewfeldt, he couldn't spell about a fourth grader, you know I Clare Lewfeldt own 5,000 feet north, 5,000 feet south, 3/4 of a mile east and 300 foot west." This way he staked the claim. Well any one that has done any claim staking know that it was plumb illegal. But he had the .30-.30 so it was legal as far as I'm concerned, right there. (Laughter). Yeah, he had a brother, I had a .30-.30 out there one time and he wanted to go kill a buckskin and he come over and said "How about borrowing your .30 some naught I want to go kill buckskin" Thirty some naught he said, he couldn't, no,

Beginning Part 4

I had a .30-.06 that was what it was and he said "How about borrowing your .30 some odd." He wanted it to go get

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a buckskin. I let him have it.
JM: Is he still alive now?
EJ: No, he is dead. He died here about two or three years ago. He always had something going. He sold his claim to an old boy down there in Cortez and I happened to be down in Coretez that day, he had made a payment on a brand new Pontiac convertible. I seen him going up the street and he had four women in there and a big cigar in his mouth and a new white shirt on and a quart of whiskey. I passed him and I said, "Hey Clare, what the Hell are you doing?" He held up a quart of whiskey and he said, "Boy, I'm doing good, I'm King today". He was, that is the way he lived, too. King one day and broke the next. He kept the car three months and they repossessed it. He didn't make the payments. But he sure had a ball.
JM: Did he have any thing left when he went?
EJ: When he died? No. He went through a fortune too. One guy I knew down there, they called him Casey Bagely. He was right up in this same area, he had three or four claims and had a little streak of ore he was digging on. He use to tell me all the time, "You know, Eddie Joe, I have one ambition in this life." I said, "What's that?" He said, "I want a Cadillac pick-up." But he didn't live long enough to get it quite. Yeah, he finally quit mining and went out to Nevada and went in the plumbing business and he come back here and plumbed around here for about a year and then he died. I don't know from what causes. But I've never forgot that, his ambition in life was a Cadillac pick-up. There was an outfit from Canada that come down here and they looked at his property and took a lease on it. They said they -,'anted 300 foot of drift drove. They had a feeling that there was ore back there in this hill. It wasn't drilled, I don't know but they had the money. So they gave Casey $12 a foot to drive this drift and all expenses. In two months he bought $700 worth of groceries and hauled out there., The company was paying all his expenses. My wife and I went up by there and "get out and come on in" and he had a deep freeze, refrigerator and every thing there and had a light plant to run all those things, you know. Arid he said, "What will you have, smoked oysters, T-Bone steak" and he would open these doors and he had all of this stuff in there. Shelves just full of canned stuff, just anything you could think of in the way of groceries. He said, "I'm going to eat for a while anyway." (Laughter) And he did. He had grasshoppers, canned grasshoppers, and all these kind of goodies, you know. He had been eating buckskin and beans for years up there and I guess he just went crazy when he had a chance to buy all these groceries on some body else bit. Yeah, and old Pat Patterson, he lived down on the river and he was the newspaper down there. Any thing that went on in the valley he could tell you. He know where every claim was and who was in and out of there. When he would come from town he would take all his money out of his pocket and lay it on the table. I was down there one day and no body was around and there was $15 or $20 worth of change laying on the table. Finally Pat come in, he had an old beat up Chevy pick-up, he come in and I said, "Pat, for Christ's sake why do you leave your money lay out like that, any body can just walk by here and the house wide

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open, the door standing wide open, any body can come by here and pick up your money and take off with it". He said "Christ, I don't have no trouble with my God Damn money, it is my drinking liquor. I can't keep any drinking liquor, I could hide it in the cistern, any place and some one will find it, can't keep any liquor but money no body bothers".(Laughter) He was quite a character. I spent a whole summer down there staking claims living in the back of a jeep station wagon. Had a little dog and had a sleeping bag and me and that little dog would sleep in that sleeping bag. He would crawl in and get down on my feet and keep my feet warn. Had a little gas stove that I would set on the back end gate of the station wagon. I would drop the door down and I would do my cooking there and
stake claims. Yeah, we staked 140 claims. Joe Welleby was financing us. I couldn't afford it, I had a little to much money so he was giving us $400 a month, keeping it free, buying my gas and paying my grocery bill at home and every thing. Then we split the claims.
JM: Did you get your money out of those claims?
ED: Well, we sold one group, 27 of them for $6,000 and then we got $3,000 out of another group and then we had an over ride and royalty on it and the people didn't do anything. It was just a promotion deal on their part. They paid us alright but they never did any drilling or anything. We ended up taking the property back again. Then we had one other claim and I sold my half interest in it. That was an involved deal. I sold it to John Shumack. We sold it to John, we knew he was aggressive sort of man that he would do something with the property if he had it. I had this one claim that laid right. next to Climax. That is Climax Uranium Company. John knew there was ore under mine and I knew there was too, but it was 700 foot deep and I knew that I would never have the money to develop it. So Joe and I got together and decided old John Shumate, he was interested in it and we would sell him a third interest. That tied him in so he would do something about it. So he didn't do nothing there for quite a while and one day I met him up at the Moose up here. "Eddy Joe", he said, "I'll just buy that third interest you own". "Oh, I don't want to sell John, not right now any way". Well, he kept on and we had a few drinks you know, and got a little louder and more serious about the deal, you know and finally I said, "I'll tell you what I will do, John, I will just match you double or nothing, I will either get yours or you will get mine". They had a pool table there and we decided to cut cards. So, I got a deck of cards out and laid them on the table and we got some witnesses up there. So we cut cards and I beat him. He said, "Why you son-of-a-bitch, do you know what you cost me?" I said "No". He said, "Boy you cost me about $1,000 bucks right there." I said, "Oh Hell, don't worry about it". So he grabbed a napkin out of the holder there on the bar and he scribbled on it "I hereby quit claim my half interest in the Grass property to Ed Johannsen". He took off, got madder than Hell. But later on I did sell to him for 1200 bucks for my interest.
JM: You did sell him the same property?
EJ: Yeah, I finally sold my 2/3 interest back to him.
JM: How did he make out?

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EJ: Him? I don't know whether he still owns it or whether he sold it to Climax or what. I never have asked him. But they they never did any mining on it I know that. Now, Climax shut down, if they want they can start up again. V.K. had a lease on it and they drilled one hole for 700 foot deep and had a 10 foot 10. I know that there is some ore down there somewhere. It was awful deep.
JM: 700 foot is a deep -
EJ: Yeah.
JM: What is the deepest that you've ever gone in? You yourself.
EJ: You mean mining? We-1, let's see. There was that Bogey shaft, I think it was around 500 if I remember right that is about as deep as :: went in shaft mining. I have been down in 750 footers but not working.
JM: It gets pretty expensive you were telling me.
EJ: Oh, yeah. On that shaft mining you got to bottom, you only pull so many skiffs out with a hoists a day. Like the one I had up there at Split Rock. 90 skiffs is all we could pull. I mean if you sit on that hoist and run it solid for a full eight hours 90 skiffs is all you could pull. Well, a skiff is a ton so ',here is 90 tons is all you could get out of that mine in one shift. Where if you go track pitches there's just no limit. Track mining is expensive. Then you've got your guides to maintain and tumored all the time. They've got to be well tumored, two or three escape ways, ventilation, they are very expensive. But there's one nice thing about mines, you can have a blizzard outside and your down in that hole about six feet you can take your coat off and go to work. You never know what is going on on top. No flies, no mosquitoes, no gnats and working conditions are usually excellent, the temperature and stuff like this. Yeah, in the winter time you go down in the mine before the sum comes up and when you come up the sun is already down. You don't see it much in the winter. Yeah, mining is a facinating to be able to get into, every time you walk around you wonder what is under the ground. (END OF TAPE)