California Treasure Hunt

When Donald Bartlett, an oil-company worker, and six of his friends in Bakersfield, Calif. decided to hunt for uranium, they did it the easy way. They bought a $495 scintillator and drove along the country roads in Kern County around Bakersfield. One day last December, as they drove along the Walker Pass road through the southern Sierra Mountains, the needle of the scintillator began to "go crazy." Bartlett and his friends began to "go scrambled out, soon found the reason: a big granite outcropping studded with pockets of radioactive ore (autunite). When they tunneled into the mountainside, the Sunday prospectors found enough ore to give California its first solid uranium strike--and its first uranium rush.

Last week the treasure hunt in oil-and-cotton-rich Kern County had reached feverish proportions, as shoe clerks, tin smiths, bankers, doctors, and Hollywood bit-players filed some 200 claims in the county recorder's office. Thousands more rode into the hills in everything from jeeps to Cadillacs; in their spare time, even housewives hopped into the family car and cruised hopefully about the area.

In Bakersfield Sears, Roebuck & Co. was hard put to keep Geiger counters and the more sensitive scintillators in stock, had already sold "hundreds" of them. Complained a professional ore analyzer: "My phone rings all night long. They call from all over the U.S., and they want to know if they should come out here and look for uranium."

Last week Donald Bartlett and his associates added to the excitement; they sold their "Miracle Mine?" to Manhattan Geologist-Engineer M. William Ditto, representing a number of interests, for an announced "$1,000,000." Actually, the for buyers paid only $35,000, promised to pay the rest in royalties.

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