When Tom acquired the Forum, he took possession of its entire archives, a hundred or so dusty black volumes containing every issue of the Forum and its predecessor paper, the Center Times, dating back to 1873.
Center was what Radium was called before Madame Curie herself briefly visited the region in the 1920s to study the mysterious phenomenon to which she had bequeathed the term radioactivity. Local mining interests had hoped the famous French physicist would help develop new commercial uses for the mineral that was locally both abundant and easily found because it occurred in shallow beds of a bright yellow compound that Curie herself later named carnotite, to honor A. Carnot, a French mining official. Indeed, miners searching for gold had been “fooled” by carnotite. Here was a rock that emitted invisible rays, a truly magical property, but without a commercial application it was a curiosity – “fool’s gold” – and far less valuable than real gold.
Madame Curie had developed medical uses for radium, and uranium was used as a coloring agent in glass and to paint glow-in-the-dark watch dials, none of which yielded much economic benefit. Center was nonetheless renamed in honor of Madame Curie’s visit, and in the vain hope that “Radium” might provide more of a future for its residents than “Center” had. The region had proved a tough setting for the “Utopianists” who had founded the town half a century earlier. These were the region’s earliest non-native inhabitants: a group of Mormon pioneers who went far astray en route to Salt Lake City and settled their own desolate region, subsequently diverging into their own short-lived fundamentalist Mormon sect. Such schisms were not uncommon in early Mormonism, since the religion’s very premise was that God could offer revelations to latter-day prophets like Joseph Smith, the church’s founder.
Though Center’s own prophetic founders dreamed they would originate a new world order, Center never prospered like Salt Lake did, and not for lack of religious zeal. When Smith’s successor Brigham Young decreed that the Salt Lake Valley was “the right place” he had the good sense to pick a location where plentiful fresh water flowed down from the high elevations of the Wasatch Mountains that formed the valley’s eastern wall. In Center, it was the other way around: the essential fresh water flowed in a river canyon below the mesa that was suitable for cultivation. This required Center’s founders to devote their first decade to the construction of a ditch, before they could plant a single turnip. They started out working collectively to bring water to the mesa, but as soon as the ditch reached a plot of land that someone had claimed for a homestead, that fortunate landowner stopped digging and started farming, resulting in a constantly shrinking workforce as the ditch grew longer, slowing the mesa’s cultivation all the more.
Starting at such a sharp disadvantage in building their utopia, Center’s pioneers failed to expand their religious franchise and instead of a community of the faithful they quickly devolved into a group of isolated ranchers, struggling to supply themselves and the miners up in Telluride with beef, mutton, milk, eggs, and vegetables.
Before the uranium boom of the 1950s, it was neither the Utopianists’ dream of finding the key to the Kingdom of Heaven nor Madame Curie’s scientific inventiveness that kept the community alive, but rather an economy split between ranching and the mining of carnotite for the vanadium it contained. Vanadium was used as an alloy in the manufacture of steel; uranium was a by-product.
“You will be the guardian of all this history,” Howard Knapp had stated, grandly gesturing to the wall where the bound volumes of newspapers were shelved in a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, as he prepared to turn over the keys to the Forum offices to his successor. In the century and a half that the Center Times and the West End Forum had published, Tom would be only the ninth publisher, Knapp said.
The years of labor that went into publishing the newspaper by generations of publishers and editors represented an impressive commitment to some kind of legacy and, to Tom, a touching faith in the very idea that recording events has inherent and lasting value. Someday, the shelves of volumes seemed to propose, the stories contained herein, this carefully documented past, would matter to someone. From the Utopianists to Madame Curie to mining the ore that went into the manufacture of the world’s first atomic bomb, the history of the West End could be, should be, of more than local interest. Yet it was equally obvious that nobody had cracked open the volumes of newspapers that Howard Knapp and his seven predecessors and now Tom compiled and guarded in many, many years. When he first started publishing the Forum, Tom imagined he would pass the evenings reading the archives, steeping himself in the history of his new home, but somehow he never got around to it. Instead, Tom himself sent a half-decade’s worth of newspapers to the bindery, adding volumes to the collection, with absolutely no sense of whom he was doing it for.
Arriving home from his visit with Elizabeth Walker, Tom sank into an armchair and found himself gazing at the wall of old newspaper volumes. He wondered if Elizabeth herself ever made the news. Had there been an announcement of her son’s birth? Or was a rich man’s bastard son unmentionable in the 1960s? He wondered when Dick DeRichter himself might have first been mentioned.
Tom pulled down a volume of newspapers covering the early 1940s and started flipping through it. The nation was on the verge of war.
On December 11, 1941, after Pearl Harbor, an uncredited writer, presumably the paper’s editor or publisher, sought to convey his and his community’s resolve:
The United States Is at War
This peace-loving nation, which has ever shunned imperialism, has been attacked without warning by a mongrel yellow race that has dreams of dominating and controlling more than half the face of the globe.
Our nation apparently already has suffered heavy losses. Our people are face to face with the knowledge that we must wage a long, burdensome struggle to maintain our free American way of life and the right to conduct friendly commerce with all parts of the world.
This nation will meet the challenge. No matter what sacrifices are involved, the United States of America will win this battle of the Pacific, just as it will help to rid both hemispheres of the curse of dictatorship.
Our people are now united in a common resolve to make Japan rue the day it attempted to match forces with this great republic. No matter what the cost, no matter how long it will take, this nation will emerge victorious.
We of the West End will put forth every effort to help our country in this grim struggle. Through the purchase of government bonds, through aid to the Red Cross and other welfare organizations, this section of the country will not be found lacking. Scores of our young men are already in the armed forces – others will enlist from time to time as their services are needed. The West End is “all out” to win this war – just as all other parts of the nation are.
In succeeding editions, the Forum voiced pride that the local mining industries had geared up to defend America. Vanadium was a strategic mineral of great importance, used to manufacture the bullets and airplanes and rifles that American soldiers would need to defeat the enemy. “The metal mining industry is a vital part of the war program,” the paper preached. “Without metals, the tanks, guns, ships and airplanes needed cannot be produced in sufficient quantity to meet the needs of the soldiers at the fronts. In this emergency, every ounce of metal is a sacred trust. Every worker in the metal industry is a vital soldier in a war against evil. Not only is every ounce of metal a sacred trust but every one connected with the mining industry has a sacred duty to perform.”
The region boomed as large corporations operated mills throughout the region, purchasing carnotite ore from independent miners. In 1943, the paper was indignant that Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes declared millions of acres of public land off-limits to prospecting, stating it was being reserved due to the likelihood it contained minerals of strategic importance: vanadium, magnesium, and potash.
In a vain attempt to deduce why the land was withdrawn, the Forum editor supposed there was “a nigger in the woodpile,” since the withdrawal did not advance but actually seemed to slow the production of strategic metals. Of course, Tom realized with historic hindsight, it was uranium that was being safeguarded, and it was uranium, not vanadium, that was being extracted at the region’s “vanadium” mills, as part of the then-top-secret Manhattan Project. Like the miners themselves, who were being kept in the dark as to the real value of their ore, the Forum demonstrated no awareness at all that the region’s contribution to the war effort was so fundamental to the ultimate war strategy. Before the detonation of the first atom bomb, perhaps nobody – not the politicians who authorized its invention, nor even the physicists who split the atom – could truly comprehend what uranium meant. Before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was an abstraction. But after the war, the government made itself the only legal buyer of uranium.
In early 1952 the Forum reported that the year 1951 had seen over $300 million in uranium mining and milling activity in the region. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had not only set the price of uranium high enough to encourage prospecting, but paid generous bonuses to new claims that produced a minimum amount of ore, setting off the uranium rush. Congress authorized the AEC and U.S. Geologic Service to build roads to access mining districts and connect them to mills. The population of Radium spiked tenfold in 1951, from about a thousand to ten thousand, with most of the new inhabitants living in tents or shacks or trailers, scrambling to stake claims or, failing that, working to support the booming new industry in mines, mills or ancillary businesses. Among the population, Tom surmised, was the young Dick DeRichter and his family.
Tom scanned the pages of the Forum for any mention of DeRichter, and found it unexpectedly, in a brief story dated November 14, 1952.
Geologist Reports Missing Man
Geologist Dick DeRichter told authorities on Monday that his partner, Jim Stewart, is missing in the vicinity of the Iberia Canyon mining district. DeRichter said that he and Stewart were prospecting in the Iberia Canyon, 40 miles southwest of Radium, when they became separated.
DeRichter said he searched for Stewart, but found no sign of him. After searching for a full day, DeRichter returned to Radium for help looking for the missing man. A search party had no luck.
The Iberia district is rugged country, with numerous side canyons. It would be easy for a man to become disoriented there, or to lose his footing and fall a great distance, searchers said after they returned to Radium.
DeRichter said that Stewart is known as Whispering Jim because of his soft-spoken manner of speaking. He said that Stewart is single, and has no family in the area.
That was all. But this was clearly how DeRichter’s famous uranium strike, the Whispering Jim Mine, got its name.
If the disappearance of Whispering Jim did not command more ink, perhaps it was because the paper published so much misfortune. The Forum was full of stories of men and women “called by death” or “summoned home.” Sometimes death “beckoned” or it “found” the unlucky deceased. There were constant stories of miners struck by falling rocks and wives taken by sudden illness. There were frequent mine cave-ins, and ranching accidents involving horses or bales of hay, and a couple of fatal car accidents every week, it seemed, drivers taking curves at too high a speed and running off the road. Constant though these mishaps were, the Forum duly noted that the death “was a keen shock” to the surviving family or a “sharp blow.” Friends almost always extended “heartfelt sympathy to the bereaved.”
Tom found himself engrossed in this litany of lives cut short, flipping the pages of the old newspapers past numerous stories with the name DeRichter, or the Uranium King, in the headline, thinking he would come back to read them all soon enough.
It was pure luck that he opened a volume to a story that seemed to resolve the mystery of what had happened to Whispering Jim. It was from the summer of 1971.
Human Remains Believed to Be Whispering Jim Found in Iberia Canyon
Slickrock County Sheriff Trace Martin said Tuesday that the human bones found last week in Iberia Canyon are probably those of Whispering Jim Stewart, the miner who went missing almost twenty years ago and who Dick DeRichter’s Whispering Jim Mine is named after. Stewart was DeRichter’s partner before DeRichter made his famous uranium discovery.
If the remains are those of Whispering Jim, a mystery is solved. The only bones that were found are those of a man’s arm below the elbow. The bones were found wedged behind a boulder in a slot canyon. There was a rusty knife nearby. Sheriff Martin says it appears that the boulder fell on the man’s arm, trapping him.
There is no way to know for certain if the bones are those of Whispering Jim Stewart, but DeRichter told the Forum he is convinced they are.
“It looks like a boulder fell on Jim and trapped him down there in that canyon where he was prospecting and that’s why we could never find him,” DeRichter said. “We looked all over that area. He must have been dead or unconscious, so he couldn’t even shout out for help when we were looking for him. Poor Jim. I only hope he died quickly.”
The bones have been sent to a medical examiner in Denver for analysis.
A few months later, the Forum published a follow-up story.
Whispering Jim May Have Cut Off His Own Arm
The state medical examiner has determined that the arm bones believed to be those of Whispering Jim Stewart show signs of knife marks at the elbow joint.
“It sure looks like Whispering Jim cut off his own arm,” Slickrock County Sheriff Trace Martin said. “He got trapped down in that slot canyon by a boulder that must have come loose on him, and he must have used the pocketknife we found to free himself by amputating his own arm. Then he wandered off and died, probably of shock and exposure and maybe blood loss.”
Whispering Jim Stewart went missing in 1952 while prospecting in the Iberia Canyon vicinity with his partner Dick DeRichter. A search for the missing man did not find him. DeRichter later found the mine he named after Whispering Jim.
“This just shows what kind of man Whispering Jim was that he had the strength to cut off his own arm,” DeRichter said after learning of the medical examiner’s conclusion.
It is not surprising that no other human remains have been found, Sheriff Martin said. The bones trapped by the boulder were protected from predators and the elements, but if Jim severed his own arm and walked off before perishing, predators and the elements would have dispersed any remains in just a few years time….
Just as Tom had surmised, the long-serving sheriff of Slickrock County, Martin, and the county’s most prominent citizen, DeRichter, went back decades together. Martin would have been newly installed as sheriff when Whispering Jim’s remains were found.
To all appearances, the mystery of Whispering Jim had a logical resolution. If there had been any further developments, the Forum did not report them. But Whispering Jim’s demise had been suspiciously convenient for Dick DeRichter and Trace Martin’s investigation into the circumstances surrounding it could have been every bit as cursory as his current investigation into the disappearance of Ray Walker.
Was it improbable or even unlikely that behind the DeRichter fortune there might have been a crime?