by Rick Bass
Under the loads of salt, the carretas would begin to creak in the night, as the rawhide wet from river crossings and the green wood heat-riven by the day began to twist and contract in the cooler temperature of evening, so that the wearied carts gathered around the salt traders sounded almost like living things themselves; and sometimes it was difficult to tell which sound was which: to differentiate the moans of the worn-out oxen from those of the wooden carts to which they were still harnessed, and with the carts’ wheels lashed with the hide and ligaments of several of those same oxen’s ancestors.
The traders traveled early, and again late, in the hottest months, and wore wide hats and white shawls, and sometimes carried self-made parasols of shirts and trousers that tattered quickly and gave the procession the appearance of a failing parade.
Back and forth the traders went, wearing their paths deeper into the hardpan desert, until to archaeologists in later years it would have seemed that the salt traders’ trek must have been a religious pilgrimage rather than an economic one, and that they had celebrated, revered, and worshiped, and even loved, the salt.
The Mexicans camped and cut salt from the south shore in the nineteenth century, while the American colonists worked the north shore. In 1836, after the Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto—after Texas proclaimed itself a sovereign nation to the world—the lake received its current name, Juan Cordona, after the man who held the original deed.
The American colonists stepped up their own salt-freighting operations, supplying not just the living and dying of the Civil War (those Pennsylvania farm boys succumbing with Texas salt dissolving in their bloodstreams; and those Alabama farm boys’ wretched last meals the night before battle salted down with the same), but the cattle that were filling the country around San Antonio as the buffalo, and then the Indians, were killed off.
The face of the land changing quickly now, like that of an old man or old woman, even as the shape of the bone, the frame and structure of it beneath that changing surface of skin, remained essentially the same.
The salt cutters were as noted for their physical strength as for their prodigious greed. When the salt was dense enough, they loaded slabs and squares of it into their wagons as they would quarry stone; but often the salt was formless, so that they had to wade out into the lake waist-deep, as if into a warm ocean, and, working shirtless, or in rags and tatters not unlike those that festooned the spars of the farther skeletons, whose coattails still now and again stirred in the rarest breeze, the salt cutters would shovel the salt onto broad planks of wood they had brought for that purpose (which would later be reattached to their wagons to form a higher tier, enabling the freighters to transport even more salt).
Once the sleds were fully loaded, the mules would pull them to shore, where the salt would dry in the sun before being loaded into wagons.
The wagons themselves—prairie schooners—were the size of small clipper ships, thirty feet long, with front wheels five feet in diameter and rear wheels measuring slightly more. Each wheel was six inches wide, to help keep the wagon from bogging down. The wagon could sustain seven thousand pounds of salt.
The salt cutters filled their wagons to the limit, and then beyond. It generally took one man three days to fully load his own wagon; and in the blazing heat, standing waist-deep in the brine, with the grinning skulls and mummified carcasses of the ancient wayfarers stationed all around them, it must have occurred to more than one of them to question why they had opted to sacrifice any portion of their allotted earthly time in order to enter hell prematurely. It’s tempting also to think that they, too, dreamed of cool rivers and ferns, and of love—though perhaps they dreamed of nothing at all; or, worse yet, perhaps their dreams were of shoveling dense loads of heavy salt onto broad planks half-floating out in the middle of the lake, to be sledded into shore by tortured mules, to dry blazing in the sun.
Despite the hardships, the salt cutters could not restrain themselves. Among them, August Santleben was most famous for loading his wagons over their limits. Often he would exceed those limits by a ton or more, and would have to stop and offload along the camino, leaving saline mounds that were many miles distant from their provenance, and to which wild animals were attracted, even decades later: pawing at the sand where the salt had disintegrated and drained back into the earth.
Santleben opened the San Antonio market first, and from his modest team of seven wagons routinely produced fifty thousand pounds a week, which he sold for $2,500 to the ranches on his route.
The ranchers fed the salt directly to their cattle and sheep. Their cattle and sheep were quickly overgrazing the thin topsoil, and the salt the ranchers were casting over the land to help their livestock retain more water weight was scalding and sterilizing the soil, so that it was as if they were sowing ruin purposely onto their own fields; and still Santleben could not sell them enough salt, for the ranchers’ stock craved it, and it helped the cattle and sheep bring higher market prices.
Santleben, knowing he was the first to be supplying the ranches around San Antonio, understood also that he was living in halcyon days; that sooner or later other freighters would discover his market and undercut his prices, until the miraculous salt was selling for something far closer to its true worth, which was almost nothing.
“There is room for only one trader per market,” he wrote in his journal. “The reason for this is that daily the sun replenishes the salt, and in so doing proves itself capable of furnishing an inexhaustible supply for eternity.”
Freighters came from all over Texas to load a wagon or two, before taking it back home as easy money. As the price kept dropping, a caste system developed between the ranchers who used the salt and the laborers who provided it, while the grueling work remained the same, until eventually the gathering of it became the last resort of the economically bereft.
Cattle barons Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving went right past Juan Cordona Lake with their famous Goodnight-Loving Trail, but never deigned to traffic in the lake’s commerce, focusing instead on meat on the hoof. They drove their cattle northward, selling the steers at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, and the mother cows and heifers farther north, up in Colorado, before returning south with their bags of gold, hoping to tuck in with some of the salt drivers for security on the final leg home.
On one such return, still north of the relative safety of the salt cutters’ caravans, Goodnight and Loving lost their mules in a stampede and were forced to ride by night to avoid Comanches and overheating their horses, which were carrying more than $12,000 in gold. There were but four men in the party.
They straggled in this manner across seventy-five miles of waterless desert, aiming for the distant relief of Castle Gap, and were nearly there when they spotted a Comanche war party.
Too tired to run, they accepted their fate.
Charles Goodnight recalled looking out at the long line of Indians and thinking to himself, Here you are with more gold than you ever had in your life, and it won’t buy you a drink of water, and it won’t get you food. For this gold you may have led three men to their death—for a thing that is utterly useless to you!
Goodnight moved to the front and told the others to flank him; he would lead a last charge straight through the Comanches, firing wildly and hoping to open a wedge wide enough for his men to pass through.
They were surprised to discover that the Indians did not scatter to deflect their approach, and finally they drew close enough to see that what they thought was a war party was instead the trader known as Uncle Rich, who—like Loving and Goodnight—seemed to make money at everything he tried, out on the barren plains.
On this occasion, Uncle Rich was freighting watermelons from East Texas to trade with the drivers of the Mexican carretas, loading his own wagons then with some of their salt to take up to North Texas. He traveled regularly through the hostile territory—making the four-hundred-mile round trip from Coleman County in North Texas twenty-one times without harm to himself, though no
one could ever say why. All of his oxen wore cowbells around their necks, and it was surmised by some that the melodies of the bells had somehow cast a blessing upon him. When he grew too tired to travel on any journey, he would dig a hole in the ground and nap in such a dugout, like a badger or coyote. It was rumored that for this, too, the Indians revered him.
Everyone was after the salt; the routes of its export left the lake in all directions.
The Texas and Pacific Railroad was finally completed in 1881, a hundred miles to the north, and the salt cutters and prairie schooners became obsolete overnight, though there were still those who continued to eke out a marginal existence, peddling baskets and barrels of salt to small-time ranches around San Antonio.
Lacking any vision or talent beyond mindless endurance, grizzled salt cutters like Burro Jack, last name unknown, and Salty Bill Latham persisted deep into the twentieth century, freighting absurd loads of salt across the desert in wagons pulled by miniature donkeys, even as the railroad passed them by, as did later the motorcar and an expanding highway system. It was what their fathers had done, and their fathers’ fathers, and as such, they believed it was holy work.
They traveled the old stone-lined trails that the carretas had once used, and each time they came through the area, the entire population of the present-day ghost town of Upland, just east of Castle Gap, would come running out of their homes and line the road to watch them, and call out greetings, and sometimes leave favors for them out on the side of the road.
Access to the lake’s mineral resources ended in 1920 when the Cowden family bought the four-thousand-acre deed and attempted to convert the lake into a sheep farm, a scheme that resulted in spectacular failure. Although wolves were already nearly extinct from cattle country—only an occasional old loner would come limping clubfooted down from out of the mountains, wreaking havoc on a herd or two of sheep before being poisoned or trapped or shot—the smaller, more numerous coyotes were able to almost single-handedly destroy any sheep they encountered, and at Juan Cordona Lake, it was too easy; the coyotes had merely to stampede the sheep out into the suckhole bog of the lake, where they became stuck, and the ravens were free then to feast on the ones that did not sink.
The coyotes, lighter in weight yet with large feet, were able to struggle on out across the floating sludge of salt long after the sheep had been rendered immobile. The sheepherders had to keep vigil and even then were unable to protect the entire herd; the lake was too vast.
Trying to recoup their losses, the Cowdens ran larger and larger herds, and tried to keep the sheep bunched together for greater protection. The result was that often whenever the sheep overnighted, the next day they would leave concentrated deposits of their dung baking in the sun, supersaturated with nitrates, and rich in saltpeter.
The dunghills were flammable, and a stray spark from a bolt of lightning, or even a backfiring piece of machinery or a sheepherder’s cigarette, could set off these mounds with a percussive explosion of orange-yellow light, followed by the odor of brimstone; and then the sparks from one dunghill would sometimes set off the explosion of another.
And on a stormy night, after lightning had passed by, it was possible to look out across the lakeshore and see several such mounds afire, as if in the storm’s coming there had arrived also clans or encampments of a more secretive race of beings—the tribes of those who had once lived there, returning now to reclaim that which for so long had been theirs.
The fires always burned themselves out. They were dramatic, but there was no other fuel for them to consume beyond the dung itself; the sheep had already ravaged all else. There was only stone, salt, and wind; and again to a stranger it would have seemed curious as to why the ranchers had placed such a curse on their own land. As if smiting it in this manner only so that they could show that it was theirs to smite.
After the Cowdens had inflicted all the harm they could upon the land, they sold it to the young man of German stock, Max Omo, Marie’s husband, who, having already amused the locals by having purchased such a suckhole of a tract, astounded them next by building a home on its shores, thereby becoming—in 1936—the first known person to reside at the lake year round.
Not since the forests of the Ice Age had lined its shores had anyone considered camping there for more than a few nights; but Omo, who before he bought the land had worked briefly as a laborer for the Cowdens, and who had fallen in love with salt, built a little house out of stone and wood and sheet iron.
He brought Marie and his children—another son had been born two years after the first—with him into the dunes—seeking his fortune, but seeking also salt: craving not the scent or taste or even the shimmering sight of it, but the mere accumulation of it; as if some switch had been flipped within him, some genetic tenuousness had been disturbed, finally and radically, by its interaction with the sere and withholding landscape into which he had been drawn.
Omo figured out almost immediately that it was not really necessary to wade waist-deep out into the sludge with a board and shovel, but that by constructing weirs, a man could trap and harvest the salt as it was driven each day by the prevailing winds that carried the waves in from the northwestern depths to the shallows, before receding each evening.
By adjusting slightly the depth and slant of the southeastern shoreline, near his base of operations, and setting up a system of rock floodgates, Omo was able to lay out flat sheets of iron onto which the salt would be precipitated each day, so that every evening before he went to bed he would be able to empty his sheets of iron into barrels.
In this manner, he was able to harvest nearly two thousand pounds a day.
Omo was not a big man when he first came to the lake, but moving such prodigious quantities of iron and salt developed him into a caricature of labor, knotted and swollen with muscles whose contorted proportions seemed all the more odd in that they were little used for anything but the act of pulling in the iron sleds and leaning them against his barrels, and shoveling the salt into the barrels.
He had tiny little bird-calves, but ponderous thighs; no chest, but preposterous biceps and forearms. No triceps to speak of, but a neck like a bull’s. His back was as wide as that of two men, so that he looked like some kind of experiment of nature, and a mistaken one at that.
He dug water wells too, finding the brackish water, in those days, at a depth of only twenty feet. He and Marie hardly drank any water at all, but kept buried in their hot sand cellar, which was lined with more sheets of iron, dozens of cases of white wine from Germany. (When they were first married, they had received as a wedding present from Max’s uncle, a vintner in Germany, a hundred cases of cheap white wine, along with the promise that their lives would be blessed for as long as they had any of the wine remaining.) This was almost all they ever drank, except for a pot of salt-coffee each morning, and it was mostly the children who were subjected to the tepid taste of the brine water. The children were always thirsty, as a result, but one of the side effects of their diet, so high in minerals, was that they grew quickly, so that by the time they were seven and nine years old, they were already the size of adolescents, and able to do nearly the work of a full-grown man.
The richer the Omos became, gathering the salt, the poorer Marie’s heart grew; and rapidly she passed from being a beautiful and vivacious young woman into a weather-beaten, dour hag. When the townspeople saw her coming into the town of Odessa for supplies, or to bring the boys to the Lutheran church, they would avoid her, where once they had sought her out.
The smell of sour wine was on her breath and somehow always on her clothes, even in the mornings, and, as well, the sulfurous odor of the lake itself, and the scent of dried mutton, which along with the eggs from a few parched chickens was all the Omos ever ate.
For the longest time, Marie had sympathized with the creatures that the coyotes herded out onto the salt, where they would become mired—the remaining sheep, usually, but also the deer, and even sometimes an individual from the fast-dwi
ndling herds of antelope—Had the buffalo ever been caught in such a trap? she wondered. And as the years passed, and Omo’s bounty increased (he could never sell nor even transport as much as he produced, so that there were mountains of salt, inland from the lee basin, up against the dunes), and as with the jettisoned or wagon-broke loads that lay scattered along the caminos, wild animals of every sort came all night long to paw and suck at the ever-increasing and miraculous salt mountain of Max Omo.
Deer and rabbits came, as did mice, coyotes, foxes, pack rats, antelope, wild boar, feral horses, bobcats, and once, down from the cool pine mountains and forests of New Mexico and the Big Bend country, a black bear, looking so uncannily like a human that at first neither Marie nor the children could be convinced that it was not merely a man dressed up in a fur coat, a man gone mad, clawing and gnawing at the salt, unable to control his desire.
After several years of living in the oven, however, and seeing her babies sprint past babyhood, launching almost immediately into grotesque musclebound imitations of their father, Marie found, at first to her horror but then to her slow-building pleasure, that she enjoyed seeing the parade of animals that the coyotes were able to haze out into the quicksand of the salt.
She began to view them as a kind of crop, something the land produced for her, even if she could not utilize it; and she would arise early each morning and move eagerly to the window, to see if the coyotes had sent anything new out onto the flats.
And then, still later into her unhappy career as mistress of the lake, it got to where she came to view the trapped and struggling, writhing animals with even greater pleasure, reserving a place in her heart for them as if they were guests who had arrived to keep her company out in the wasteland.
