For information on the cleaning product, please see Twenty-Mule-Team Borax

Twenty-Mule-Team Borax

20 Mule Team Borax is a brand of cleaner manufactured by the U.S. soap firm Dial Corporation. The product is named after the 20-mule teams that were used by William Tell Coleman's company to move borax out of Death Valley, California, to the nearest rail spur between 1883 and 1889.Mule teams were...

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For the film starring Wallace Beery, see 20 Mule Team (1940 film)

20 Mule Team (1940 film)

20 Mule Team is a 1940 American Western film about Death Valley, and Daggett, California borax miners starring Wallace Beery and Anne Baxter, and remains an extremely rare opportunity to watch Beery work with his similar-looking nephew Noah Beery, Jr., who played "Rocky" on television's The...

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Twenty-mule teams were teams of eighteen mule

Mule

A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. Horses and donkeys are different species, with different numbers of chromosomes. Of the two F1 hybrids between these two species, a mule is easier to obtain than a hinny...

s and two horse

Horse

The horse is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus, or the wild horse. It is a single-hooved mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature into the large, single-toed animal of today...

s attached to large wagon

Wagon

A wagon is a heavy four-wheeled vehicle pulled by draught animals; it was formerly often called a wain, and if low and sideless may be called a dray, trolley or float....

s that ferried borax

Borax

Borax, also known as sodium borate, sodium tetraborate, or disodium tetraborate, is an important boron compound, a mineral, and a salt of boric acid. It is usually a white powder consisting of soft colorless crystals that dissolve easily in water.Borax has a wide variety of uses...

 out of Death Valley

Death Valley

Death Valley is a desert valley located in Eastern California. Situated within the Mojave Desert, it features the lowest, driest, and hottest locations in North America. Badwater, a basin located in Death Valley, is the specific location of the lowest elevation in North America at 282 feet below...

 from 1883 to 1889. They traveled from mines

Mining

Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the earth, from an ore body, vein or seam. The term also includes the removal of soil. Materials recovered by mining include base metals, precious metals, iron, uranium, coal, diamonds, limestone, oil shale, rock...

 across the Mojave Desert

Mojave Desert

The Mojave Desert occupies a significant portion of southeastern California and smaller parts of central California, southern Nevada, southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona, in the United States...

 to the nearest railroad spur, 165 miles (275 km) away in Mojave, California

Mojave, California

Mojave is a census-designated place in Kern County, California, United States. Mojave is located east of Bakersfield, at an elevation of 2762 feet...

. The routes were from Furnace Creek, California

Furnace Creek, California

Furnace Creek is a census-designated place in Inyo County, California, United States. The population was 24 at the 2010 census, down from 31 at the 2000 census. The elevation of the village is below sea level....

, to Mojave, California, and from the mines at Old Borate to Mojave.
In 1877, six years before twenty-mule teams had been introduced into Death Valley, Scientific American

Scientific American

Scientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...

 reported that Francis Marion Smith

Francis Marion Smith

Francis Marion Smith was an American miner, business magnate and civic builder in the Mojave Desert, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Oakland, California.Frank Smith created the extensive interurban public transit Key System in Oakland, the East Bay,...

 and his brother had shipped their company's borax in a 30-ton load using two large wagons, with a third wagon for food and water, drawn by a 24-mule team over a 160-mile stretch of desert between Teel's Marsh and Wadsworth, Nevada.

The twenty-mule-team wagons were among the largest ever pulled by draft animals, designed to carry 10 short ton

Short ton

The short ton is a unit of mass equal to . In the United States it is often called simply ton without distinguishing it from the metric ton or the long ton ; rather, the other two are specifically noted. There are, however, some U.S...

s (9 metric tons) of borax ore at a time.