The Cisco Kid

Lean, stubborn Charles A. (for Austin) Steen was so full of troubles that it was only natural to think of him as Bad-Luck Charlie. A onetime oil geologist for Socony-Vacuum, he spent two years in the South American jungle where no white men had ever been before, then went to work for a Texas oil company. When he was fired for telling off his boss, he found that no other oil company would have him. He scraped along in the contracting business for a while, but never forgot a romantic dream of his days at the Texas College of Mines: prospecting and finding a million dollars. In the Atomic Age, he decided, his best chance was uranium.

With $1,000 borrowed from his mother in 1948, Steen packed his wife and three children off to southeastern Utah, where there are uranium mines. He "sniffed around" without the help of a Geiger counter, finally staked out claims on a high sandstone ridge in the Big Indian district near Cisco--land which AEC had officially declared "barren of possibilities." Time after time Charlie got promises of money to help develop his property, but when people took a closer look, they always backed out. The Steens lived on oatmeal and beans; the only meat they had was venison which Charlie bagged on hunting expeditions. In 1950, his savings gone, Steen moved to Tucson, went to work as a carpenter to get a grubstake. After a year, the Steens sold their trailer for $375, climbed into the family jeep and headed back across the desert for Cisco, where they rented a shack with no plumbing or electricity for $15 a month.

Sugar & Salt. Charlie's wife came down with pneumonia. For a while the Steens . owed $300 in grocery bills, had no money to buy milk for their ten-week-old baby; they fed him weakly sugared tea instead. Winter evenings, Steen foraged for coal at a nearby railroad. Then, when things looked blackest, Bad Luck Charlie's luck began to turn.

He got $1,000 from one old friend, borrowed $100 from another and bought a secondhand drilling rig. On his first try, at a depth of 73 feet, the rig broke down. Steen, who had no money to buy a Geiger counter, borrowed one from a friend to test a sample of the greyish black rock brought up by the drill. The needle nearly jumped from the dial of the instrument. "We've found it!" cried Charlie. "We've found a million dollars!"

Nobody believed him. For months AEC did not report back on his ore samples; neighbors gossiped that Charlie had salted "Steen's Folly" with pitchblende to raise money from the gullible. But Steen soon proved them wrong. He got $15,000 from Texas Construction Man Dan O'Laurie, incorporated as Utex Exploration Co., and started selling his ore to refiners at $50 and up a ton. AEC finally classified "Steen's Folly" as probably "one of the major uranium strikes" in the U.S.--an estimated 1,350,000 tons of uraninite ore reserves with a value of more than $60 million. Most uranium miners can stay in business if their ore shows a uranium content of .20%; Charlie's lowest grade ore assays at .49% uranium.

Rumba Lesson. As the first checks rolled in, Steen bought himself a flaming red Lincoln and sports jacket to match, now tours his mining properties with a Dalmatian sitting beside him in the car. Occasionally, he flies his private plane up to Salt Lake City for rumba lessons.

This month a syndicate headed by a Texas oilman offered Steen $5,000,000 for his property; last week he turned it down, is angling for a deal for $10 million with another group. Says Charlie Steen: "I don't want to build a financial empire, or become any kind of a big entrepreneur --I'm not cut out for it. I'm just a geologist and prospector, and that's what I want to be--although now I can do my prospecting in a limousine."

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