THE NUCLEAR WEST dates back to 1898, long before anyone had thought of nuclear power or nuclear bombs, when Marie Curie discovered radium in unrefined pitchblende. Radium is a radioactive “daughter” of uranium that was once seen as a sort of miracle substance, so much so that just one gram of the stuff could fetch upwards of $100,000. Paint it on watch numbers or even clothing, and they’d glow in the dark. It purportedly could cure cancer and impotence and give those who used it an “all-around healthy glow,” as one advertisement put it. During the early 1900s, it was added to medicines, cosmetics and sometimes even food. The Denver-based Radio-Active Chemical Company added radium to fertilizers. The Nutex Company made radium condoms. Makers of the Radiendocrinator instructed men (and only men) to wear “the adapter like any ‘athletic strap.’ This puts the instrument under the scrotum as it should be. Wear at night. Radiate as directed.”
Shortly after Curie’s discovery, she received a sample of uranium ore from western Colorado. Curie found that it, too, contained radium, and she named the ore carnotite. A boom erupted in western San Miguel County, Colorado, just along the Utah border. Hundreds of mines were dug into mesas and extraction plants built along the rivers to get at the high-dollar miracle substance.
The boom busted in the early 1920s when huge mines opened up in the Belgian Congo that were able to supply the globe’s radium hunger far more affordably. Radium’s glow dimmed soon thereafter when the women who painted it onto watches began dying, and the inventor of the Radiendocrinator was stricken with bladder cancer.
Since uranium ore also contains vanadium, a metal that is used to harden steel and to color glass, a few mines were able to stay afloat throughout the 1930s. The Shumway brothers of San Juan County staked claims on the public domain in Cottonwood Wash and elsewhere during this time under the General Mining Law of 1872, which, like the Homestead Act, is a federal government land-giveaway. After staking the claims, the brothers were able to patent them, thereby taking ownership of public lands. Today, those parcels are private rectangles surrounded by public land.