Items of Interest January 17, 1914 Issue

Items of Interest

The Keokuk & Hamilton Water Power Company, whose gigantic dam across the Mississippi river was recently completed, together with officials of the war department, are involved in an investigation by a committee of the House of Representatives, which the conservationists will try to have ordered as soon as Congress comes together. The charges recite, in general, that the government and the public received the bad end of a sharp bargain. It is also claimed by steamboat companies that navigation has been hindered rather than helped. The conservationists further say that the power company is buying up electric light plants within the sphere of its operations in Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa, "paying therefor in many cases much more than said properties are worth, and thereafter rendering less efficient service than was formerly rendered."

Department of agriculture experts figure that an annual waste in the United States of twenty-two million dollars' worth of ammonia is due to the practise of making coke in the beehive type of oven, which does not admit the recovery of the distillation products. From this ammonia, they say, should be made ammonium sulphate, a valuable fertilizing material. About four million dollars' worth of the ammonia is obtained annually as a by-product of coke-making, while more than five times that much is allowed to go to waste. This country imports annually from Chile about seventy thousand tons of sodium nitrate for fertilizer, which contains 15 per cent less nitrogen than does ammonium sulphate.

The last great sale of Indian lands in Oklahoma under the direction of the United States government began last week. More than a million acres of timber, agricultural, and grazing land are to be sold in five county-seat towns of the Choctaw nation during January, the sale in McCurtain county being the first to begin. Months have been spent by the department of the interior in preparation for the sale. Hundreds of land buyers and home seekers have flocked there to bid on the tracts, which will be sold at auction. There is no lottery in connection with the sale. Every buyer is required to make prompt payment.

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