Borax: the Magic Crystal

Borax ore carts with a life-size replica of a twenty mule team at Rio Tinto's Visitor Center in Boron, CA. | Photo: Kim Stringfellow.

The Mojave Project is an experimental transmedia documentary by Kim Stringfellow exploring the physical, geological and cultural landscape of the Mojave Desert. The Mojave Project reconsiders and establishes multiple ways in which to interpret this unique and complex landscape, through association and connection of seemingly unrelated sites, themes, and subjects thus creating a speculative and immersive experience for its audience.

It was a rare occasion that a visitor would stopover at Aaron and Rosie Winters' modest stone cabin in a corner of Ash Meadows, located 40 or so miles due east of Death Valley. The couple led a quiet existence similar to other 19th century homesteaders who had settled throughout the American frontier. Customary for the times, when a stranger appeared at their door, they shared what little they had. It turned out that their humble hospitality would pay off well.

Gold and silver lured many a prospector out to Death Valley and surrounding environs, but the mineral compound that surprisingly proved most financially lucrative for a handful of them is common borax (Na2B4O7 10H2O), a concentrated soluble salt containing boron that was once collected from ancient lakebeds in Death Valley National Park.

Borates were first discovered in North America in Northern California's Tehama County in 1856. Evaporated surface deposits of crude borax called tincal (Na2B4O7 5H2O) had been recognized in Death Valley and surrounding areas during the country's first round of borax fever by spring of 1873, but the remote location along with the lack of a reliable transportation method out of this formidable desert landscape kept it from being exploited. By the early 1880s, scores of borate prospectors began frequenting the Amargosa Valley and nearby lands, driven by rumors that a new rail transport line was in the works that could connect the Mojave Desert with shipping hubs near the coast. Timely borate discoveries bringing in profits in neighboring Nevada also drove the prospecting frenzy. Henry Spiller was one of many borax adventurers making his way southward across Nevada. On an opportune evening during the fall of 1881, he stopped at the Winters' cabin for the night.

A twenty mule team at the ruins of the Harmony Borax Works, Furnace Creek, Death Valley, CA.

After dinner, Spiller exuberantly showed off a sample of cotton ball a surface formation of ulexite (NaCaB5O6(OH)6 5H2O) that is one of a hundred or so related mineral ores containing borax. Spiller suggested to his hosts that fortunes awaited those lucky enough to find a generous deposit of the stuff. He went on to share how to test for the mineral's presence with a combination of alcohol and sulfuric acid, which Aaron carefully noted. After Spiller left the next day, Aaron confided to Rosie that he had seen a material very similar to this out on the desiccated lakebed of Death Valley.

That same morning the couple set off across the Funeral Range over to Furnace Creek to collect samples of the opaque dirty-white bulbous material spread across the desert floor that resembled a handful of used cotton balls. At nightfall back at their camp, when the shadows had closed in around them, Aaron put some of the salt into a saucer, poured the acid and alcohol on them, and with a trembling hand struck a match. 1 Watching anxiously, he exclaimed, She burns green, Rosie! We're rich, by God. Aaron staked his claim and quickly sold it for $20,000 in 1883 to William Tell Coleman, a Kentucky native turned San Francisco borax magnate who was known as a controversial iron-willed vigilante leader during the 1850s.2

Chinese laborers gathering cotton ball from the desert floor at the Harmony Borax Works, Furnace Creek, Death Valley, CA, 1885. | Photo: Courtesy National Park Service.

Coleman's Harmony Borax Works at Furnace Creek began processing cotton ball within months of his acquisition with Chinese laborers who scraped the mineral from the harsh desert floor for $1.50 per day.3 Overall, 40 men were employed here. As summer temperatures regularly flared above 120 degrees Fahrenheit processing had to be suspended during the hottest summer months. The purpose of the operational shutdown was not to provide the toiling laborers a seasonal break -- instead it was necessary as borax could not crystalize under such extreme conditions.4 Still, the venture was short-lived -- production ceased in Death Valley within a mere five years after Coleman had shipped around a million dollars of borax from the valley floor.

The demise of Coleman's borax-built empire was attributed to overproduction, which caused the lucrative market of the mineral to fall, plus a series of poor investments including an ill-planned raisin venture in 1887. Coleman died a broken man a few years later in 1893. His legacy is forever associated with colemanite (CaB3O4(OH)3 H2O), the harder quartz-like calcium borate ore discovered by Philander Lee and his companions at Furnace Creek Wash in 1882, and named on behalf of Coleman.

Coleman's numerous holdings were bought out in 1890 for half a million or so dollars by his business competitor/colleague Francis Marion Borax Smith, who would go on to amass -- and also eventually lose -- his own $20 million borax fortune. His riches began with an 1872 claim he had staked out at Teals Marsh in western Nevada at age 26 while laboring as a woodchopper. Smith now had a monopoly on domestic borax production with his consolidated Pacific Coast Borax Company, holdings of which included the borate-rich colemanite mines at Calico in the Daggett mining district where principal production of the mineral had continued until 1907 after the Harmony Borax Works

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/borax-history-of-mining-crystal-de...
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