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[California Mining] The San Bernardino Borax Company 1898 - Glass Plate Negative....
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[California Mining] The San Bernardino Borax Company 1898 - Glass Plate Negative. 8.5" x 6.25". John Searles discovered borax at what was then known as a dry lake in what is now called Searles Valley. At first the lake is called Borax Lake, and in doing research it is helpful to search that term. In partnership with a Mr. Schillings and others, he established the San Bernardino Borax Company. The borax after being processed had to be hauled almost 200 miles to the port in San Pedro. Thus was actually born the twenty mule team hauling borax. As long as John was alive he had an injunction against the Harmony Borax work for their association with the "Twenty Mule Team" term. In 1876, the Southern Pacific Railroad reached Mojave, California and the distance of the haul was considerably shortened. Fine condition.More Information:
Clarence W. Tucker Photograph Collection
Randsburg, California - Mojave Desert, Circa 1896 - 1898
Simply spectacular! This collection consists of twenty-seven studio-mounted photographs and ten glass plate negatives taken by pioneer California photographer Clarence W. Tucker (1874-1964). The archive represents the most important and rare grouping of mining camp images to come to market in many years. The photos were found at the bottom of a mine in the Mojave Desert in the 1950s by amateur prospector William Young as documented by a series of articles in Westways Magazine in 1971 and 1972. Not a great deal is known about C. W. Tucker's early days in photography. He was born in Indiana on September 22, 1874 and in 1893 he became a photographer's apprentice in Warsaw, Indiana. In 1895 he came to San Jose, California to visit a cousin and ended up staying in California and working as a photographer until his death in 1964. Tucker settled in the rough mining camp of Randsburg around 1896 and remained there until about 1898. During that time he met and married Grace Doughty and she worked as his assistant from thereafter. In the early 1900s the Tuckers moved to Covina, California where they ran a photography studio until 1950. Tucker could not have avoided being affected by the raw energy of the mining camp at Randsburg and his keen photographer's eye fortunately chronicled its rise from a tent city to a small but booming mining town. His images are possibly the only photographic record extant of Randsburg's glory days as an Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) search shows no images by Tucker taken during his time in Randsburg in institutional holdings.
Randsburg's decade-long boom began in 1895 with the discovery of rich gold and mineral deposits in the El Paso mountains in the northwestern Mojave Desert. John Singleton, a hard-rock miner, in a last attempt at striking it rich, got lucky with the discovery of rich gold deposits which would become the famous Yellow Aster mine. The claim was named the "Rand" giving a nod to the rich mines of South Africa and the early mining camp was called "Rand Camp". The discovery touched off the inevitable flood of prospectors and a crude tent camp was hastily established. By the end of 1895 there were thirteen buildings, most of them canvas but by the next year the population had swollen to 1,500 and more permanent wooden structures began to appear. The town suffered a series of devastating fires and as mining played out in the area, the town effectively reverted to ghost town status.
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