20 Mule Team Borax

20 Mule Team Borax is a brand of cleaner manufactured by the US soap firm Dial Corporation, a subsidiary of the German consumer product firm Henkel. The product is named after the 20-mule teams that were used by William Tell Coleman's company to move borax out of Death Valley, California, to the nearest rail spur between 1883 and 1889.

History

20-mule teams were first used by Francis Marion Smith to move borax out of the desert. Smith subsequently acquired Coleman's holdings in 1890 and consolidated them with his own to form the Pacific Coast Borax Company. After the mule teams were replaced by a new rail spur, the name 20 Mule Team Borax was established and aggressively promoted by Pacific Coast Borax to increase sales.

Stephen Mather, son of J. W. Mather, the administrator of the company's New York office, persuaded Smith to add the name 20 Mule Team Borax to accompany the famous sketch of the mule team already on the box. The 20-mule team symbol was first used in 1891 and registered in 1894. In 1988, just over 20 years after the acquisition of U.S. Borax by Rio Tinto Group, the Boraxo, Borateem and 20-Mule Team product lines were sold to Dial Corporation by U.S. Borax.

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Twenty-mule team

Twenty-mule teams were teams of eighteen mules and two horses attached to large wagons that ferried borax out of Death Valley from 1883 to 1889. They traveled from mines across the Mojave Desert to the nearest railroad spur, 165 miles (275 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 east of Calico, back to Daggett. There they worked from 1891 until 1898 when they were replaced by the Borate and Daggett Railroad.

The wagons were among the largest ever pulled by draft animals, designed to carry 10 short tons (9 metric tons) of borax ore at a time.

History

In 1877, six years before twenty-mule teams had been introduced into Death Valley, Scientific American reported that Francis Marion Smith and his brother 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 stretch of desert between Teel's Marsh and Wadsworth, Nevada.

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20 Mule Team

20 Mule Team (aka Twenty Mule Team) is a 1940 American Western film about Death Valley, and Daggett, California borax miners starring Wallace Beery and Anne Baxter, and remains an extremely rare opportunity to watch Beery work with his nephew Noah Beery, Jr., who played "Rocky" on television's The Rockford Files 35 years later. The movie was directed by Richard Thorpe and originally released in Sepiatone, a brown and white process used by the studio the previous year for the Kansas scenes in The Wizard of Oz.