About midway between Stovepipe Wells and Furance Creek are the ruins of the Harmony Borax Works. An interpretive trail explains what you are looking at and what life was like for the workers. Briefly, the work was miserably hard, incredibly hot, and generally unpleasant. The workers, primarily from China, would go out onto the salt flats (a.k.a. Lake Manly), look for deposits of borax, and than scrape the borax, along with other deposited minerals, off the surface. The mineral was brought here to be processed. As I understand that process, the scraped up minerals would be put into a vat of hot water to dissolve the borax. It would than be cooled and magically the borax crystals, now separated from any other minerals such as table salt, would be collected. The challenge was the cooling part of this process. If it cooled too fast or didn't cool enough, the borax would not separate nor form into crystals. The Harmony Borax Works was in full operation from 1883 to 1888, when William Tell Coleman, the owner, saw his financial empire collapse and his many enterprises closed.
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