Steve Voynick is a science writer, mineral collector, former hardrock miner, and the author of guidebooks like Colorado Rockhound ing and New Mexico Rockhounding.
The household-cleaning product, Twenty Mule Team Borax®, has been on store shelves for 130 years. Its familiar logo, a 20-mule team hitched to two 15-toncapacity freight wagons and a water wagon, depicts one of the frontier West’s greatest feats of mine haulage—the grueling 165-mile-long, desert journey to haul borax from mines in California’s Death Valley to a railhead during the 1880s.