The Twenty Mule Teams: Ten Tons of Borax, a Hundred and Sixty-Five Miles

The ruins you can see from this pullout are what remains of the Harmony Borax Works, where the most famous freight haul in California history began. Starting in eighteen eighty-three, Pacific Coast Borax Company moved its product, borax ore, out of this valley and across one hundred sixty-five miles of desert to the railroad at the town of Mojave. They did it with wagons and mules, and the scale of the operation was industrial.

Each team pulled two wagons coupled together, plus a water tank, for a total rig extending roughly one hundred sixty-five feet from the nose of the lead mule to the rear of the water tank. The loaded wagons carried ten tons of borax. The rear wheels stood seven feet tall. The wagons were purpose-built for this route, engineered for a specific problem: how do you move enormous weight across sand, rocky washes, and grades that would stop a lesser rig.

The marketing department called them twenty mule teams. The actual composition was eighteen mules and two horses, the horses positioned nearest the wagon tongue where the work required more steering and less raw pull. The name was catchier, and the name is what survived.

Twenty men drove the teams over the five-year life of the operation. They worked twelve to fourteen hours a day in summer temperatures that regularly exceeded one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The route crossed the Panamint Valley and the Slate Range before descending onto the Mojave Desert floor. The death rate among the drivers is not recorded.

The entire operation ended in eighteen eighty-eight when Coleman's borax business collapsed. Five years of iconic freighting, and then it was over.

The mythology proved more durable. The twenty mule team image became the brand identity for the borax company for more than a century, the anchor of the Death Valley Days radio drama that ran from nineteen thirty to nineteen forty-five, and the television program that ran from nineteen fifty-two to nineteen seventy, with Ronald Reagan serving as host in nineteen sixty-four and sixty-five.

What the mythology left out: the ore at Harmony Works was processed by Chinese laborers, men working caustic, dusty jobs in the same temperatures, whose wages were lower than those of white workers and whose names are not in the advertisements. The ruins here are what their labor built.