DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna give it its full due. West of where you're rollin' right now, down on the Colorado, there are brine springs that have been drawing folks in for a long, long time. Indians knew about them first — used the place as an infirmary, a health resort, somewhere the land itself offered something restorative.
That knowledge didn't disappear. It just waited. Then the Civil War came, and suddenly those springs weren't just a curiosity or a comfort.
They were a resource. Operations increased — and I mean serious, organized, working-every-day increased — to make army supply. Salt for the men.
Salt for the cavalry horses. Salt for the mule teams. And beyond the military, salt for general use, for the table, for the ranch.
The Confederacy needed it, and somebody out here on the Colorado figured out how to get it. Now here's where it gets interesting, because the engineering they rigged up to do this is something worth picturing. To pump brine up from the spring, they drove a horse in a circle.
Round and round that animal walked, and its motion operated a lift that filled troughs sitting on a scaffold forty feet high. Forty feet. That's no small structure standing out there on the Texas land.
And those troughs weren't just holding tanks. Cedar boughs were placed in them — laid right in there — and the brine moved through those boughs and concentrated. Then it filtered down, all that heavy mineral-thick liquid, down into iron kettles below.
And those kettles boiled. They boiled until out of fifty bushels of brine, you got one bushel of salt. One out of fifty.
That horse kept walking. The cedar kept concentrating. The kettles kept boiling.
And the Confederacy kept getting its salt. Something about that image sticks with you — one horse, moving in a circle, connected by rope and lever and ingenuity to a forty-foot scaffold, connected to iron kettles, connected to an army fighting hundreds of miles away. Out here on the Colorado, where Indians once came to heal, the land was still doing its work.
Just under different orders.
What the marker says
West of here, on the Colorado. Brine springs used by Indians as infirmary or health resort. Increased operations in Civil War to make Army supply, for the men, cavalry horses and mule teams; and for general use for table and ranch purposes. To pump brine from the spring, a horse driven in a circle operated a lift that filled troughs upon a 40-foot-high scaffold. Cedar boughs placed in the troughs concentrated the brine, which filtered down into iron kettles that boiled one bushel of salt out of 50 bushels of brine.