Other Resources The county has abundant resources other than its argicultural and sugar manufacturing. The Wildcat range has many beds of excellent volcanic ash, one being about eight feet thick and of great purity. In the Owl creek country there are magnesium outcrops that are valuable. Wonderful and extensive beds of gravel are here and there throughout the county. Some of these are of the quality and color of the famous Sherman hill gravel used for

HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

ballast on the Union Pacific right-of-way and along- the Lincoln Highway. Wallace Beatty of Scottsbluff has opened up the largest gravel deposit in a mercantile way and ships out hundreds of tons of the product for state aid and other highways and for building purposes.

In the moderately new geological formations of the rocks there have been some examinations made with a view to discovering a bed of thorium content. Thorium or Valadinum is used in steel to temper it and make it more serviceable for uses which its fusing temperature will now not permit it to be used. Tests have found some rocks radio active and with two-tenths of one per cent the required mineral -- not sufficient for development. But its being radio active and the presence of the mineral make further prospecting sure and it may be successful.

There have been no coal discoveries of consequence in the county although undoubtedly ligniteous coal underlies the county's soil. The depth, is, however, prohibitive from a commercial standpoint.

Potash production is only in connection with the sugar factory at Scottsbluff and the low price of the commodity made the plant lie idle the year of 1921. It is made from the waste waters from the mills at Scottsbluff and Gering which is piped into a large storage reservoir and later reduced to potash.