There
is no perfect modern-day comparison to the circumstances spawning
the short-lived potash industry in Nebraska during World War
I. The oil embargo of the 1970s, prodding more homeland oil production
(particularly off-shore, drilling) and nudging development of
alternative fuel sources such as ethanol, is not quite the same.
The cessation of rubber and silk shipments from countries we
were at war with, or countries occupied by countries we were
at war with, during World War II (leading to the development
of nylon to replace silk and synthetic rubber to replace natural
rubber) is close. Still, the history of the potash boom
during World War I is uniquely concise. Oddly enough, the
long-cursed alkaline wetlands of the western Sandhills
became one of the best alternate sources of potash the
U.S. had, and by the end of the war the region was meeting
about 60 percent of the country’s need. (Photo: The
Hord Alkali Products Company potash plant at Lakeside in Sheridan County.
Barbour photograph.)
In the years before World War I, most of the world’s potash
came from Germany where extensive, underground deposits
were mined like rock. Some beds were as much as 5,000 feet
thick and several hundred miles in extent, State Geologist
Erwin Hinckley Barbour reported in his 1916 paper, A Preliminary
Report on the Alkali Resources of Nebraska. Barbour speculated
the German deposits were extensive enough to meet world
needs for “more than 600,000 years.” In those times, the
U.S. was a world leader exporting manufactured goods, and
ships returning from Europe frequently carried potash rather
than making the Atlantic crossing with their cargo holes
empty or at least not filled to capacity. Potash was used
in an array of products, from glass to soap, but about
90 percent of it in the U.S. was used for fertilizer. Prior
to 1912, the price was stable at $8 to $10 per ton, but
as Europe edged closer to war the volume shipped to the
U.S. dramatically declined and prices soared. At its peak,
in 1917, potash was selling for $150 per ton. Once the
U.S. entered World War I supplies from Germany vanished.
_400.jpg)
With
inexpensive foreign supplies gone the U.S. turned to homegrown
supplies. Potash was a byproduct of dust from cement kilns,
wastes from distilleries and sugar refineries, and kelp
harvested on the California coast; but those sources could
not meet the demand during World War I, and other sources
were sought. (Photo: Remnants of the Western
Potash Company plant along Nebraska Highway 2 between Lakeside
and Alliance.)
Alkaline crust had been gathered from ephemeral wetlands
in the western Sandhills as early as 1900, but such endeavors
never prospered. A more serious attempt to mine potash
from Sandhills wetlands was initiated by John H. Show and
Carl L. Modesitt (also seen in print as Modisett) in 1912.
They filed mineral claims on 230-acre Jesse Lake and erected
a 40-feet-high evaporating tower to concentrate the lake’s
briny waters. Over 200 (and eventually 1,000) sand-point
wells were sunk in the lake bed to a depth of about 17
feet, and the alkaline water fed into trunk pipes to a
central pumping station. As the operation evolved, the
brine from the evaporation tower was pumped a little over
two miles to the south where it emptied into three steel
storage tanks with a total capacity of 40,000 gallons.
The tanks were adjacent to the Chicago, Burlington, and
Quincy Railroad line where the potash boom town of Hoffland
would spring up only two years later. From the tanks, the
brine flowed into four concentration vats called “cookers”
to be reduced to about 20 percent solids, then into finishing
vats that produced a 40-percent-solids solution.
About 200 pounds of potash could be produced per day. The
operation was inefficient as the cost to produce a pound
of potash exceeded the price received, in part because
the potash still had a high moisture content, hence high
shipping costs, about one-third higher than if the potash
had been dry. By late-summer 1913, the plant closed.
Source of the
Salts
The
water in lakes and wetlands of the western Sandhills vary
in salt concentrations from mild to strong. Highly alkaline
lakes are devoid of aquatic vegetation, salt-encrusted,
and cracked mud most summers; while mildly alkaline lakes
are fringed with bulrush and saltgrass. Dissolved solids
(a commonly-used measurement of salts dissolved in the
water, or degree of alkalinity) in the lakes of southern
Sheridan County ranged from about one percent to as high
as 19 percent in Jesse Lake. Seawater contains about four
percent dissolved solids; and water in the Great Salt Lake
about 20 percent. Only lakes with concentrations exceeding
five percent were considered worth mining for potash. (Photo: A
1918 soil survey map shows the boom towns of Antioch and
Hoffland, as well as Jesse Lake, the most productive lake
mined for potash during World War I.)
“Up to the middle of the past century, potash was obtained
almost wholly by leaching wood ash in pots and concentrating
the liquor or lye by boiling, hence the name potash,” Barbour
wrote in 1916. Potash, as commonly defined, can be any
of several salts; including such compounds as potassium
hydroxide, potassium carbonate, or potassium chloride (sea
water). _300.jpg)
The
principal salts in the alkaline wetlands of in the western
Sandhills are potassium, sodium and calcium carbonates.
George E. Condra, Director of the Nebraska Conservation
and Soil Survey Commission, in his publication, The Potash
Industry of Nebraska, which is not dated but apparently
was published in 1918, listed more than 10 potassium, sodium,
and magnesium compounds present in the briny water. One
sampling of the waters of Jesse Lake during the potash
boom showed the dissolved solids to be over 28 percent
potash, but most samples were made by or for potash companies,
hence suspect as boomerism ran high. (Photo:Typical,
small, alkaline pothole drying in summer.)
Why are the shallow lakes of the western Sandhills alkaline?
The salts found on and near the surface were once believed
to have been drawn up from deeply buried marine deposits
of the Cretaceous Period, when a vast inland sea covered
much of what today is the North American continent. A similar
geologic history created the extensive German potash deposits,
according to Barbour. That is almost certainly not the
source of briny waters in the western Sandhills.
_400.jpg)
Salts
are naturally occurring in nearly all soils. Condra believed
the source of salts in the western Sandhills and along
the North Platte River Valley had their origin in the Rocky
Mountains. The tableland of western Nebraska was laid down
by erosion of the Rocky Mountains, as gravel, sand and
silt was carried easterly by streams and deposited. Surface
and subsurface drainage is to the southeast, and so salts
leached from the tablelands were carried into the western
Sandhills. Because the Sandhills are of such recent origin
(there being evidence winds during periods of drought were
still reworking the dunes as recently as 600 years ago)
an extensive system of creeks and rivers to drain the region
is yet to develop. The result is that the western Sandhills
are poorly drained, and mineral-rich water leaching down
through dunes to wetlands is not efficiently carried away.
During wet cycles, and even during the rainy spring months
in years of average precipitation, these salt-rich waters
pool on the surface and in summer evaporate, leaving behind
alkaline crusts on the surface. (Photo: Cracked
mud and alkaline deposits on pothole.)
Barbour attributed the source of the alkaline waters to
ash that leached down through the soil, ash derived from
thousands of years of wildfires burning “grasses, weeds,
and shrubs.” Barbour continued: “However produced, the
ash would be leached by rains and snows, and washed as
lye into the pools and lakes. Since these lakes are practically
without outlet, there was been no waste, and the alkali
has been concentrated through the centuries.” Barbour succinctly
characterized the alkaline wetlands: “They are shallow
evaporating basins in which the alkaline waters of the
respective drainage areas are caught and concentrated,
to a greater or less degree, by solar evaporation.”
Such waters would be expected to be devoid of animal life
but support a limited variety and abundance of insects,
crustaceans and salamanders. They are thick with “alkali
fly” larvae and tiny brine shrimp. Those foods, along with
the open shorelines and shallow water, make them particularly
attractive to a variety of shorebirds.
Blossoming
of Industry
In
the summer of 1914, a year after they had ceased operation
and as political events in Europe leading to World I began
influencing the availability of German potash, Modesitt,
Show, and Omaha investors organized to resume potash production
on Jesse Lake. They made two significant changes from their
earlier operation—increasing the size of concentration
vats, and building their plant adjacent to the Chicago,
Burlington, and Quincy Railroad line little more than two
miles south of Jesse Lake, about 12 miles east of Alliance.
Before long the wildcat city of Hoffland sprung up near
the plant at Reno, the name of railroad siding where cattle
were loaded for shipment. The new venture and corporation
was named the Potash Reduction Company (also called the
Potash Products Company and more often “the Hoffland Company”
for short). Production increased to about seven tons of
potash per day. Barbour reported the company initially
built “20 bunk houses, together with a hotel and commissary
for the 70 employees. They have a well-equipped office,
drafting room, and laboratory adjoining the plant.” (Photo: A
schematic sketch by Barbour of a revolving steel drier used
to reduce potash slurry to powder for shipping.)
Pipelines buried 30-inches underground carried the brine
from the lake to the plant. Iron pipes were initially used
but it soon became evident they were corroding and so they
were replaced with pipe made of wooden staves bound snugly
together with wrappings of a heavy, No. 6, wire. Stave
unions were sealed with tar. The pipe diameters varied
from two to six inches, increasing in size from sand-point
pumps in the lake to the trunk line leading to the plant.
Local ranchers in the area who uncovered and reused some
of the wood pipe after the plants closed said they were
made of redwood, as it not only resisted corrosion but
rotting as well.
“Some
of it was redwood, some of it was made out of fir lumber,”
the late Paul Dietlein recalled in a 1982 interview. Paul’s
father, George, was a railroad man but in 1919 came to
Antioch to be a management employee of the American Potash
Company. He remained with the company even after it stopped
production, when he went to Atlanta, Georgia to sell potash
stored there. Paul was born in 1907 and so was 12 years
old at the peak of the potash boom. “Those pipes were made
out of long strips of this wood, and they were beveled
just enough so they would fit and they was round.”
Labor and shipping costs remained high, and so the Potash
Reduction Company made additional changes to their plant
to increase efficiency. Plants built after the Potash Reduction
Company plant did not learn by trial and error the way
the Potash Reduction Company had but imitated it. The operation
of all the large plants was nearly the same, varying in
outside appearance and conformation, but all employing
essentially the same equipment and process to reduce potash
to a powder for shipping.
(Photo: Solar
evaporating tower built on Jesse Lake in 1912. Barbour photograph.)
Large, concrete basins were constructed adjacent to the
plants where the salt-rich water was sprayed into the air,
using solar and wind power to begin concentrating the potash.
The brine was further concentrated in evaporation towers
and coal-fired boilers. Barbour wrote that some “heavy
liquor” or “alkali salts in solution” were shipped in tank
cars. Most of the briny syrup, though, was then pumped
into slowly rotating dryers of “intense heat produced by
the combustion of crude oil accompanied by a forced blast
of air.” Barbour described the “revolving steel driers”
as about 65 to 70 feet long and six feet in diameter.
“Some alkali adheres to the sides of the cylinder and is
jarred off by means of heavy mechanical hammers, weighing
about 50 pounds each, which strike the revolving cylinder
at regular intervals,” Barbour wrote of the American Potash
Company plant. “The hard lumps drop from the lower end
of the cylinder onto a belt conveyor, are carried to an
upper floor, pass through a crusher, and drop down a chute
into bags holding 200 pounds each.”
“When
it got down to just kind of a slop,” Dietlein said, “so
it would just barely move in a pipe you know, just a sludge
is all it was, and they wanted it just as thick as they
could have it and still move it through the pipes,” it
moved to “big dryers, big heavy, steel about 5/16ths [inch
thick] iron things. They were 6-feet in diameter and they...run
on rollers…that turned, and on those dryers they had a
wide band with steel around them that run on those rollers,
you see. They revolved real slow, probably make...a complete
revolution, probably in two minute’s time, real slow. That
mud went into one end and they had a big flame down at
this other end. It would shoot back probably half the length
of that big steel [dryer]…. It was chunky when it come
out of there.
( Photo: Brine pumping station
on east end of Jesse Lake. Barbour photograph.)
“That stuff that dried on the sides would drop off, cake,
and dropped into a thing that had an auger, a big auger
and up at the other end. A fellow would stand up there
with a sledge, and pound on that thing and that would jar
it loose,” Dietlein continued, his description of freeing
the dried alkali from the rotary drums differing from Barbour’s.
“I don’t know…, those sledges probably weighed ten pounds.
They were hitting that dryer, that steel dryer...to break
that mud loose that had baked on the side. Most of them
guys were damn husky guys. ... _300.jpg)
Well,
you couldn’t get a man to do it [today]. They wouldn’t
even try to hire a man to stand up there and swing a sledge
all day. Hell, they would have some kind of a mechanical
deal fixed up to do that work.”
(Photo: Coils
of the heavy wired once used to bind wooden pipes for pumping
potash brine still rise to the surface in shallow, alkaline
pools.)
Because wood-frame buildings had burned, later plants were
built of steel, concrete and brick. The plants operated
year-round so as to make efficient use of the facilities;
and because the brine was more concentrated below the frost
line in winter. Nebraska Potash Company’s electrical generators
not only provided light for the plants but also homes in
Antioch.
Condra estimated a large potash processing plant cost between
$100,000 and $400,000, required several acres of land,
and typically had the following equipment and buildings—a
main building for storing, evaporating, drying, grinding
and sacking; boiler and engine houses; bins for coal and
oil storage; a supply house and blacksmith and carpenter
shops; office buildings; bunk houses and eating houses;
homes for employees, a railroad siding; and a freshwater
supply.
Boom Towns
When the overseas supply of potash vanished, other plants
sprung up like mushrooms in southern Sheridan County. By
the end of World War I, there were 10 plants capable of
producing 100 tons or more per day, and small wildcat operations
capable of, but seldom, producing 10 tons per day that
sold their potash to the larger companies.
(Photo: The
Potash Products Company plant in April 1916. Barbour photograph.)
The
Hord Alkali Products Company began operating near Lakeside
in February 1917. The Hord family of Central City had been
a pioneer cattle feeder in Nebraska, and was the largest
grain company in the state, owning 50 grain elevators,
most in small towns. They also owned ranches in Duel County
and southern Sheridan County, and were quick to jump on
the potash bonanza as there were alkaline wetlands on his
ranch near Lakeside. That same year the Nebraska Potash
Company and American Potash Company completed plants near
Antioch. Subsequent large processing plants included the
Alliance Potash Company, the Western Potash Company, the
National Potash Company and the Standard Potash Company,
all along the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad
line between Lakeside and Hoffland. Paralleling the rail
line was the highway today called Nebraska Highway 2, but
in those days, and for decades after, known as the Potash
Highway. Of all the plants, the Hoffland plant, because
it was the first and tapped the potash-rich waters of Jesse
Lake, was the most successful, employing 200 men and producing
up to 200 tons of potash per day.
(Photo Left: Paul Dietlein during his barn-storming
years. He was a young boy during Antioch’s boom years.)
Condra wrote that production was confined to Sheridan,
Garden, and Morrill counties in an area “about thirty miles
north and south and between twenty and thirty miles east
and west.” The Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad
line traversed the center. Condra also wrote 75 lakes were
known to “contain potash in paying quantities” although
a “few strong lakes remain untested and unleased.” Surprisingly,
Condra included most of the larger lakes now on the Valentine
National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Cherry County, and
some in Brown, Holt and McPherson counties as worthy of
investigation. The Nebraska Refining and Pipe Line Company
with offices in Valentine leased a number of Cherry County
lakes, many on school sections, but apparently never advanced
beyond that.
Because hundreds of men worked at each plant, and the nearest
large town, Alliance, was miles away, the potash companies
built housing for workers at the same time they were building
their plants, although photographs of the day show wall
tents as well.
“I was a kid when that happened,” Dietlein said. “Let’s
see, I was in the seventh grade, I guess. I went to seventh
and eighth grade in Antioch.... When Antioch first started…,
there was the [railroad] section people who had a section
house at Antioch, …about five or six; and they had a station
agent; a fellow that run the store there; there was the
post office. I guess that’s all that was there in Antioch
at that time. Then in about three week’s time, the town
jumped from those 25 people we’ll say to 1,500. They were
living in tents, shacks, anything to keep the rain off
of them. It sure went wild out there, and we had all classes
of people. A lot of them single [men], most of them single.
A lot of them were married but hadn’t brought their family
in or anything. No place for them. There was two pool halls
there in town, a ladies ready-to-wear store. About the
time the potash pulled out, two drugstores, a restaurant,
two restaurants, and what else? That’s the only business
places I can actually remember.... At Antioch, there was
probably 3,000 people at Antioch at one time.
_400.jpg)
“The
housing, they built housing for the married men to live
in. They built some pretty nice houses.... Each potash
plant had a couple or three real nice, modern homes for
their superintendent, probably the office manager, and
then the plant manager. They usually had the best houses.
The rest of them, the lakes foreman, he had a pretty nice
house, by the standards those days you would consider a
nice house. Each plant had about the same setup, you see.
They had a lot of those houses built that were four-room
houses....”
(Photo: Remnants of the
Western Potash Company plant along Nebraska Highway 2 between
Lakeside and Alliance.)
Condra, in his 1918 writing, probably based on information
from a year prior, noted that Antioch “is destined to become
the big potash center,” and that there were more than 200
houses in that town, all of which “sprung up within a year.”
All had electric lights, steam heat, and indoor plumbing,
conveniences rare at that time in small towns, particularly
in the Sandhills. Some of the larger companies provided
public entertainment and public bathhouses. Condra reported
that adequate labor was difficult to hire and retain because
of the sparsely populated region and because so many young
men were in the military, even though wages were generous
for the time.
Wild Times
“Finally they had to have a mayor of the town and a policeman,”
Dietlein said of Antioch. “The sheriff was located up at
Rushville, see, in [northern] Sheridan County. It was Prohibition
too, you know. They had two of these pool halls. One of
them was just a dive. I can’t remember the two guys that
run that place, the farthest one east. That was the dive.
About everything went on there. McGee had one, a nice big
building and a good pool hall. It was a pool hall and a
bar in there.
“Legally speaking, all they could sell was near beer. But
they would spike it with alcohol; put an ounce of alcohol
in a bottle of near beer, and by God, about three or four
bottles of that would put you buzzing. Now I was told,
and I don’t know this to be a fact of course, but I was
told that McGee had been a bootlegger and an ex-prize fighter
back in Boston, and he come out there and started that
pool hall.... He run a pretty good place, pretty decent
place. If them guys got too wild and too rowdy in there,
he would just throw them out of the damned place, throw
them out in the gutter. He didn’t stand for, just the normal
amount of guys feeling good, drinking, and stuff like that,
that was fine and dandy, but if they got wild and got to
fighting and wanted to tear up things, McGee took them
and handled them....” Dietlein was a small man, but wiry
and apparently fast with his fists as a boy, and for a
time, until his father caught wind of it, did well boxing
for money in Antioch.
“This
old McGee, dropping back a ways in the story, he got a
bunch of us kids and he built a [boxing] ring.... The kids
never learned any harm in that place. I used to box down
there two nights a week, so I knew what was going on. I
got along pretty good at it. They passed the hat around
there, and those rounders around there and one thing another,
they were generous, you know. For those days, they was
all making good money. A lot of them sales guys spent money.
They passed the hat; they throw money in the hat. Hell,
I would get $10, $15 a lot of those times. I was winning
a good share of the time, so I got the pot. This went on
for quite a while. Mother found out about it, [and] I suspicion
probably Dad knew it.”
(Photo: Workers at the Nebraska Potash
Company near Antioch. Photograph by Hager, probably a Barbour
student.)
Before school started the next fall, Paul’s parents enrolled
him in a Jesuit school in Denver to get him away from the
unsavory atmosphere of Antioch. Dietlein returned to finish
high school in Alliance, ran off to travel the country
as a barnstormer, and had other adventures, including being
the personal pilot of a Central American dictator, before
returning to ranch south of Lakeside for the rest of his
life.
Dashed Dreams
Almost from the beginning it was obvious Nebraska’s potash
industry would be short-lived, but there was no shortage
of investors who believed otherwise. Reports that investors
in American Potash Company at Antioch received more than
$4 for every $1 invested when the company was sold to the
Western Potash Company fueled the fever. _400.jpg)
Even
after the Armistice Treaty ended World War I in November
1918, two new companies sprang up believing it would be
years before potash shipments resumed from war-torn Germany.
In 1919, the Berg Potash Company near Sutherland and the
Republic Chemical Works Company (also a Berg Company venture)
near Merriman in northwestern Cherry County began building
plants that year. The Sutherland plant was never completed.
(Photo: Remnants
of the Western Potash Company plant along Nebraska Highway
2 between Lakeside and Alliance.)
The Berg plant at Merriman is an interesting story in and
of itself. Marianne Brinda Beel, in A Sandhills Century,
Book I, The Land – A History of Cherry County, Nebraska,
wrote of the plant near Merriman.
“The William Berg Co. sold $1,000,000 worth of stock in
a potash venture in Merriman; many of the investors were
local ranchers and merchants,” she wrote in the 1986 Cherry
County centennial book. “It was to be the largest plant
in the state and would employ about 200 men with a payroll
of $30,000. They built a mess hall and bunkhouses for Japanese
help and built company dwellings with a promise of many
more. Water was pumped through 10-inch cypress wood tongue-and-grove
pipeline from ponds near Gay Lake, 12 miles west of town.”
Beel wrote that local newspaper headlines of the time burst
with optimism: “Prospects Look Bright for Merriman” was
a headline in an August 2, 1918 Merriman Maverick article.
At the end of December of the same year, newspapers reported
the first shipment of potash had been shipped. In February
of the next year, the name was changed to the Merriman
Potash Products Company, and the first rumors of misdeeds
financing the venture began to surface. Arthur Bowring,
a prosperous rancher north of Merriman and substantial
investor, was elected the new president of the company.
A petition was filed in district court asking for an explanation
of $.5 million unaccounted for in the company books. Bowring
(whose ranch is now the Bowring Ranch State Historical
Park) was almost immediately concerned about McWhorter & Company
bookkeeping practices, a subsidiary of the original William
Berg Company, and even before the first shipment of potash
left the plant he was writing blunt letters demanding to
know why investors were yet to receive stock certificates.
McWhorter’s reply was obscure and implied the venture was
not financed by legitimate stockholders and adequate funds,
but “paper.” At the same time, McWhorter attempted to reassure
Bowering by writing that “stock” in the company was selling
from $150 to $200 per share. Bowring replied: “I note what
you say about the stock being worth $150 per share but
what good would that do me, if I wanted to sell my stock
when it has never been issued me?” Bowring closed that
letter: “I helped you people get started on selling stock.
Please issue me that stock and forward to me at Merriman
and oblige.”
Subsequent correspondence revealed the original company
had backed away from the operation because there were concerns
the alkaline wetlands being mined were too low in potash
salts for the venture to profit. Gay Lake had a sandy bottom,
rather than a “mud bed” as do the lakes in southern Sheridan
County. Barbour wrote, of highly alkaline lakes: “The lake
beds are rendered impervious by fine materials, which are
washed in from the surrounding watershed. This is all muck,
and varies in thickness from 2 to 10 or 15 feet. This impervious
muck contains magnesia, aluminum hydrate, and lime, with
silt and some organic matter.” Condra noted such lakes
have “a characteristic odor and bitter taste.” In Gay Lake
west of Merriman, though, groundwater levels were high
and flooded the lake in the spring, diluting the potash
concentrations, and the sandy bottom allowed surface water
carrying salts to seep away, hence its waters proved unprofitable
to process.
Bowring’s investments in the operation were apparently
substantial, and his reputation as a civic leader in the
region was on the line as he had encouraged others to invest
in it. Hoping to salvage something, the plant was modified
to produce fertilizer—a mix of potash and dried muck.
“The plant was converted to a fertilizer factory,” Beel
wrote. “They resumed work in October [1919] working one
shift of 12 hours a day and expected to be working 200
men by summer, but as yet hadn’t turned out any fertilizer....
Because of a coal strike they were forced to shut down
again but were able load out their first [rail] car in
November and closed again in December.”
More stock was issued and the plant reopened in February
1920. By May, the plant was again closed and the electric
lights in Merriman went out as the plant had been providing
electricity to the town. “Potash Promoters in Clutch of
Law,” headlines read in May 1921. “McWhorter and Masse
were arrested for using the mails to defraud,” Beel quoted
from newspaper accounts of the time. “McWhorter, ‘the big
fish,’ fled to Mexico.... All of these men will be arrested,
sooner or later. This one of the biggest swindles in Nebraska
history.” Shortly thereafter, the Merriman potash plant
was destroyed by fire, a fire many considered of suspicious
origin.
_300.jpg)
Country for Cattle,
Not Industry
Mari Sandoz summarized the potash boom in her book Old
Jules, the story of her father and his role in settling
the western Sandhills.
(Photo: Tiger
salamander stranded on alkaline pothole that dried in summer.)
“War and the curtailment of German shipping brought a new
industry to the sandhills—potash. And to the most unlikely
place for a million-dollar development, to the wind-torn
region south of the Greens [ranch family who lived in the
Sandhills south of the Sandoz ranch on the Niobrara River
south of Hay Springs], no longer needing Jules’s protection,
to a region pitted with lakes as stinking as old setting
eggs, the gray water edged with alkali-bleached tufts of
grass like worn-out scrub bushes.
“Men let their cultivators stand in corn rows, the polished
shovels buried in the earth; left their mowers with the
steel teeth in blowing timothy and purple-bloomed alfalfa,”
Sandoz continued. “They squatted on their dusty heels,
talking. They leaned over the hog pens in the evening sun,
talking. Work was started at Jess [Jesse] Lake, four [two]
miles from the south road [today’s Nebraska Highway 2].
A Chicago concern already controlled a thousand acres of
the foulest, richest brine, quietly leased up before a
foot of pipe was shunted to the sidings at Reno. Five
thousand dollars went into a well and an evaporating tower
before anyone knew what was up. A $50,000 plant was already
on paper. The report of the water analysis once more brought
a stream of Eastern money to the Panhandle. It would carry
away the profits as before.
“Almost every Kinkaider with a mud hole briny enough for
water puppies (the sandhill salamander) carried a bottle
of the gray water with him and thrust it hopeful on any
stranger in leather puttees or with a crease in his pants,”
Sandoz continued.
“‘So it goes,’ Jules told his family gloomily ‘I pick out
a good place with fine grass and fresh water, and along
comes a war, shuts off German potash, and lot of fools
that don’t know any better than to file on stinking alkali
lakes make more money in a month than I can by working
a lifetime.’”
It is unlikely many ranchers substantially profited selling
or leasing mineral rights, as Jules Sandoz’s contended.
Condra, near the end of the potash boom, wrote that land
was both leased and sold, and landowners were eager to
do so as the alkaline wetlands were useless to them. Condra
reported that royalties paid on leases averaged about 12
percent of the gross of production, and that leases continued
in effect “during the period of profitable production of
potash,” implying they were relinquished when production
ceased. If there was no “profitable production,” landowners
apparently received token or no payments. As with the flurry
of center-pivot irrigation farming in the eastern and southern
Sandhills in the 1970s and 1980s, those who profited were
investors who bought range land cheap, developed the land,
and sold with substantial profits before the folly of farming
sand dunes became fully evident.
There was considerable controversy, fermented by the press,
in regard to the leasing of school sections for potash
mining; particularly in regard to whether the Commission
of Public Lands and Buildings could issue separate leases
for grazing and mineral rights on the same tract of land.
School sections were one-mile-square sections (640 acres),
numbers 16 and 36 of each 36-section township in the state,
set aside by the federal government to fund public education
when Nebraska became a state. There was, apparently, little
consistency in how such matters were handled. Potash-rich
lakes were discovered in early-1917 on state-owned school
land. A company reportedly composed of then current or
former state employees filed for leases on some of those
school sections, raising cries of fraud and cronyism. The
Commission quickly squashed the rumors by waving the American
flag and calling for citizens to be patriotic as the potash
was needed in the manufacture of munitions for our boy’s
fighting for freedom half way around the world. Although
potash was sometimes listed as a component of munitions,
the notion was unfounded. The controversy soon became a
moot point.
The Crash
Nebraska’s governor-elect Samuel McKelvie and the Nebraska
congressional delegation attempted to have federal legislation
passed to impose an import duty on foreign potash after
World War I, so home-harvested potash would remain competitive.
Apparently the cotton-farming lobby had more influence,
as Nebraska’s delegation was unsuccessful. Most of the
potash plants began laying off employees or shutting down
in 1919. Producers had warehouses full of potash, but fertilizer
companies refused to pay the high wartime prices. Some
fertilizer companies did buy potash but reduced the percentage
of it in the fertilizer mix they sold to cotton farmers
in 1919, resulting in reduced cotton crops. _650.jpg)
The
fertilizer companies were forced to pay high prices for
potash in storage the next year to satisfy their customers.
Some plants resumed production but were almost immediately
crippled by a coal strike in Wyoming, and a ton of coal
was required to reduce brine to a ton of potash.By late-1920,
plants were again shutting down. Potash was again being
shipped from Germany. By early in 1921, the potash boom
in Nebraska ended when the last plant closed its doors.
The towns of Antioch and Hoffland vanished as quickly as
they had sprouted. Dietlein said when the potash companies
folded, the houses were moved or torn down and the lumber
salvaged. The plants, he said, the companies “Stripped
them down and sold that used pipe and everything.”
( Photo: Remnants
of the Western Potash Company plant along Nebraska Highway
2 between Lakeside and Alliance.)
Today, about the only reminder of the potash boom are the
concrete, brick, and steel remains of the Western Potash
Company plant on the north side of Nebraska Highway 2 near
Antioch between Lakeside and Alliance. They stand, somehow
Stonehenge-like, as train after train carrying coal from
Wyoming to more easterly states passes by, somber and silent
reminders of the fickleness of commerce and wars, and the
folly of short-term speculation. _300.jpg)
In
1979, these remnants were added to the National Register of Historic
Places. If you drive slowly enough, and look in shallow pools of
water shrinking in the summer sun, you might see a coil
of the old wire once used to wrap the wooden potash pipes
emerging from the water; or if you look closely at a gate
post here and there you might see twists of No. 6 wire
nearly a hundred years old, a relic, about the only remnant
of the potash boom still doing something useful.
(Photo: The
heavy wired once used to bind wooden pipes for pumping potash brine
can see be found used on gate posts in the region.)
“I’ve still got some, a piece of fence out here, corral
fence out there,” Dietlein said in 1982 of lumber salvaged
from the wooden pipes to pump brine to the dehydration
plants. “A lot of the ranchers dug up their old pipe. The
pipes, you take that wire off of it, see, and there’s a
staple on the end. Just as soon as you poke it loose...,
drop them a time or two and the wire would just come uncoiled,
come loose on you. What I did is knock one slat out and
the rest of them would just fall in. That was good lumber,
good straight-grained lumber, you know, like if you wanted
to put it up for a corral fence…. You couldn’t even buy
that kind of lumber nowadays at a lumber yard.... The potash
company didn’t pay one bit of attention to it. They just
forgot about it. It was such a small item for the amount
of money that some of them had tied up in those plants,
they just forgot about it.”
_300.jpg)
In 1942, long after the potash
boom in western Nebraska, large deposits of potash were located
in Saskatchewan in the course of exploration for oil. The
potash comes from deep-shaft mines as much as 3,300 feet
underground. Today, Canada is far and away the largest producer
of potash in the world, and most of Canada’s production is
shipped to the U.S. (Photo: Coils of
the heavy wired once used to bind wooden pipes for pumping
potash brine still rise to the surface in shallow, alkaline
pools.)
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