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Show All Mining Claims Are Endangered By New Policy Behind a veil of official secrecy, a move has been started by the general land office, department of the interior, that may wipe out an estimated $300,000,000 worth of unpatented mining claims owned by thousands of western prospectors prospec-tors and small stockholders in mining min-ing ventures in all parts of the nation, na-tion, according to a series of articles written by Leon Starmont, and appearing in the Spokane, Washington, Spokesman - Review. Clippings of the. series of articles have been furnished The News by James R. Villars, wellknown Spokane Spo-kane mining man, who is developing develop-ing the Okay properties, owned by Theodore Kronholm and located northwest of Milford. The estimate is based on a trustworthy trust-worthy report that 12,000 claims are to be contested in the Spokane land office area alone; that the number in the 12 public land states will aggregate 150,000 claims, and that the average claim attacked represents an expenditure of $100 a year for about' 20 years prior to the (present exemption of the annual an-nual labor requirement. , The 1 facts are not . generally known even among the persons most interested the individual prospectors and their heirs who hold these claims, and the . shareholders share-holders in the thousands of small exploration enterprises whose holdings are being questioned. Little information leaked ,past the censorship clamped on offices of the department of the interior since the land office move to cancel can-cel the 150000 mining locations, reportedly involving $300,000,000 in risk capital, was inaugurated. One nugget of fact and several promising stringers of surmise were revealed. The fact: Applications Applica-tions for patent have been held up by the land office "until after the war," even while parties of land office examiners were scouring the 12 western states looking for flaws on which they might attack' the validity of individual claims in properties otherwise demonstrated demon-strated tp be mineral in character. Representative Coimpton I. White (Dem., Idaho) was in Spokane Spo-kane and left word before going to his home in Clark Fork, Idaho, that he would make a statement later in the week. It was White who called hearings hear-ings at several northern cities that brought out the facts about divergent plans for use of Columbia Colum-bia river waters, after a series of articles published in The Spokesman-Review a year ago. Those j hearings resulted in establishment of the Northwest Development association as-sociation by joint action of the governors of Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Montana and Wyoming. White's committee on irrigation and reclamation has already announced an-nounced it will hold more hearings on other phases of that problem. It is possible that White will extend ex-tend his investigation to cover the' (Continued on last page) V Claims Endangered (Continued from first page) wholesale attack on mining locations. loca-tions. Another possibility is that he will institute hearings through the public lands committee, of which he is also a member. Officials of more than a dozen mining associations in the 12 public pub-lic land states were probing to discover clews to the mysterious silence imposed on the several agencies of the general land office and on other bureaus within with-in the department of the interior, the head of which is Harold Ickes. "Conflicting statements have been followed by officially imposed im-posed silence," said C. O. Dunlop, chairman of the legislative committee com-mittee of the Northwest Mining association. "The interests of the west demand that ways be found to break the department's gag rule and let the people out here know what is going on, and who is responsible for it. The mystery must and will be solved." Reports from Butte, Boise, Seattle, Seat-tle, Baker, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Reno, Denver, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Albuqurque, and even South Dakota and Alaska were in the hands of the Northwest North-west Mining association. In 'some cases the warning was attached that individual elaimowners did not wish to be mentioned because they feared reprisals. "It appears to me," said Edmund Ed-mund P. Twohy, Spokane mining attorney, "that much more is involved in-volved here than appears on the surface. It may be, as some have suggested, merely a case of the department of interior trying to do by indirection what it failed to accomplish in its request to congress con-gress to substitute leasing ar-" rangements for the time-honored mining laws under which the western states were developed. "We know that Secretary Ickes more than 10 years ago tried to get congress to knock out the rights of location and place all mining under a leasing system the federal government retaining ownership. He told congressmen then that although he was defeated defeat-ed in the attempt he had not changed his mind. "li the secretary now is trying to achieve the same result by canceling claims before patent applications ap-plications are made, something entirely new in federal practice he would naturally want to keep it a secret from congress, from the newspapers and from the people." More than half the mining engineers engi-neers in the United States are now in the armed forces or working for the several government bureaus that nave supplanted private initiative initi-ative to a great extent in developing develop-ing ore deposits. There has been more than the suspicion of a smile on the faces of some of these men when they met fellow engineers engi-neers not on the federal payroll, according to the comparatively few who are still free to speak their minds. |