Charles Steen

Charles Augustus Steen (December 1, 1919 – January 1, 2006), was a geologist who made and lost a fortune after discovering a rich uranium deposit in Utah during the uranium boom of the early 1950s.

Charlie Steen was born in 1919 in Caddo, Stephens County, Texas, the son of Charles A. and Rosalie Wilson Steen, and attended high school in Houston. As a teen Steen worked summers for a construction company that helped finance his education, this is the same company that his first stepfather Lisle had died working at. He went on to study at John Tarleton Agricultural College in Stephenville, Texas where he met his wife Minnie Lee Holland, and in 1940 transferred to the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy (now the University of Texas at El Paso), receiving a B.A. degree in geology in 1943.

Ineligible for the draft because of his poor eyesight, Steen spent World War II working as a petroleum geologist in the Amazon Basin of Bolivia and Peru. Returning to Texas in 1945, he married Minnie Lee ("M.L."). He started graduate school at the University of Chicago but after a year returned to Houston to take a job doing field work for the Standard Oil Company of Indiana. However, within two years he had been fired for insubordination and had trouble getting any job as a geologist anywhere in the oil industry.

Down on his luck, Steen read in the December 1949 issue of The Engineering and Mining Journal that the United States federal government had issued incentives for domestic uranium prospectors. Under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had the authority to withdraw lands from the private sector in order to examine them as possible sites for uranium mining. During World War II, the Manhattan Project had received most of its uranium from foreign sources in Canada and the Belgian Congo. However, it had also received some from vanadium miners in the American Southwest, where uranium was often a by-product of mining (before the atomic bomb uranium was not a valuable metal). There was a concern that the United States would not have enough domestic supply of uranium for its nuclear weapons program.

...
Wikipedia