The Lakes near Sheep Mountain—Three Tons of Soda at the Centennial—A Yield of 104,544 Tons of Soda per Annum—Should Provide an Income of $1,062,864,000 per Annum.

Some days ago, in company with several other eminent men of this place, I paid a visit to the soda lakes of Wyoming, and will give a short, truthful and concise description of their general appearance.

The lake or soda beds are situated about twelve miles southwest of Laramie, in a direct line according to official survey, but the road makes a slight variation from a direct line and therefore makes the distance about fourteen miles.

In a kind of basin toward Sheep Mountain, the finest of a series of hills intervening between the broad Laramie Plains and the Snowy Range, lie these lakes, four in number, with no outlet whatever.

Just as you get plumb discouraged and have ceased to look for the lakes, they all at once lie at your feet in all their glistening, dazzling, snowy whiteness.

One of these lakes, to all appearances, is the source of water supply for the balance, and from the exterior the water is constantly crystallizing in the sun and forming a thick crust of sulphate of soda.

When we went out, it was one of those dry, clear, bracing days in the month of July, in Wyoming, when the crisp air fans your cheek and fills every vein, artery and capillary and pore with a glad exhilarating sense that you are freezing to death.

Well, the day we went out to the lakes it was that way only not so much so.

It was not, therefore, difficult to imagine the broad, white crust over those lakes to be ice and snow. They are of the purest snowy white, and when cut into, the crust has that deep sea blue of ice when cut in like manner.

This crust of sulphate of soda is nearly three feet in depth and is perfectly firm, so that the heaviest loads drive over it with safety.

The water which oozes up through the crust at intervals is quite warm, being at the surface on a cool day about blood temperature, and of course at a considerable depth much higher.

In 1876—the year which the gentle reader will call to mind as the centennial—a slight fragment of this lode, weighing over three tons, was cut in the form of a cube and sent to the Centennial, where it attracted very much attention.

Six weeks afterward the unsightly hole in the deposit at the lake was entirely filled up with a new formation.

This goes to show how inexhaustible is the mighty reservoir, and the gentle reader may give it his earnest thought as a mathematical question, what amount of this formation might be secured to the enterprising manufacturer who might see fit to purchase and develop it.

Suppose there are sixty-four tons to every 400 superficial feet, and suppose there are four lakes averaging forty acres, which is a low estimate, then we have at present on hand 17,424 tons, with a capacity to reproduce itself every two months, we will say, or at the rate of 104,544 tons per annum.

Suppose, then, we take a ten years' working test of the lakes, and we have 1,002,864 tons of soda.

This soda is not adulterated with alum or other injurious substances, and would therefore sell very rapidly.

It might be put in half-pound and pound cans which would sell at, we will say, twenty-five and fifty cents per can.

Taking the very low estimate made above, as a basis we have the neat little income of $1,062,864,000.

This is more than I am now clearing, I find, over and above expenses, and I am thinking seriously of opening up this vast avenue to wealth myself.

I would have done so long ere this, were it not that I am now developing the Boomerang mine.

This mine is named after my favorite mule, and I am very anxious that it should succeed.

I have already sunk $10 in this mine, and I cannot therefore abandon it, as the casual observer will notice, without great loss to me.