Francis Marion Smith - Last Mining

Last Mining

In 1913, Smith became financially overextended and had to turn over his assets to creditors who refused to extend new loans. After winning a lawsuit to protect his wife's interest in a silver mine in Tonopah, Nevada, he acquired mineral rights to a large section of Searles Lake in the Searles Valley over the Panamint Range from Death Valley, in northern San Bernardino County, California. However, finding a profitable way to convert the extensive lake brines into borax and other important commercial mineral salts products proved elusive for roughly a decade.

In the meantime, he outbid the new owners of his company for the rights to a rich borax discovery in Nevada's Muddy Mountains, in Callville Wash, under present day Lake Mead. He called his operations there the Anniversary Mine as the claims were acquired on the anniversary of his marriage to his second wife. The profits from this claim provided the capital to develop the Searles Lake deposits when a young chemist, Henry Helmers, discovered a profitable process for refining the lake brines into marketable products. He built the Trona Railway, a Short-line railroad, to ship the products to the Union Pacific Railroad connection at Searles, California. The operation and railroad is now under Searles Valley Minerals.