THE SALT-DEPOSITS OF WESTERN NEW YORK. 535 



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 salt- 

 men 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 re- 

 move the tariff, thoy 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 Yalley 

 does not differ materially from that of a well in the " oil-country." 

 We see the same derrick, of spruce or hemlock ; the ponderous wood- 

 en 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 pulver- 

 ized rock ; and the " fishing-tools " and all other tools for clearing 

 the well of bits of broken apparatus. A short distance from the der- 

 rick is a covered shanty which contains the engine, while the boiler is 

 still farther away, and generally in the open air. With such an appa- 

 ratus, 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 hunded 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 Niag- 

 ara 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 insert- 

 ed 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 



