the price of uranium, they created an incentive for prospectors in the Four Corners region. Despite the fact that his three sons, Johnny, Andy and Charles Jr. were all less than four years old and his wife was expecting another child, Steen borrowed $1,000 from his mother and headed for the Colorado Plateau, determined to strike it rich. After being in Colorado for several months the Steens moved into a tarpaper shack in Cisco, Utah. Steen and his family were struggling to get by and were often hungry so Charlie made the decision to move his family to Tucson, Arizona. Steen worked as a carpenter in Tucson for about a year before he returned to his claims in Utah. He and his family once again packed up and headed to their claims. This final trip back to Utah would be the most detrimental for the family because M.L. Steen's wife contracted pneumonia, and her medical bills consumed the $350 remaining from the sale of Steen's trailer. Steen could not afford the standard radiation-detecting equipment used by uranium prospectors - the Geiger counter. Instead, he used a secondhand diamond drill rig and his geologic training for his prospecting. At the time, each prospector had his own idiosyncratic theory about where to find uranium. The uranium industry was composed primarily of individual prospectors and geologists who would attempt to find a large deposit and either mine it for themselves or mine it for a large company (such as Union Carbide) who would transport the ore from the mine to the uranium mill where it could be converted into yellowcake. Steen's theory on uranium deposits was that they would collect in anticlinal structures in the same manner as oil, which others on the Plateau dismissed as "Steen's Folly". Mi Vida uranium deposit On July 6, 1952, Steen hit it big but he didn't realize until three weeks later. He was drilling down through the layers of sandstone when his drill bit broke off at a depth of 197 feet, just 3 feet short of his goal. Finding this massive deposit of uranium ore only became apparent when he took a piece of the blackish core he found while drilling weeks earlier back to Cisco. He stopped to fill up his jeep and decided to have the core tested by a friend with a Geiger counter and they found that the piece made the