The Mine in the Canyon Wall

Watch what you kick, friend. I mean that kindly. Dan Hogan came to the canyon from Flagstaff in eighteen ninety with the first bunch of prospectors, and in eighteen ninety-three he registered a claim on the canyon wall, a long way below the rim. He called it the Orphan Lode. He got to it on ropes, ladders and toe holds cut in the rock, a route he named The Slide. Everyone else called it the Hummingbird Trail, since only a hummingbird could stay on it. He'd served with Buckey O'Neill's Rough Riders, and the story goes Theodore Roosevelt signed that claim himself, in thanks. Hogan held on for fifty-three years. In nineteen forty-six he sold to Madeleine Jacobs, who ran the tourist business up top and cared little for any mine. There was black rock lying around. She kicked it out of her way. In nineteen forty-nine she leased the lodge to Will Rogers Junior, and he was gone a year too soon. In nineteen fifty-one somebody finally looked at that black rock. It was uranium, as rich as any the Southwest had. All those years on the ropes, and Dan Hogan had let go five years too soon. No page I've found says if he ever heard. If he did, I expect he looked at his hands. Then the money came. By nineteen fifty-five a bucket on an eighteen hundred foot cable was carrying miners down the wall. The first shipment went out on April twenty-fifth, nineteen fifty-six, on trucks from a Cameron company, bound for the buying station at Tuba City, most likely down this road. When the company wanted to dig past its claim, under the park, it floated a hotel as its argument. Eighteen stories, eight hundred rooms, hanging off the rim and spilling "down the side of the precipitous cliff like a concrete waterfall" to a swimming pool. Some called that political blackmail. Congress made a deal in nineteen sixty-two anyhow, and the mine quit in nineteen sixty-nine. Me, I've quit kicking rocks. I pick one up, I look at it a good while, and I set it back where it was.