Last year we took a day trip up to Mason Texas to search for Topaz. When doing some research I cam across this story. There are also other versions of this story that leaves out the radio active parts and makes Wells Fargo to be a strong hero but I thought I would share this interesting bit. The site that I originally read this on is down. The story at the end I thought was kind of funny and I am now also very careful about picking up stones that I do not know what they are from that area.
William E. Hidden was next to a 73-lb. mass of Gadolinite in place at Barringer Hill, 1903.
For four months that winter and six months the following year, a dozen or so miners worked full time for the company, including Tad Casner and Barringer, who was probably once again somewhat of a laughing stock for not getting as much money as he could have for the land. Work was slow because the minerals appeared in pockets. The miners struggled to remove ore using picks, shovels, and dynamite to quarry rock from open 40 foot deep pits around the edge of the mound. Despite the difficulty of their task, the men made progress. By 1904, they had blasted away the top of the hill. A 30 foot high quartz pillar, however, was left standing in the middle of the quarry because it contained almost no rare earth minerals.
Hidden and the miners made many curious discoveries about the minerals at Barringer Hill. Masses of purple and green coarsely crystallized fluorite up to 400 pounds were fairly common, as were enormous crystals of feldspar, some over five feet in diameter. From a cavity big enough to hold a horse, the miners removed a 600 pound single smoky quartz crystal which measured 43" X 28" X 15".
Other rock samples were radioactive, such as a seventy-three pound double crystal of gadolinite. Even seemingly common minerals could be radioactive. For example, in a 1905 publication, Hidden mentions that much of the fluorite from Barringer Hill exhibited "brilliant green light when strongly heated and viewed in the dark," and one piece was "self-luminous at night without heat."
73 Pound double crystal of gadolinite
18 Pound mass of Yttrialite
More ominous still were crystals taken from areas where the rock matrix contained radiating lines that resembled stars. The stars possibly formed when rare earth elements crystallized from the magma before the quartz in the matrix did, thus causing the quartz to crack as it accommodated itself to the incompressible crystals.
70 Pound mass of mixed zirconium-yttrium-uranium and thorium ore which was a nucleus to one of the "stars"
Hidden writes that while removing a mass of mixed zirconium-yttrium-uranium and thorium ore from one of the stars, his hands and face began to burn as if from the effect of strong sunlight. After two or three days of mining, he felt soreness in the parts of his hands and face that had been directly exposed to the minerals.
Because the effects of radiation were not well understood at the turn of the century, Hidden could only speculate as to the cause of his curious symptoms. He reports.
My assistant (Mr. J. Edward Turner) asked me "if these minerals could be poisonous?" As no arsenic was present . . The thought came to me that this action might be the work of a radio-active element and it is offered now more as a suggestion than as a proven fact. William Hidden was not the only employee Nernst/Westinghouse sent to work at Barringer Hill. In 1903, Marshall Hanks, the engineer who had improved the Nernst Lamp, arrived to run the mining operation. Although Hidden, at least in his writings, seemed to find no fault with the Hill Country or its inhabitants, Hanks did not fare as well. Hanks was unpopular with the miners because he kept secrets from them. In addition, he had heard many stories about what murderers and scoundrels Texans were. The miners, therefore, took every opportunity to play pranks on this "green as a gourd" Yankee.
In 1904, Westinghouse had enough gadolinite to suit its needs and decided to recall Hanks. Availing themselves of this last, great opportunity, the miners decided to play one final trick on their boss. At that time, Wells Fargo was in charge of shipping Barringer Hill ore out of Kingsland by train, so the miners brought the Wells Fargo express agent in on the prank. The agent convinced Hanks that the only way he would get out of Texas alive was to mail himself to Pennsylvania in a crate of ore.
After he was loaded up, the miners pretended to search for him in the baggage car. Just as they threatened to shoot at the crates to flush him out, the agent bellowed out, "You fellows better not mess with Wells Fargo! Get out of this baggage car!" Hanks escaped in the crate and always believed the miners had wanted to kill him. Like Hidden, his life does not seem to have been cut short due to exposure to radioactive materials, and he went on to have an illustrious engineering career in Pennsylvania.
For several years, the Nernst Lamp Company continued to annually extract a few hundred pounds of yttria minerals from Barringer Hill. Eventually, however, Nernst ceased operations as newer technologies surpassed the lamp.
From the time mining operations ended until the building of Buchanan Dam flooded the area, Barringer Hill was of interest primarily to mineralogists. One of the best collections of minerals from the area was that of Tillie Badu Moss, Professor Badu's daughter. Among her specimens were pieces of quartz which had been beautifully colored through exposure to radiation. According to Tillie Badu Moss specimens are to be found in many museums, including the Houston Museum of Natural History and the New York Museum of Natural History. The University of Texas at Austin also possesses a number of rocks from Barringer Hill, including the 600 pound smoky quartz crystal that so impressed William Hidden.
For many years, it was displayed on the Little Campus at UT until renovation began in the 1970's. Like many other exotic Texas mineral specimens, it is now squirreled away as part of the geology department's Barron Collection. (Note: Since the original publication of this article in 1996 we have been contacted by Rob Reed, a doctoral candidate at UT who is doing research on the granites in the vicinity of Barringer Hill. He once had a summer job updating the cataloging of the Barron Collection and has no recollection of a 600 lb. smoky quartz crystal.)
Other crystals found their ways into museum collections across the country. For instance, the Smithsonian Institute has a large, faceted piece of gadolinite that was once part of a neckdrop. Supposedly the radioactivity from this gem led to the premature death of its original owner.
