Mining Soda from a Dry Lake

Long before Curtis Howe Springer sold his tonics here, people were mining the ground itself. The crust of Soda Lake is rich in sodium compounds, the raw material for laundry products, baking soda, and caustic soda. In the early nineteen hundreds, a soda works operated on the edge of the dry lake, pumping up the salty brine and letting it evaporate in shallow rectangular ponds to concentrate the minerals.

If you know where to look, the faint outlines of those old evaporation ponds are still etched into the playa. Getting the product to market required a railroad, and one came through this corner of the desert. The Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad was built starting in nineteen oh five by the borax magnate Francis Marion Smith, better known as Borax Smith, to haul ore and freight between remote mining districts and the main line at Ludlow.

The soda operation shipped its output on that line during its brief run, roughly from nineteen oh seven to nineteen twelve. The mining faded, the railroad was eventually pulled up, and the desert reclaimed the site. But the story reveals a truth about Zzyzx.

For more than a century, people have come to this dry lake to extract value from what looks, at first glance, like empty ground.