Where fortunes are to be made lives are held cheap, and natures great deposits of wealth in the valley have tempted man to pit his ingenuity, strength, and endurance against the powers of the great destroyer.
In the United States the supply of borax is limited to the States of California, Oregon, and Nevada. Until within the last ten or twelve years the supply of borax in this country was derived from evaporating the water of Clear Lake and several alkaline marshes in California and Nevada. In 1890, it was discovered that the crust of borax which formed in such places was but a secondary deposit from the main body of the mineral drug stored below. Then began the real history of the borax industry in this country.
It is said that borax is never found in nature except in craters of extinct volcanoes. Be that as it may, certain it is that in California all the deposits yet discovered lie at the bottom of those bowl-shaped valleys which are known to have been once the outlet for the vomitings of prehistoric Pélées.
The presence of borax is indicated by the snowy appearance of the valley bottoms, and to the uninitiated these white stretches, when seen from a little distance, might well be mistaken for snow-fields. Many a life has been lost in attempting to cross these snowy plains, for beneath the thin shell of salts lie fathomless depths of poisonous waters, for the funnels of those extinct volcanoes are filled with solutions of a multitude of mineral drugs such as were never brewed in chemist's laboratory.
In Death Valley thirty thousand acres of borax, niter, soda, and salt deposits have been located. The valley is literally a vast chemical laboratory where Nature has compounded and stored drugs by the millions of tons. It is the drug store of the universe.
There are several different forms in which borax occurs in nature. It is found in solution in some of the lakes and pools, from which it is obtained by evaporation; in salts or crystals known as boreat, which require no other treatment than to be dissolved in vats of boiling water and then allowed to crystallize again, and it is found in the form of "cotton balls," as the round masses of ulexite are called, masses varying in size from a rifle-ball to a bushel basket. The finest borax on the market is made from the "cotton balls." These balls, when broken, are fibrous and woolly in appearance, hence the name.
THE PAINTED DESERT
From photograph by C. C. Pierce & Co.