THE WHISPERING MOUNTAINS

In all the get-rich-quick furore that is causing believing souls to rush out into highly uninviting country carrying Geiger counters, one turn of events has been largely overlooked-the effect on 76,000 hitherto povertystricken Navajo Indians of the discovery of uranium right on their own lands. This series of finds on the Navajo Reservation has served to create not just a few happy and somewhat confused millionaires. it has set up a chain reaction which is making changes in an entire people.

The Navajos, one of the most primitive tribes in America, have often been in direct want-only a few years ago they had to rely on an emergency airlift to drop feed to their starving livestock. Today they are standing, or some of them, at least, on the threshold of a kind of independence they never dreamed of.

It all began one cold winter day in 1950, when Willie Cisco stood at the door of his hogan looking up at the snow-covered tops of the Lukachukai range far above him. The Lukachukais, according to oldsters among the Navajos, were the homes of spirits; and often, to Navajo medicine men, they whispered important things.

A rumor had come down from the rugged peaks to Willie Cisco's hogan. Strange white men had been seen walking along the crest or these mountains in the lonely northeast corner of Arizona, and along the great rampart of cliffs that forms their base. They carried little boxes with them, and they lived in a camp with a sign

PHOTOGRAPHY BY TAD NICHOLS

On it that said in English letters, “AEC.” They were looking for something they called carnotite. They had begun drilling holes in certain spots. They were prospecting.

Willie Cisco knew about prospecting. He had worked in the low-grade vanadium mines further west, when they were operating during the war; and he had done some prospecting on his own. Now he was ready to try again.

It was a hard winter among the Navajos. Food was low in the hogans, and many people were hungry; and so, in the bedroll Willie Cisco tied behind his saddle, he did not have much in the way of supplies. As he left his family and headed his horse out of the desert valley toward the high pines, he was carrying two items he had never taken on prospecting trips before: a little black box called a Geiger counter, and a sample of uranium ore.

Perhaps Willie Cisco smiled as he held that sample in his hand; for he could see that it was streaked with the bright yellow substance his ancestors had used to make war paint. It was carnotite, and in it was uranium. It had suddenly become valuable.

Willie camped in the deep snow on the crest, 8500 feet up; next day he left his horse tied to a tree and made his way on foot down the steep slope to the edge of the sandstone cliffs. He carried with him the little box, the box that could hear what the rocks were whispering. He knew that his box-that-hears was not entirely to be trusted . . . like a woman, it often hears and repeats a lot of idle gossip, sometimes chattering wildly as it does so. But Willie Cisco was a practical man, and shrewd; moreover, he had been to school, and knew how to absorb the white man's knowledge.

After many days of clambering over snowy boulders and sliding down pitches above the cliff rim, Willie Cisco came to the headwall of a great box canyon. Its cliffs were almost a thousand feet high.

As he stood looking down the canyon toward the valley where his home lay, Willie's box-that-hears began to chatter. It was loud and insistent. The mountains were whispering, and the box was repeating what they said. The formation, which the white men called Morrison Salt Wash, was right for uranium; and Willie Cisco caught a glint of yellow that matched his sample of ore. There, after pacing carefully back and forth, he set up the four piles of stones which mark the four corners of a claim.

Today, on this spot, are the Cisco Mines, one of the first discoveries and an important working in the Lukachukai uranium area. The mountainside is hacked and scarred with roads for ore trucks and drill rigs; dozens of Navajos have found jobs there, and live in the tent-and-shack camp set up by the Walter Duncan Mining Company, which operates the mines on lease from the Navajo Tribal Council.

Willie Cisco draws royalties on every ton of ore taken out. He still lives on his farm down in the valley; he rides a fine new pick-up truck now, instead of a horse; he has built up his herd of sheep, and improved his farm lands.

Of course not many men of the Navajos found claims to equal Willie Cisco's. But some did. Frank Natchinbetah and his family were sheepherders, but Frank had also worked in the vanadium mines and he, like Willie Cisco, had heard of the AEC men prowling up

and down the Lukachukais. He acquired a Geiger counter and made his way on foot into the mountains on the opposite side from where Willie Cisco entered. He hiked up and down the steep canyon sides, carrying his boxthat-hears. Finally he found a ledge that satisfied him.

Frank now draws handsome royalties, owns two pick-up trucks and a $7,000 house at Oak Springs, twenty-five miles north of the Lukachukais, where he is building up his herds of cattle and sheep to the maximum grazing allowance. But he is not satisfied with that; he likes mining, and is shift boss at the mine he discovered, which is operated by Climax Uranium. His son, Frank Jr., is straw boss and maintenance man, and another son, Clifford Natchinbetah, is a loader. Climax No. 1 is almost a Natchinbetah family project.

There were other tribesmen who struck it rich when the whispering mountains began to talk... famous among them on the reservation are Cato Sells and Koley Black, Dan Phillips and Henry Phillips. (One reason there are so many Anglo-Saxon names among the Indians is that when a Navajo likes and admires a white man, he often adopts the white man's name, complete, and thereafter will not answer to his former name.) The Lukachukais lie about forty miles south of the only point in the U.S. where four state boundaries meet-Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. Today, the whole northwest side of the Lukachukai range looks like the beginnings of a new subdivision in the hills back of Hollywood. Roads, mostly built by AEC engineers, circle the peaks and mesas as little as two hundred yards apart. The roar of caterpillars and the boom of dynamite echo in the canyons as new roads are cut to let in drill rigs or let out ore trucks. AEC trailer camps, and tent or shack mining camps, have been set up, and every day jeeps and trucks head out from them to bounce and grind over the network of rough, hazardous ruts.

The first big discoveries on the reservation were made in the Lukachukais. Later the search went north and west, and finds were made at Rattlesnake, at Monument Valley (Monument No. 2 is now one of the biggest uranium mines in the country), and at Cameron near the Painted Desert. Discoveries are still being made; the AEC is now prospecting Hoskanini Mesa, in the wild country west of Monument Valley.

When vanadium was being mined in hasty war-time operations, uranium was an unconsidered and often bothersome by-product; both occurred in carnotite ore. Today uranium is giving Navajo miners and their families far more naalghe (the Navajo word for wealth) than the vanadium output could ever have done.

The Navajos are not rich. They cannot be compared to the Indian oil millionaires of Oklahoma. But they are on their way.

This flow of mining money could very well change the Navajos' entire way of thinking but it hasn't, so far. Some months ago hundreds of Navajos gathered solemnly at Willie Cisco's place in the Lukachukai valley, for a nine-day sing a ceremonial called "The Blessing Way." It was held to appease the spirits of the mountains for cutting into their homes and carrying away the yellow rock for the white man.

Apparently it takes more than money to change a Navajo's beliefs.

Willie Cisco, himself, takes rather a statesmanlike view of his achievement. He says, "I have got money from my mine, yes. But I have done more than that. I have helped the Navajo nation. I have given jobs to dozens of my people, and with what they earn they now live better."

Frank Blue Horse did not find any mines, but he had a very clear idea of what uranium could do for him. He showed up at the Cisco Mines, dressed in rags and speak-ing no English. He made it understood that he wanted a job, and he got it. He worked steadily for a year, never spending any money, never taking time off. Then, one day, he quit. He had saved up enough to buy a spread of cattle, which he was going to run on the high mountain meadows in summer, and down in the valley in winter. Willie Cisco's mines had given him the stake that enabled him to lead the nomadic life he loved.

Earl Saltwater, who has the face of a Navajo chief, except that his war bonnet is a miner's helmet and any streaks of yellow war paint on his cheeks are accidental, is boss of an all-Indian mine crew at West Rattlesnake No. 1.

"Back in 1942," he said, "Navajos would come here on horses, riding for long hours to mine the vanadium. They were poor and sometimes hungry. Now, they drive up fast, in fine automobiles, and when they go home they go to new houses."

In building these new homes-and there are hundreds of them on the reservation-the Navajos have not given up one of their traditions: whether they put up the typical round hogan, or a square-built home of logs, or a trim cement-block house with steel casement windows, they always built it with the door facing due east. This is a custom of the Navajo tribe that amounts to an architectural law. (A corollary to this law is that if an Indian dies in a hogan, his body cannot be taken out the door; a hole must be cut in the west wall, and the body carried out that way.) All these houses have one, or sometimes two, shiny new cars parked beside them.

Most of the Navajos are quietly happy about their new houses, their cars, the additions they can make to their herds of sheep and cattle, the irrigation and other improvements they are able to put into their farms. But one highly educated Navajo miner (who did not want his name to be mentioned) said: "The white men are cornering most of the uranium.

I think they are exploiting the Indians . . . even though we are getting more money than most of us ever saw before."

Many of the Navajos, particularly those who have not been to school, are far more carefree than white people about money, because they do not understand it. They love the excitement and drama of spending large sums.

They have bought the flashiest of the new-model cars . . . chrome-covered hardtops, four-door sedans, stream-lined convertibles. They roar up and down the reservation at hell-bent-for-election speeds, a lot faster than most white men would care to travel over those rutted, twisting roads. Fortunately, a driver can usually see for miles, and there is no traffic problem. But there have been some grim accidents. Dan Phillips, one of the original discoverers of uranium in the Lukachukais and a man much respected among the Navajos, found that heeding the whisper of the mountains led to his death, when his fine new car went smashing off the road.

Navajos will gamble on anything, in true Indian fashion, whether it's rodeo team-tying or drawing straws -and today they have more money to do it. This makes for noisy excitement whenever the young bloods get together.

They also have more money for liquor. Formerly the Navajos paid outrageous prices to bootleggers for cheap whiskey; now, since the sale of liquor to Indians has become legal, they can jump in their pick-ups and drive off the reservation to spots where they can get what they want at reasonable prices. Their favorite tipple is a California sweet wine.

The Navajos do not follow the white imbiber's custom of hurling an empty bottle against a rock to hear it smash. They stick their empties on the lower branches of trees. Although it is still against the law to bring any kind of alcohol onto the reservation, there are placesusually near the scene of a squaw dance-where these sparkling empty bottles are anchored on trees in such numbers that the whole scene looks as if it had been decorated for Christmas.

There is another way the Navajo spends his newfound wealth which, while perhaps not provident, is far more praiseworthy. Whenever he has the money he takes care, in lavish style, of all his less fortunate relatives. Some miners-pick-and-shovel men, not royalty drawers -have been known to support five families in addition to their own. Usually these families all cluster around their benefactor's house, running up hogans beside his. Not even the old Scotch clans were more tightly knit than those of the Navajo.

Some of the women members of Navajo families like to try their hands at prospecting, too. One woman, whose husband is part owner in a profitable mine next to the Painted Desert, made a ceremony of it; she was observed dressed in her brightest squaw dress and wearing all her silver and turquoise jewelry, walking slowly and carefully around the desert carrying a Geiger counter.

But most of the Navajo wives continue to do what they have always done . . . they take care of the homes, their husbands, and their children. Today traders say they are buying more food, and better food; and they are buying more expensive cloth for their dresses. Although most of them continue to wear their traditional Indian-style garments, they now insist on having their daughters dressed up in crisp little cotton frocks, just like white children.

As the wives of Indian miners no longer have to add to the family income by weaving their beautiful Navajo rugs, they are doing it less and less. However, Mrs. Clarence Cox, wife of the Climax mines superintendent, has made close friends of many of the Indian women, and she believes they will never completely stop weaving their rugs-simply because they love to do it.

"Husky" Hunt, a trader who doubles as an athletic coach at Stanford University, hopes she is right. To insure quality, he provides the Indians with wool and tells them the kind of rugs he wants. "Last summer," he said, "when I went to get my rugs, the women told me their men were now working in the mines and making plenty of money-and then they handed me back my wool.

The actual prospecting and mining going on in the Navajo country is nothing like the wild and uncontrolled scramble of early gold rushes. There are rigid rules, rigidly enforced by the AEC, the Navajo Tribal Council, and the Indian Bureau. Most of the preliminary prospecting on the reservation is done by the AEC, although the AEC takes out no claims; private companies and individual "desert rat" prospectors, white or Navajo, are allowed to carry on their search only after they have applied for a permit from the tribal council.

When a man happens to make a strike, if he is a Navajo, he has to get a mining permit from the tribal council. This requires him to do work on his mine equal to $5 per acre a year. (A claim is limited to 960 acres.) If he's a white man, things are tougher. He has to apply for a mining lease, which requires twice as much work per acre and a bond to insure performance. The white man also finds that the tribal council has a shrewd way of taking care of its own: in order to get his application for a lease approved, he has to take a Navajo in on the deal, and assign him a royalty of two to five per cent, depending on the richness of the ore. Nothing has ever been put on paper about this "assignment" device; it is an unwritten law, but it is much more inflexible than most of the regulations set up by the elders of the tribal council.

The only requirements necessary for an Indian to be chosen for these royalties are that he must have been living in the neighborhood of the mine, or have been running sheep there. For such "services," if the mine pans out, he may suddenly find himself drawing an income of $900 to $1400 a month.

In addition to "assignments," every mine has to pay into the tribal council a royalty of from ten to twenty per cent, depending upon ore quality. The total of this fund now amounts to around $12,000,000, which the Indian Bureau has placed in the U.S. Treasury, in trust for the tribe. (There are conflicting opinions as to whether the withholding of this entire fund is wise; some feel that part of it should be given to the Indians to use now, in developing small industries.) To all the nicks taken out of a mine's income, there is one very welcome offset: the AEC pays a bonus on every ton of ore that assays as little as 10 of 1% (or better) in uranium oxide. The bonus is scaled on the richness of the ore, and can go up to $35,000 a year. For many small operators, this AEC bonus spells the difference between profit and loss.

Four large companies are operating mines on the reservation: Climax Uranium, a subsidiary of Climax Molybdenum; Navajo Uranium division of Kerr-Magee Oil Industries; Vanadium Corporation of America, and the Walter Duncan Mining Company and in their contracts with these large operators, the tribal council has added another clause to protect the rights of the redman: ninety per cent of the workers must be Navajos. Most mine superintendents swear by their Navajo miners. “They’re easy to train,” says Fred Hahn, superintendent at Kerr-Magee, “they love machinery, and they take to jackhammers. But, they have no idea of how to care for their machines. We have to be constantly on the watch, particularly with new hands, to see they do the little necessary things like oiling and replacing worn parts.”

NAVAJO URANIUM

Karl Butt, shift boss at the Cisco Camp Mine, adds, “It’s a lot easier, for my money, to train Navajos who do not talk English-you show them what you want done, and they do it exactly. Those who know English are apt to get independent and try to figure out a different way to do things.” One habit of the Navajos, Butt chuckled, is frustrating until you get onto it. “If a white foreman starts working with a shovel, to speed up the job, all the Navajos will immediately drop their own shovels and stand watching him. They think he’s crazy, and maybe he is.” Absenteeism takes novel forms on the reservation. “All miners light out now and then-that’s to be expected,” says Fred Hahn, “but these Navajos seem to do it more often, and for special reasons. In the spring it’s for planting on their farms; in the summer it’s squaw dances-and is that a headache! In the fall it’s for roundup and sheep shearing. Only five out of every hundred Indians keep on the job long enough to qualify for their two weeks’ vacation.” Orville Junke, superintendent of the Cisco Mines, has a smaller number of workers and finds a different situation. “The married boys, particularly, are very steady,” he says. “They’re interested in building new houses and adding to their stock. They stay on the job.” When Clarence Cox, superintendent of the Climax mines, was in Monument Valley, he found a solution for the squaw dance problem. “I simply shut down the mine for three days. When the men came back, they were happy and dug harder than ever. I don’t think the company lost anything by it.” That solution probably wouldn’t work in the Lukachukai area, where there are more Navajos, and many more squaw dances are held. These dances are social affairs staged out in the open around a bonfire, and they continue for three nights. They begin around 11 p.m. and go on at a faster and faster pace until dawn. Aside from hangovers, Indians who show up for work the next day are generally so bushed for want of sleep they have to be taken off the job as a safety measure.

Sheep used to be the principal business of the Navajos, and with small herds it was a precarious livelihood at best. Today, these shepherds-turned-miners make between $60 and $90 a week, depending on the job.

It is these common miners and their families-not just the few who struck it rich with their own claims-who form the vast majority-getting a share of the new wealth pouring out of the whispering mountains.

James Salotso, who runs a hoist in a VCA mine near Rattlesnake, and is the son of a famous Indian medicine man named Big Policeman, saved up enough to build his family a fine new cement-block house with steel casement windows; it stands on the high, lonesome mesa next to Big Policeman’s weatherbeaten hogans.

Bill Sandoval, a war veteran, uses his salary as shift boss and maintenance man to buy cattle. Donald McCabe, another veteran and an assistant surveyor for Kerr-Magee, is saving his money to continue his education.

(Incidentally, K. N. Garard, in charge of the Navajo Tribal Mining Department, says, “Give these Navajos an education, and mister, they make top citizens-also excellent executives. Some of those Navajo boys are whizzes at math.”) Frank Big Boy, a man over fifty, drives a mule hauling ore cars at Monument No. 2. He told his white friend Clarence Cox, “I not work all the time, pretty soon I be too old. So-I buy sheep.” Tommy James is a cat skinner for Kerr-Magee . that is, he operates one of those huge caterpillar tractors that gouge roads out of the mountainside. Tommy sticks close to his job, and always gets his vacation . . . which he spends working harder than ever on his farm down in the valley.

This time, the Navajos are running their own show. Their uranium earnings are not a government handout; and the Navajos are not under government regulation as to what they do with it.

Of course, not all of the 76,000 Navajos are affected by the new prosperity which atomic energy has brought to the reservation. Some are as poor as ever, and eke out their existence in the old way, with small flocks of sheep and poorly watered farms. Occasionally, on a high, lone-ly mesa, just such a Navajo sheepherder can be seen, standing silently looking at the far blue heights of the Lukachukais; perhaps he might be thinking of Willie Cisco, or Frank Natchinbetah... and wondering whether he, too, should get a box-that-hears, and learn enough of the white man’s ways so he could discover some of the precious rock his fathers once used as war paint.