PLOWING SALT IN COLORADO DESERT
This field is literally white to harvest and a most phenomenal harvest it is. Over a briny, oozy marsh lies a crust of salt six to sixteen inches thick. As often as removed, the crust quickly forms again, so that crop after crop is taken from the same ground. In fact, although these harvests have been going on nearly twenty years, and two thousand tons of marketable salt are annually taken from the beds, but ten acres of the one-thousand-acre field have been broken.
The laborers employed in breaking up the salt crust, in loading the salt onto the wagons and taking it to the mills, in cleaning and preparing it for the market, are mostly Japanese and Indians. In the summer season the temperature reaches 130 to 140 degrees at Salton, and white men are unable to endure the work exposed to the burning rays of the sun.
The ease with which the salt is procured in this field makes it a valuable one. At very little expense the salt is made ready for market, and it brings from six to thirty-six dollars per ton, according to the grade.
The Coachella Valley, in which this great field of salt lies, is ninety miles long and from ten to thirty miles wide. Its one thousand six hundred square miles of territory lie wholly below the level of the sea, its greatest depression being 275 feet. The southern portion of the valley is devoid of vegetation, save where irrigation has been introduced, but about the northern portion of the valley the sage and mesquite have obtained a foothold in the sandy soil. Near Indio, in the northern portion of the valley, an artesian well was drilled a few years ago and a copious supply of water was obtained. Now more than two hundred and fifty of those wells are pouring their waters over the thirsty soil, and a large tract of land has been brought into a high state of cultivation. The lands about the salt-fields, however, are too strongly impregnated with salts and alkali to offer any inducements to the rancher now or in the future. The constant harvest of salt, however, is a rich enough return for the lands thus unfitted for agriculture.
This desert salt is remarkable for its fine quality. An analysis made in San Francisco shows its constituents to be as follows: Chloride of sodium, 94.68 per cent.; calcium sulphate, .77 per cent.; water, .75 per cent.; magnesium sulphate, 3.12 per cent.; sodium sulphate, .68 per cent.; total, 100 per cent.
Until 1901, the title to the Salton lands was vested in the Government, and the company which was reaping the harvest had no title to the property and no legal right thereto. There is an interesting story connected with the change of title.