The Pageland Journal

A Great Salt Field

In the middle of the Colorado Desert, a little to the north of the Mexican border and two hundred and sixty feet below the level of the sea, lies a field of crystallized salt more than a thousand acres in extent, presenting a surface as white as snow, and beneath the noonday glare of the sun so dazzling that the naked eye cannot stand its radiance. It stretches away for miles about Salton, Colo., an ocean of blazing, blistering white. Here daily throughout the year men are at work overturning the great deposit with plows and scrapers getting it into piles preliminary to putting it through the refining process. The salt plows used to secure the harvest are great four-wheeled implements, driven by steam and managed by two men. The salt crust is thrown up in parallel ridges, then laborers with hoes work it to and fro in the water, washing out the dirt, preliminary to taking it to the mill.

Salt springs in adjacent foothills are constantly contributing to the deposits, and so heavily laden are they with almost pure salt that the plow has hardly passed on before a new crust is formed in the furrow left. This fact renders it unnecessary to operate more than a small portion of the vast deposit. At present only ten acres are worked.

As may be supposed, work in these fields is performed under the most trying conditions. No white man can stand the intense heat, and for this reason the work is done wholly by Japanese and by Coahuila Indians. Of these the Indians are by far the better adapted to the work, the Japanese performing only one portion, sewing the sacks in which the salt is shipped. The atmosphere, laden as it is with particles of salt, gives rise to a painful thirst, and the only drinking water comes from one well. It is warm and ill-tasting.

Beautiful mirages frequently appear above the great salt field in the daytime, sky pictures of magnificent cities and flower-dotted, tree-shaded fields. The moonlight, too, produces wondrously beautiful effects upon the great field of gleaming salt. For several weeks in the year the thermometer on the salt field averages one hundred and forty degrees, and the reflection of the sun produces a glare like that of a furnace. The deposits vary in thickness from ten to twenty inches, and form a solid crust over the great marsh. It is estimated that about seven hundred tons are plowed up daily.--The World's Events.