P6 THE SPOKESMAN • TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 2022
OFFBEAT OREGON HISTORY
State biggest uranium mine was
found by amateur rockhound
BY FINN J.D. JOHN
Offbeat Oregon
D
uring the go-go years
of the uranium-mining
rush of the early 1950s,
the character of the uranium
prospector became iconic. He
was basically the gold-seeking
“miner 49er” updated for the
atomic age: in lieu of a mule,
he rode an Army-surplus Jeep.
In place of pick and gold pan,
he carried a Geiger counter
and ultraviolet flashlight.
For the better part of a de-
cade seekers of “A-metal”
deposits (the “A” stood for
“Atomic”) prowled all over the
public lands of all the West-
ern states, waving their Geiger
counters at every promising
rock formation. They spent a
lot of time getting excited, and a
lot of time being disappointed.
Oregon has a lot of uranium,
much of it in the form of au-
tinite crystals; but it’s very thinly
distributed — in most deposits,
there is enough to set off a Gei-
ger counter and get a prospec-
tor all excited, but not enough
to mine.
So it’s ironic, but maybe not
surprising, that Oregon’s biggest
uranium strike was made by a
guy who didn’t even own a Gei-
ger counter.
Lakeview business owner
Don Tracy knew almost noth-
ing about rocks and geology
until he was in his late 30s.
That’s when he stumbled across
some stones, multi-colored and
obviously semiprecious, that he
couldn’t identify. None of his
friends could either.
Tracy hit the books, borrow-
ing everything the Lakeview
public library had on gem-
stones and even digging into
geology textbooks from Ore-
gon State University.
He also set up a rock shop in
his garage with polishing and
cutting equipment, and started
going out with his family on
regular excursions to hunt up
new specimens.
He never did find a name
for his stones. They were some
kind of jasper, but beyond that
they apparently were unknown
to science. Today they are
known as Tracinite.
Tracy was still in the full
flush of his new geology hobby
when the uranium craze broke
out. The first thing he wanted
to do was go out and use his
newfound knowledge of min-
erology to try to find some.
Tracy didn’t own a Geiger
counter, but he knew what ura-
nium oxide crystals looked
like — and maybe he remem-
bered seeing something like
them on one of his previous
rockhounding expeditions. In
any case, he closed in on the
future site of the White King
Mine like a bloodhound on a
scent. There, near the edge of
the Fremont National Forest, he
found a deposit of rocks with
promising-looking crystals set
in them. He promptly staked a
claim around them, naming it
the Lucky Day.
Back he went to Lakeview
with a sample of the rocks. Be-
cause he wasn’t kitted out for
uranium mining, he had to
borrow an ultraviolet light from
a friend to shine at the rocks.
Under it, they fluoresced the
characteristic chartreuse color
of uranium oxide crystals.
To make sure, he sent a sam-
ple to the Oregon Department
of Geology. The department
checked the samples and re-
plied that there was uranium in
them — in the form of autinite
— but not enough to be worth
processing. But they encour-
aged him to keep looking.
He did, moving afield from
his first discovery, looking for
rocks more densely packed
with autinite crystals. And
again, he very quickly found
what he was looking for, near
the banks of Augur Creek,
stuck in the dirt wad of a tree
that had blown down in a win-
ter storm a month or two be-
fore.
He found two partners
and the three of them staked
16 claims covering the “hot”
ground in the state forest and
on Walter Leehman’s land, and
got busy exploiting it. They
named the claim cluster “The
White King Group.”
While all of this was going
on, another group of prospec-
Oregon Historial Society
Uranium prospectors Lee Gibson, Allen Berends, and Elden Berends stake a claim in Malheur County in
1954 in this photo made by Harano Studio of Ontario.
tors was hunting across Lake
County for the elusive A-metal
using a very different tech-
nique.
Their names were Don Lind-
sey, Robert Adams, Clair Smith
and Choc Shelton, and the four
of them had gotten interested
in uranium mining a year ear-
lier, in 1954. They had pooled
their resources to purchase an
extremely expensive Geiger
counter, a Detectron Nucle-
ometer, which was allegedly so
sensitive that one could use it
to sniff out uranium deposits
from low-flying airplane. Ad-
ams had a Piper Super Cub, so
they used that to try the Nucle-
ometer out.
It didn’t work so great. Many
hours of tedious, dangerous
treetop hopping later, they had
nothing to show for it. So they
switched to prospecting the
old-fashioned way, or rather the
new-old-fashioned way, with
a Jeep, using the Nucleometer
like a regular Geiger counter.
They were doing that when
rumors reached their ears of
Tracy’s big strike.
Nobody admitted it. The
prospectors said they were put
onto the scent when a friend
told them he’d seen pickup
trucks leaving the Fremont Na-
tional Forest with their beds
full of rocks. But it seems most
likely they used the Super Cub
to figure out where the min-
ing action was taking place. It
wasn’t the kind of activity that
one could do by stealth and by
night.
However they figured it out,
figure it out they did, and pros-
pecting out from the marked
claims of the White King group
with the help of their overpow-
ered Nucleometer, they soon
honed in on a spot that was so
hot, the Nucleometer actually
couldn’t measure it — there
was no sensitivity setting low
enough to keep the needle from
simply pegging at the high end.
As quickly as possible, they
staked and filed a discovery
claim and four claims around it,
dubbing it the Lucky Lass Mine.
And they weren’t a moment too
soon. Other prospectors were
already arriving. The word, it
seemed, was out.
“Talk about excitement!”
Clair Smith wrote, in corre-
spondence with author Ruby El
Hult. “The next day the discov-
ery … was in the newspapers,
on the radio and TV all across
the nation. People came from
all over, some from 1,000 miles
or more away.”
“The first week after the dis-
covery we estimated 2,000 cars
drove by in front of the open
cut,” he added. “Of the ore dug
and piled by the side of the
road, two or three tons must
have been carried off piece by
piece as souvenirs by sightse-
ers. Our little town (Lakeview)
looked like Gold Rush days,
with street hawkers on corners
selling Geiger counters and
scintillators.”
Over that crazy summer of
1955, nearly 10,000 claims were
staked in the Fremont National
Forest by hopeful prospectors,
most of them based on mar-
ginal readings from the cheap
Geiger counters like the ones
hawked on the streets of Lakev-
iew. The area teemed with
Army surplus Jeeps and bat-
tered pickup trucks. And one
or two of them may even have
panned out. But, a decade later,
only two of them remained in
operation: The White King and
the Lucky Lass.
No uranium-mining story
has a really happy ending. Few
of the prospectors and miners
who were involved in the in-
dustry realized how dangerous
uranium ore really was.
But Oregon got off compar-
atively unscathed, at least by
comparison with other Western
states.
The White King and the
Lucky Lass were open-pit
mines, so Lakeview was spared
the trauma of losing a genera-
tion of underground uranium
miners to a pandemic of lung
cancer a dozen years later. (The
White King did have one un-
derground mine, but most of
the work was done in the big
pit.)
After the uranium market
declined to the point of the
mines no longer being profit-
able, both were closed, and the
pits filled with water to form
White King Pond and Lucky
Lass Pond (13 acres and five
acres, respectively). Left behind
were mountainous heaps of ra-
dioactive tailings.
Both sites were added to
the government’s Superfund
cleanup program in 2001. To-
day, the hottest of the tailings
have been hauled away and
more-or-less-safely buried in
a “disposal cell” area nearby,
protected by a heavy layer of
compacted soil topped with
rock. The remaining tailings are
buried on site, and the whole
area presents the appearance of
a peaceful meadowland — al-
though access is restricted due
to the lingering radioactivity.
█
Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State
University and writes about odd tidbits
of Oregon history. His book, Heroes and
Rascals of Old Oregon, was recently
published by Ouragan House Publishers.
To contact him or suggest a topic: finn@
offbeatoregon.com or 541-357-2222.
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