It has been more than a century since twenty-mule teams hauled borax out of the California desert, but their legend still ties the chemical industry to the fabled Old West
The borax diggings of southern California never had the hell-roaring flavor and flair of many of the gold, silver, and copper mining camps that once dotted the Rocky and Sierra mountains; but probably nowhere did the chemical industry rub elbows more closely with the storied Old West.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the small U.S. market for borax—mostly for medicinal use—was supplied by imports from Italy (where it was recovered from hot springs in Tuscany) and from Chile. In 1856, borax (sodium tetraborate decahydrate, also known as tincal) was discovered in several saline lakes and springs in northern California. Recovery on a commercial scale but limited scale began there about eight years later.
A much richer source was uncovered in 1871 at Columbus Marsh, in southwestern Nevada, in the form of the mineral ulexite (a calcium-sodium borate, also called “cottonball” because of its round, loose-textured nature). William Tell Coleman, a San Francisco wholesale broker and leader during the 1850s of the city’s vigilante committee, soon gained control of the borax business there. Coleman needed fuel to heat the water used to refine the crude mineral. He bought it from Francis Marion Smith, who had enterprisingly acquired a nearby ranch with an ample supply of wood growing on it.
Smith, born on a Michigan farm in 1846, had gone west in 1867 to seek his fortune as a prospector. In 1872, he found even richer deposits of cottonballs nearby at Teel’s Marsh and set up Teel’s Marsh Borax Co. He marketed his output through Coleman. Together, Coleman and Smith (who would come to be known as “Borax” Smith) dominated U.S. borax production.
Death Valley, in southeastern California, was soon to eclipse the Nevada borax operations, however. The valley is a desolate land of legends and extremes. It is the lowest (down to 282 feet below sea level), hottest, and driest area in North America. Summer temperatures typically reach 120° F and have been known to go above 130° F, and rainfall averages only about two inches a year. It is bounded to the east by the Grapevine, Funeral, and Black Mountains and to the west by the Panamints, which rise to 11,000 feet. It became a national monument in 1933.
Death Valley probably was first seen by white intruders when Mexican horse thieves and traders ran a trail across its southern end in about 1830. It got its name when a ragtag party of forty-niners, seeking a short cut from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles in late 1849, stumbled into the heart of the valley and became stranded in the desert and blind canyons with inadequate water. At least one (and possibly more) of the group died before they managed to work their way out. It was “the most God-forsaken country in the world,” one survivor would write later.
The area was visited occasionally during the next two or three decades by prospectors, who made a few limited, short-lived gold and silver strikes in the surrounding mountains. One of these prospectors, Aaron Winters, was scraping out a meager living east of the valley with his wife Rosie when they were visited overnight in the autumn of 1881 by a prospector who was familiar with the Nevada borax findings. The visitor showed Winters a sample of the white mineral and demonstrated to him how to test for borax by pouring sulfuric acid over it, dousing it with alcohol, and lighting it with a match. A green flame indicated the presence of the key element in borax, boron.
Winters had seen similar-looking salts on the valley floor. He collected some near Furnace Creek, took them home, and tested them. He is alleged to have shouted, “She burns green, Rosie! We‘re rich, by God!” Lacking money and the skill to develop his borax claim himself, Winters sent samples to both Coleman and Smith. Coleman bought out his claim for $20,000. Winters soon found another lower-grade bed of borax in the Amargosa region of the mountains to the east of the valley. That claim, too, was purchased by Coleman.
Coleman’s Harmony Borax Works began operating in the valley during the fall of 1883. Crude mineral was scraped off the salt flats and carted to two 3,000-gallon heated dissolving tanks. The solution then was transferred to settling tanks and then to other tanks to recrystallize. When the heat of summer hindered crystallization, operations were shifted to the cooler works in the Amargosa.
Recovering borax from the desert salt pan was relatively simple. Getting it to market was a much more formidable task. The nearest railroad station was at Mojave, some 165 miles to the southwest across almost waterless desert and mountains. Coleman had ten huge wagon built with rear wheels seven feet high, each capable of hauling ten tons of borax. Twenty-mule teams were hitched to pairs of these wagons, plus a 1,200-gallon water-tank wagon behind. (Actually, the teams most often consisted of eighteen mules, with two horses closest to the wheels.) Loaded, the three wagons weighed about thirty-six tons. They were driven across the sand and up steep grades by a skinner, who controlled the team with a single jerk line, a whip, and an abundance of profanity. He had a swamper to assist him. A round trip from works to railroad, with an overnight stay in Mojave, took twenty days.
The Harmony Borax Works, together with Amargosa, soon was turning out two million pounds of borax yearly. Meanwhile, beds of another borate mineral named colemanite—a hard, quartzlike calcium borate, that could be easily converted to borax by digesting it with sodium carbonate—had been uncovered in the nearby mountains in 1882. Coleman acquired rights to that deposit as well and began shipping product from it in 1886. He also set up a refinery at Alameda, across the bay from San Francisco. But supply was by now far ahead of demand, and the market glut caused the price of borax to collapse by more than half to less than six cents a pound.
Coleman, at the same time, had been speculating in canned salmon and raisins. He went bankrupt. The Harmony Works shut down in 1888, and its great wagon teams, after hauling twenty million pounds of borax, were dispersed, never to carry the mineral out of Death Valley again. (Mule teams would be used sporadically at other sites during the next twenty years.) “Borax” Smith bought Coleman‘s properties in 1890 for $550,000. Coleman tried to make a comeback in the borax business, but he died, at age sixty-nine, in 1893.
Smith soon consolidated his borax holdings by forming Pacific Coast Borax Co., which virtually monopolized the U.S. borax business. But he concentrated his operations on a high-grade colemanite mine in the Calico Mountains, fifty miles south of Death Valley and only eight miles from the railroad.
Death Valley was not forgotten, though. Its twenty-mule teams and their wagon trains became the trademark for Pacific Coast Borax and the focus of its consumer advertising. This inspiration is credited to Stephen Mather, a young newpaper reporter who was hired by Smith to intensively, and often rather extravagantly, promote borax sales to homeowners as a cleansing and laundry agent. (Borax is still retailed to consumers under the “20 Mule Team” brand name.) Mather later became the first director of the U.S. National Park Service.
One of Mather’s publicity schemes had a wagon team exhibited at the St. Louis Exhibition in 1904, where it was a great hit. The team later toured the East, handing out free samples of borax. The product was touted for consumer uses ranging from cleaning and laundering to treating wounds and preserving food. It also was finding a broad menu of industrial uses in making glass, ceramics, porcelain enamels, and cosmetics; for tanning leather; and as a metallurgical flux, among other things.
Smith joined forces with Redwood & Sons (the British company that controlled borax output in Chile and dominated European sales) in 1896 to form what would become Borax Consolidated, Ltd., in 1899, one of the first truly multinational corporations. By this time, the Calico mine was becoming depleted, and Smith opened another colemanite claim, the Lila C., which originally belonged to Coleman (and was named for his wife) in the Amargosa region. He pushed a railroad into it in 1907.
Meanwhile, Smith, a lavish spender (and noted yachtsman), had gone heavily into debt while recklessly speculating in real estate and streetcar lines in Oakland, CA. After he was forced to sell off his borax assets in 1914 to settle with his creditors, “Borax” Smith no longer was in the borax business. He later managed to acquire some modest borax operations in California and Nevada, but he never regained his former preeminent position. He died in 1931, at the age of eighty-five.
After the Lila C. neared exhaustion in 1914, Borax Consolidated opened up other borax deposits in the Death Valley area. But the valley would be superseded by a larger underground deposit of tincal and kernite (a sodium borate tetrahydrate, also known as rasorite), found near Kramer, NV, in the Mojave Desert in 1926, and by borax extracted from brines beneath the surface of Searles Lake, a dry lake bed also in the Mojave Desert, as a byproduct of potash production there. The Searles Lake salt pan had been the source of small quantities of borax produced during the 1880s and 1890s. It was the leading source of potash in the U.S. from 1916 until the rich deposits in New Mexico were opened up in the early 1930’s. Searles Lake brines and the deposits at Kramer mined by U.S. Borax & Co. are now the only sources of borax in the U.S.
Death Valley’s borax heritage can still be seen. Tourists visiting the valley, now a national park, can view rusty machinery and adobe walls where the Harmony Borax Works once operated near the present visitor center, in addition to an old borax wagon and other memorabilia in the Borax Museum, at nearby Furnace Creek.