COLORADO Like many plainsmen, Fred Schwartzwalder was enormously impressed when he first saw the Rocky Mountains. That was 30 years ago, after Fred and his young wife Martha moved to Golden, Colo, from the prairies of Iowa. Schwartzwalder fell completely under the spell of the Rockies; every weekend and holiday he spent hiking and exploring the rugged hills around Golden. He often brought home samples of curious rocks to show his wife and to decorate their meager basement apartment. In his backyard a sizable cairn of rock samples gradually accumulated—a monument to Fred Schwartzwalder's ab sorption in geology.
Indian Head Bonanza. In 1950 Fred decided to buy a Geiger counter. For months he worked overtime at his job as janitor of the local high school in order to accumulate the necessary $100. The day he brought his counter home, he poked it around his backyard rock pile. Immediately, the Geiger counter began to jitter excitedly, but when Fred located the radioactive rock and dug it out, he could not remember where he had found it. For three months he retraced his steps through the hills until at last, on a Sunday afternoon, he discovered the spot where he had broken off his sample from an outcropping on Indian Head Mountain. "The Geiger counter was as hot as a firecracker," Schwartzwalder recalls. "Everywhere I went it picked up a strong reading."
Fred arranged to rent the site from the rancher who owned it (with a verbal agreement to give him 15% of any commercial ore mined), and began to dig for buried treasure. He had only the barest knowledge of mining practices, and for three years he worked alone, hacking away with a pick and a crude handdrill. Many Saturdays Martha Schwartzwalder swept the school floors and washed blackboards so her husband could work on his mine. It was a grinding, grueling job. On the last four unblazed miles to the minesite, everything had to be carried by hand. Twice the entrance to the mine caved in; both times it took Schwartzwalder two months to clear an opening again. At last, in July 1953, Fred struck a vein of uranium, 70 ft. into the side of the mountain. "The Gei ger counter went right up," he remembers. "I knew I had it."
But Schwartzwalder's frustrations were not yet over. He was dead broke, and couldn't afford to have the ore hauled down the mountain. "I didn't hardly know which way to turn. We were going steadily into debt. It got so bad I even tried to get contractors to haul it down for 50% of the profit, but no one would. They figured I was another crazy prospector."
At the depth of Fred Schwartzwalder's despair, his son raised $400 in California and sent it to his father. With the money Fred was able to haul 53 tons of ore down the mountain and freight it to the processing plant at Salt Lake City. After three anxious weeks, Fred heard from the AEC. In the envelope were two $6,000 checks and a top-grade assay. Fred's mine was a vein deposit of high-grade uranium ore (only one other major vein deposit—in Marysvale, Utah—is producing in the U.S.).