Grand Junction: Uranium, Utes, and Two Rivers

Grand Junction sits where the Gunnison River flows into the Colorado River, and that confluence gave the city its name and its reason for existing. The Ute people had lived in the Grand Valley for generations. They were forcibly removed from western Colorado in eighteen eighty-one, following years of conflict with settlers and the federal government. By the autumn of that year, settlers were already rolling into the valley.

George Crawford and a small group of partners established the city in the fall of eighteen eighty-one, the same season the Utes were displaced. Crawford, as president of the Grand Junction Town Company, dug irrigation ditches before the year was out. The Denver and Rio Grande Railroad arrived before the end of eighteen eighty-two. The city was incorporated on July twenty-second, eighteen eighty-two. The valley's combination of fertile soil and access to river water made it an agricultural district: peaches, apricots, pears, and eventually wine grapes in the Grand Valley appellation.

But the defining chapter of Grand Junction's twentieth century was uranium. The Colorado Plateau surrounding the city turned out to contain some of the richest uranium deposits in the country. During World War Two, the Manhattan Project sent Lieutenant Philip Leahy to Grand Junction with orders to procure as much uranium oxide as possible. He bought a site on the edge of town and built a secret refinery that processed uranium ore into yellow cake, then shipped it by rail to facilities farther east for further refinement. By the time the war ended, the Colorado Plateau had supplied a meaningful share of the Manhattan Project's uranium.

The postwar uranium boom transformed the city. The Atomic Energy Commission offered bounties for new finds. Prospectors flooded the plateau. Geiger counters became as common as picks. Grand Junction grew rapidly on the back of the Cold War's demand for nuclear material. The Climax uranium mill at Grand Junction shut down in nineteen seventy, and the federal government spent decades cleaning up the tailings piles that had been used, unknowingly, as fill dirt beneath homes and schools.