A hole at the foot of the cliffs has been dug by a Colorado River explorer, a Fruita farmer and the Cold War. Boone adds up what all that digging came to, and the figure is in the title.
Eyes on the foot of that cliff, now, for a couple of gated holes, because that's as near as anybody ever came to getting rich here. Men started filing on that spot around the turn of the century, and in nineteen oh four along came Jack Sumner, the same Sumner who went down the Colorado with John Wesley Powell, and he and a partner dug those tunnels and got, it seems, a little ore. Somebody christened it the Government Gift. Hang on to that. Tine Oyler, the Fruita fruit grower, filed in nineteen thirteen and his name stuck, though by nineteen thirty-seven that hillside had been filed on at least seventy-five times. Then it was a national monument, and you'd think that settled it, and you'd be forgetting the atom bomb. From February of nineteen fifty-three to February of fifty-nine, on a permit to the Atomic Energy Commission, this monument lay open to uranium mining. Charles Kelly, the old printer who was its one-man staff, blamed "the word of an illiterate prospector, as relayed by a politician who had never been off the pavements of Salt Lake City." The rush of fifty-four pulled nearly everybody out of Wayne County, and some Mormon bishops packed up and went along. When his last effort to stop the digging beside that tunnel ran out, he wrote that he felt like "the man who had the rug pulled from under him while out on a limb holding a bear by the tail." As for the tunnel itself, the richest ground around by all the talk, rival claimants tied it up in court so tight that nobody could touch it the entire boom. In fifty-eight Tine's daughter, that same Cora Smith, took a last run at it, because the government had typed her mother's initials wrong. That was dismissed, and later readings found little ore in there anyway. Mending the mining scars was billed at thirteen thousand five hundred dollars, a ruling barred the commission paying it, and the Park Service did the minimum. And the Park Service's ten percent of all the ore taken from this whole monument, the way Kelly remembered it in nineteen sixty-nine, came to thirteen dollars and fifty cents. The gates on those holes stop you and pass the bats, so come dusk the last claimants on the Government Gift drop through the bars and flap off over Grand Wash, royalty free.
Photo: NPS / E. Van Ness · Public domain (U.S. Government work)