Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/549

Rh found that the Warsaw brine is strong enough to be used without any chemical treatment. Large investments, therefore, are making, in the Wyoming Valley, for the manufacture of soda-ash; and the success of these manufacturers will make the United States independent of every other country in regard to this commodity. Of course, the saltmen of Warsaw are as clear-cut protectionists as are their fellow-workers of Syracuse or Saginaw. The duty on foreign salt is eight cents per hundred, or twenty-two cents for a barrel of two hundred and eighty pounds. They argue that salt having dropped from one dollar and eighty cents a barrel in 1860, to seventy cents in 1882, the saving of one dollar and ten cents on a barrel has been an aggregate of seven million dollars to the people of the United States. To remove the tariff, they affirm, would be to raise the price, to shut down home industries, and to allow foreigners to make the money that should be kept in this country.

The outward appearance of a salt-well in the Wyoming Valley does not differ materially from that of a well in the "oil-country." We see the same derrick, of spruce or hemlock; the ponderous wooden walking-beam, half out-of-doors; the "bit," the "auger-stem," and all the other appliances for boring, together with the "pull-wheel" that hoists the whole apparatus from the hole; the forge hard by; the "sand-reel" that lowers the pump for clearing away the pulverized rock; and the "fishing-tools" and all other tools for clearing the well of bits of broken apparatus. A short distance from the derrick is a covered shanty which contains the engine, while the boiler is still farther away, and generally in the open air. With such an apparatus, the cost of boring is from seventy-five cents to one dollar per foot for operating expenses. The workmen serve in gangs—two for each twenty-four hours—and the wages are one dollar and fifty cents per day. The drill first strikes through thirty feet of heavy clay; then fifteen feet of slate or Marcellus shale; then one hundedhundred [sic] and fifty feet of corniferous limestone; then fifty feet of hydraulic limestone; then about twelve hundred feet of saline shales, at the bottom of which is a stratum of salt averaging eighty feet in thickness. Still below this are the Niagara limestone and other members of the Niagara group.

The stratum of salt having been once pierced, a saturated solution of the saline matter frequently rises in the boring to within eighty feet of the surface. This, however, can not always be depended upon—and here center the increased difficulty and expense. When a few dozen feet have been drilled, a six or an eight inch iron pipe is inserted as a "casing." Inside of this a two-inch pipe—also of iron—is placed. The "casing-head" has two openings—one for the entrance of pure water from a neighboring spring into the larger pipe, at the lower end of which it becomes saturated with saline matter; the other at the end of the smaller pipe, to allow the expulsion of the brine. Of