Original Photograph of the Borax 20 Mule Team on the Move.

[Death Valley]: N.p., [ca. 1885]. Original albumen photograph of the famous Borax 20 Mule Team driving through the desert. It measure 8 c 6 1/4 inches and is mounted to a board measuring 10 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches. A couple of small sun blotches but a wonderful image of a famous task tat became the logo for the company.Twenty-mule teams were teams of eighteen mules and two horses attached to large wagons that transported borax out of Death Valley from 1883 to 1889. They traveled from mines across the Mojave Desert to the nearest railroad spur, 165 miles (266 km) away in Mojave. The routes were from the Harmony and Amargosa Borax Works to Daggett, California, and later Mojave, California. After Harmony and Amargosa shut down in 1888, the mule team's route was moved to the mines at Borate, 3 miles (5 km) east of Calico, back to Daggett. There they worked from 1891 until 1898 when they were replaced by the Borate and Daggett Railroad. In 1877, six years before twenty-mule teams had been introduced into Death Valley, Scientific American reported that Francis Marion Smith and his brother, owners and operprs of Pacific Borax, had shipped their company's borax in a 30-ton load using two large wagons, with a third wagon for food and water, drawn by a 24-mule team over a 160-mile (260 km) stretch of desert between Teel's Marsh and Wadsworth, Nevada.