Borates, or salt minerals, were deposited in ancient lake beds that uplifted and eroded into the yellow Furnace Creek badlands, and water dissolved them and carried them to the Death Valley floor, where they recrystallized as borax. For centuries people exploited borax for many uses, including by blacksmiths, potters, dairy farmers, housewives, meat packers, and morticians. San Francisco businessman William T. Coleman built Harmony Borax Works to refine the “cottonball” borax found on nearby salt flats because transportation costs made it necessary to process the mineral there rather than haul both borax and waste one hundred sixty-five miles across the desert to the railroad. Workers refined borax by heating water in boiling tanks with an adjacent steam boiler, winching ore carts up an incline and dumping the ore into the tanks, adding carbonated soda so the borax dissolved while lime and mud settled out, then drawing off the liquid into cooling vats where it crystallized on hanging metal rods. Because borax would not crystallize at temperatures above one hundred twenty degrees, the works shut down during summer, and during the rest of the year workers wrapped the vats with water-soaked felt padding to keep them cool. They lifted out the rods, chipped off the crystallized borax, repeated the process to make concentrated borax, and bagged and stored the refined product for later transport in a barn behind the works. Crude shelters and tents once stood on the flat below, where Chinese workers slept and ate, while other employees lived at what is now Furnace Creek Ranch.