Exposing the stories about the horrible deaths of Fremont County uranium miners in the 1980s ended up being one of the most fulfilling events of my 60-year journalism career.
Due to unsafe conditions, men who worked in construction and mining in the earliest days of uranium mining in the Jeffrey City area died of horrific cancers decades later.
We stumbled onto the story.
Perhaps the catchline for this story is about the little newspaper that ended up with a very big story.
Try To Imagine
Perhaps we should start this story with the following copy, which was an editorial that we published back in those days in our Lander Wyoming State Journal:
Try to imagine how it must feel to be on your deathbed knowing that your widow and children are going to live difficult lives without you.
Try to imagine going to your grave with that feeling in your heart.
That is exactly what has happened in the case of more than 40 Fremont County men who have died prematurely of obscure cancers. These men died terrible deaths as they gradually lost their ability to breathe. Many left young families with children still in school and their widows left to be both mother and father to these kids.
Try to imagine the pain these men felt, as they died young, knowing their wives and kids would lead emptier lives because their fathers were not there earning regular paychecks. In many cases, the illnesses sapped both the financial and emotion resources of these families to the breaking point.
Try to imagine what it must have felt like to have been told you should not have been smoking, when most everyone around you smoked. And you thought this assumed harmless habit helped cause the pulmonary cancers, not the radon gases you breathed as a uranium miner.
Try to imagine fatherless children and husbandless wives coping with the loss of the heads of their families. Imagine the sense of loss these people lived with through the loss of a loved one at a premature age.
And finally, as a dying miner, try to imagine your frustration when you learn that there might have been some relief available except that proof is necessary and most of the records have been destroyed.
Imagine how you would feel when you find out you have been abandoned and now you will die.
People Were Dying
To those of us who observed this situation, those of us who never worked in a hot, dusty, dangerous uranium mine, the whole scenario listed above may seem remote. To those miners and their families, the feelings described here were very real.
Many of the survivors of these dead miners are bitter. All are disappointed. Everyone is sorrowful. All that hurt was so unnecessary because of a lack of safety precautions.
This country has shown it has a big heart for people who have been wronged. This is especially true when it can be argued that the government was partially at fault.
The comments above were written by me as an editorial in our Lander newspaper during a campaign in the spring of 1990 to call attention to dying uranium miners.
Our series called “Why Did The Miners Die?” called attention to the odd type of cancer that was killing local men 20 years after they had worked around dangerous uranium mines.
Leading the charge was the late Mildred Olson, a Lander widow, whose husband Digger had died in his 40s from complications of cancer.
She claimed that his body was so radioactive that grass wouldn’t grow on his grave. She said tests on his bones showed he had 14 times the normal radiation in his body. He died a terrible death and left four small kids for Mildred to raise.
Al Simpson Led The Charge
Her battle and the untiring efforts by U. S. Sen. Al Simpson resulted in Congress passing a bill, signed by President Bush that offered a national apology to the men and paid them each $100,000 in benefits. Mrs. Olson was the second person to receive such a check and many others have been paid since.
That bill put $100 million into a trust fund which has since been spent and more money added to it. Lander attorney Stan Cannon, who was press secretary for Simpson at the time, said without our stories that bill would never have seen the light of day.
At a picnic held by former uranium miners in Riverton to celebrate the passage of the bill, the miners presented me with an old miner’s helmet signed by all the miners or their widows.
And out of those awards won by our newspaper staffs over 60 years, I am most proud of that simple, old, battered helmet.
(Note: My career was topped off a month ago when I was given the Amos Award by the National Newspaper Association. It was a lifetime achievement award. The series about the uranium miners figured prominently in our nomination for the award.)
Bill Sniffin can be reached at: Bill@CowboyStateDaily.com
