Dennis Searles, Searles Marsh, San
Bernardino Co., 1890
California
Historical Society
For many California youths, summer ends with regret: it’s time to go
back to school. For some, “What did you do on your summer vacation?” is a
familiar question. In recognition of summers gone by, we offer this account of
the months between May 21 and July 4, 1890, when the young Dennis Searles, son
of a borax industrialist, was sent to work on his father’s borax works in the
Mohave Desert.
Inspired by the image
above and Searles’ journal, this account originally appeared as the Spotlight feature in the Fall issue of California History (vol. 93, no. 3). The author has further illustrated it to give
a visual sense of the time and place in the life history of Dennis Searles and
his family.
Detail, Map of California Saline Deposits, 1902
From Gilbert E. Bailey, The Saline Deposits of California (Sacramento: California State
Mining Bureau, 1902)
By Shelly
Kale
“I took off my city clothes and put on my desert
duds,” wrote sixteen-year-old Dennis Searles in his journal on May 24, 1890
(1), the fourth day of his journey from San Francisco to the hot, dry desert in
northwestern San Bernardino County. It was an unconventional destination for a
teenager of a wealthy family on summer vacation from boarding school, but
Dennis Searles had been summoned by his father John to help at the family borax
works at Borax Lake.
Searles Lake, San Bernardino County, California
Courtesy California Department of Fish and Wildlife
May 22, 1890—I
went to my father’s office [in San Francisco] and was there informed of the
fact that my father wanted me to leave that evening for home [Searles Lake]. Of
course I was glad to go as I wished to see my father.
In his journal Searles (1874–1916) described
ferrying across the bay to Oakland and taking the Southern Pacific Railroad
south through the San Joaquin Valley, the Tehachapi Mountains, and, finally, to
Mojave.
Railway Depot, Mojave, 1927
Courtesy
of Pomona Public Library
May 23,
1890—Mojave is a town of about one
hundred population situated in Southern California at the juncture of the S.P.
and A. P. railroads. . . . The railroad buildings comprise about half of the
town. Of the rest of the town very near every other house is a saloon combined
with some other business. My father owns here a large barn, a warehouse and a
half of a dozen other houses. The town contains a schoolhouse but the pupils
are few and the teachers poor.
At this town on the intersection of the Southern
Pacific and Atlantic & Pacific Railroads, Searles learned to his relief
that he would be escorted through the Mojave Desert by Robert R. Charlton,
manager of John Searles’ Mojave office (Charlton, who was an avid photographer,
may have taken the image of Searles “picnicking” in the desert) (2). “Instead
of having a wearisome ride of four days [on a 20-mule-team borax wagon],” Searles
wrote, “I am going to have a pleasant ride of a day and a half.”
Twenty-mule Team Hauling Borax
out of Death Valley to the Railroad, c. 1900
California Historical Society at
University of Southern California
May 24,
1890—These wagons come into Mojave in the
morning, load and then go out in the afternoon. These big freight teams are
made up of two large wagons, the hind wheels of which are seven or more feet
high. There is an oil wagon also connected with the team. It takes about
twenty-two animals to draw one of these wagons. The average load is about
thirty thousand of Borax.
On May 25 Searles and Charlton began the 75-mile
ride to Borax Lake “behind a light team” and on “a very good road.” The
travelers arrived three days later at Borax Lake (later Searles Lake), “a large
dry lake, as white as snow. . . . On all sides, high mountains rise, completely
walling it in, the few large canyons forming its gates.”
Looking
towards the Slate Range and Searles Valley, 1947
Courtesy of Searles Valley Historical Society
June 24, 1890—On
our right the tall barren mountains rise, at their summits you can see dense
beds of sand, someof these beds are hundreds of feet deep. On our left a dry
lake shows itself, on its shore salt grass is growing in the sand.
Located at the upper end of the lake was the borax
works, established in 1873 by John Searles, a gold rush pioneer and hard-rock
miner whose daring feats included a skirmish with a Grizzly bear in 1872 (3).
John W. Searles (1828–1897)
The
May 8, 1955 issue of the San Bernardino
County Sun called John Searles a “Pioneer among Industrialists” for his
discovery and mining of rich borax deposits at Searles Lake.
In 1878 Searles
relocated to a new site and named it Borax. There he established the San
Bernardino Borax Mining Company, eventually covering 2,000 acres (4). It
was the start of a new industry in the county.
(Left)
John Searles’ Borax Plant, Searles Lake, c. 1900
(Right)
Searles Dwelling at
Borax Works, Searles Lake, 1880
California Historical Society
May 28,
1890—The works for manufacturing the
Borax are at the North Western end of the lake. There is somewhere near 30
buildings forming in itself a small town in the heart of the desert.
John Searles was the first to recognize the lake’s
potential, but he certainly was not the last. In time, the lake’s saline
mineral beds provided a continuing supply of minerals, including borax, sodium
sulfate, and soda ash. In 1912, potash—a nutrient form of potassium—was discovered
in the lake brine. Among its many uses, the Sausalito
News noted, was “the making of glass, soap, bleaches, dyes, photographic
chemicals, medicine, explosives, fertilizer,” and in “gold mining and many
other industrial processes.” (5) By 1979,
the value of the lake’s mineral deposits was regarded as worth “billions of
dollars.” (6)
Collecting from Searles Lake
Courtesy Searles Valley Historical Society
May 30,
1890—Now the regular routine of vacation
has commenced, which I get very tired of within a month or so. It is get up in
time for breakfast at half past five and then for the rest of the day there is
plenty to do but one misses the company somewhat of young me as very near all
the men are near onto 60.
Like the eponymous lake, Dennis Searles developed
his potential over time. In 1895 he graduated with the first class of Stanford
University (along with future president Herbert Hoover), majoring in
engineering. He “made a brilliant record,” the San Francisco Call observed. “He had the reputation of being one of
the ablest students there. He was probably the wealthiest . . . . Mr. Searles’
friends look to see him make a record in the days to come.” (7)
His friends would not be disappointed. In addition
to playing an active role as a Stanford alumni, Dennis Searles pursued a mining
career, serving as vice president of Frank M. Smith’s (“the Borax King”) Pacific
Coast Borax Company from 1909 to 1914 (8). He was Smith’s personal assistant in
his numerous enterprises and director of the United Properties Company, which,
when it was incorporated in 1911, was recognized as the “West’s Biggest
Corporation” and “the most powerful corporation ever organized for the development
of California, excepting that of the Southern Pacific Company.” (9)
Caroline
Stetson Ayres and Dennis Searles, 1903
“Betrothal of Three Young Prominent Society
Couples,” San Francisco Call, Sept.
23, 1903
“The engagement of Miss Ayres and Mr. Searles
is without doubt one of the cleverest summer coups of Cupid,” wrote the San Francisco Call.
In 1904, Searles married Caroline Stetson Ayres (10). The couple, whose activities filled the
society pages of the local newspapers, lived in Piedmont. On November 25, 1916,
Dennis Searles, the “Oakland financier, real estate broker and clubman, and
former secretary for F. M. Smith” died in an automobile accident when his car skidded off a road and
over a 75-foot precipice near Saratoga, California (11).
Nearly a year later,
on September 21, 1917, Caroline Ayres Searles wrote a letter to her daughter,
Mary, which she added to the last page of her husband’s journal from that
summer of 1890: “Dear Little Mary, Mother is putting this safely away for you, hoping
that someday, when you are old enough, you will read it and appreciate what a
very fine little boy your dear Daddy was.”
On that “someday,”
Mary would ignore her father’s “Hands off! Private” warning and open the cover
of his journal. Inside she would learn what the Mojave Desert and borax mining were
like in 1890. She would read about shooting coyotes, taking care of animals, sawing
borax sacks and other chores, even a description of how to make healing
ointment from horn-toads drowned in whiskey—all the features of desert life that
filled young Dennis Searles’ days and nights at Borax Lake.
(Left) Dennis Searles with a Chinese
worker; (right) Title page
Journal of Dennis Searles, 1890
California
Historical Society, MSP 1933
May 25, 1890—As we are walking along I see a coyote standing looking at us about
eighty yards away. I jump out of the wagon to get a shot at him but he
disappears amongst the brush. He has been shot at before and knows what a man
with a gun is.
Shelly
Kale
Publications
and Strategic Projects Manager
NOTES
- All quotes are from the Journal of Dennis Searles, May 21–July
4, 1890, MS 1933, California Historical Society.
- James L. Fairchild, Russell L.
Kaldenberg, Searles Valley Historical Society, Around Trona and Searles Valley (Charleston, SC: Arcadia
Publishing, 2015), 63. A caption in “20-Mule Team Era Recalled,” San Bernardino County Sun, Dec. 2, 1962,
reads “Time for Lunch: Dennis Searles is shown having a noon meal on the desert
while he rests his horses. Such was desert travel in his day.”
- James Fairchild and Russell
Kaldenberg, Lecture
on the History of Trona and Searles Valley, Maturango Museum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPIOu7wIIX8); Fairchild and Kaldenberg, Around Trona and Searles Valley, 9, 23, 24. In the early 1860s the Slate Range Stage Company brought
prospectors and business people on a weekly basis from Los Angeles to this
region originally inhabited by the Panamint
Shoshone. In 1862 John, his brother (also
named Dennis), and two other miners etched their initials on rocks in the Slate
Range, a soda-salt marsh where they were mining gold and silver. The next year,
having earlier suspected that there was borax in the soda, John attempted to
test the mineral’s content in samples he brought to San Francisco. However,
tests of the mineral’s existence in the samples were negative. Discouraged, the
brothers returned to hard-rock mining, eventually moving to Los Angeles. In
1873, however, they were shown a borax crystal from the Slate Range area and
renewed their interest. Claiming land on the salt marsh, they began extracting
the mineral from the surface mud along the lake’s western edge.
- George I. Smith, “Subsurface
Stratigraphy and Geochemistry of Late Quaternary Evaporites, Searles Lake,
California,” Geological Survey Professional Paper 1043 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1979), 4.
- “Concerning
San Bernardino Potash Discovery,” San
Francisco Call, Apr. 9, 1912; “Extensive Use of Postash,” Sausalito
News, January 6, 1912. In March
that year President William Howard Taft urged Congress to enact a law
protecting the region from private exploitation and five years later, in 1917, with America’s
entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill reserving the
Searles Lake district for potash production and use. As the Los Angeles Herald explained the year
before, “A famine in potash fertilizer is threatened by the European war.” “Taft Would Protect Potash,” Sacramento Union,
Mar. 27, 1912; “Wilson Signs Potash Bill,” Red
Bluff Daily News, Oct. 3, 1917; “Experts
to Work Calif. Kelp Beds,” Los Angeles
Herald, Jan. 4, 1916
- Smith, “Subsurface Stratigraphy
and Geochemistry,”4
- “California Bachelors Are
Interesting: Who They Are, How They Live and What They Do,” San Francisco Call, Oct. 15, 1899
- “Borax in Death Valley,” Los
Angeles Herald, January 20, 1901. Smith’s
company, founded in 1890, had absorbed the San Bernardino Borax Co. in 1895,
five years after Dennis Searles’ visit, and shortly discontinued its
operations; W. D. Hamman, “Potash Solutions in the Searles Lake Region—II,” Mining Science (May 2, 1912), 391.
- “Great Enterprises in Merger:
West’s Biggest Corporation,” San
Francisco Call, Jan. 1, 1911; “Gigantic Financial Concern Plans Big Things:
United Properties Company Will Expend Millions in Oakland and Vicinity,” in
Evarts Blake, Greater Oakland
(Oakland: Pacific Publishing Co., 1911), 50–51
- “Betrothal
of Three Young Prominent Society Couples,” San
Francisco Call, Sept. 23, 1903
- “Dennis
Searles: Funeral of Dennis Searles to Be Tomorrow,” Oakland Tribune, Nov. 27, 1916
This article
originally appeared as the Spotlight feature in the California History journal (Vol. 93, #3), published by
the University of California Press in association with the California
Historical Society.
California History, Vol. 93, Number 3, pp. 101–103, ISSN 0162-2897,
electronic ISSN 2327-1485. © 2016 by the Regents of the University of
California. All rights reserved.
Mouse’s hand, trained from years of t-shirt designing and hot rod striping, and his love of Art Nouveau combined well with Kelley’s of-the-moment style and keen eye for layouts. The two most-remembered Mouse and Kelley collaborations are counterculture complimentary: a play on the ZigZag man familiar to denizens of cigarette rolling papers, and a poster for one of the most famous rock ‘n’ roll acts of all-time. In 1966, the pair were commissioned to make a poster for a show featuring The Grateful Dead. For this band they’d never heard of, Mouse and Kelley first designed a sheet that incorrectly spelled the band’s name as “Greatful Dead;’ for their second attempt, they went to the San Francisco Public Library for inspiration. Mouse recalled: “We would go to the San Francisco library and peruse the books on poster art. They had a back room full of books you couldn’t take out with great references. We were just going through and looking for something. And found this thing and thought, ‘This says Grateful Dead all over it.’” What Mouse found was The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. 
