Jefferson's Salt Mountain

The purchase of Louisiana in 1803 was an especially bold act inasmuch as the President, the Congress, indeed all the Americans involved in the purchase from France were ignorant as to the lay of the land. Along with many other Americans, Jefferson believed, for instance, that woolly mammoth might still stomp the North American grasslands. The Jeffersonian fancy that stimulated the most ridicule, however, was the Salt Mountain.

What Jefferson Said What a Partisan Critic Said

One extraordinary fact, relative to salt, must not be omitted. There exists, about one thousand miles up the Missouri, and not far from that river, a salt mountain.... This mountain is said to be one hundred and eighty miles long, and forty-five in width, composed of solid rock salt, without any trees, or even shrubs upon it. Salt springs are very numerous beneath the surface of this mountain, and they flow through the fissures and cavities of it. Least however the imagination of his friends in Congress might take a flight to that mountain, and find salt trees there, and salt beasts and birds too, he with the most amiable and infantine simplicity, adds that there are no trees nor even shrubs upon it. Aha! who would have thought it? Methinks such a great, huge mountain of solid, shining salt, must make a dreadful glare on a clear, sun-shiney day, especially just after a rain...We think that it would have been no more than fair in the traveler who informed Mr. Jefferson of this territory of solid salt, to have added, that some leagues to the westward of it there was an immense lake of molasses, and that between this lake and the mountain of salt, there was an extensive vale of hasty pudding, stretching as far as the eye could reach, and kept in a state of comfortable eatability by the warmth of the sun's rays, (a capital place, this, for fattening hogs) into which the natives, being all Patagonians, waded knee deep, whenever they were hungry, and helped themselves to salt with one hand to season their pudding and molasses with the other to give it a relish.

Where the Story Came From

Probably from, among others, Zebulon Pike. In 1803 (thus before the Lewis & Clark expedition) Pike wrote of a "mountain of salt" in the west and saw "bushels" of salt from it in St. Louis. In English it is possible to use the word "salt" as an adjective in front of the noun "mountain." This might mean a mountain composed of salt, or it might mean a mountain simply in some way associated with salt. In either Spanish or French, the languages by which Anglo-Americans might hear of the wonders of Louisiana, the word for "mountain" must come first, followed by a preposition, followed by the object of the preposition, that is, the word for "salt."

Now take the Spanish or French phrase and translate it into English, and you get "mountain of salt"--which phrase connotes to an English-speaker that the mountain is composed of salt. Thus Jefferson believed that the Salt Mountain was a mountain of salt.

The man who sorted out this misconception was a gentleman explorer named George Champlin Sibley. In 1811 he set out from his post at Fort Osage, on the Missouri River, to travel the central plains on a two-fold mission. First, he was to make friends and allies among the Indians. Second--and this interest was more personal--he wanted to find Jefferson's Salt Mountain. He thought he had the mystery figured out.

Sibley's Osage guides and allies, as well as other tribes of the central and southern plains, traveled annually to a place in present northwest Oklahoma called the Rock Saline. This was a plain of 5000 or so acres of red sand in the Cimarron River bottom. Under the surface lay vast underground deposits of salt, as well as ground water that rose from the salt to the surface by capillary action, reaching the surface as saturated brine.

Evaporation of brine seeping to the surface and flowing from brine springs produced a brilliant salt crust over the entire plain, as well as thick accummulations of halite crystals ankle- to knee-deep. This mass of salt lay at the foot of a steep escarpment, called by later settlers the Narrowneck, a shale-and-gypsum bluff rising from the south bank of the Cimarron where it was joined by a tributary, the Buffalo. This, Sibley suspected and his exploration confirmed, was the Salt Mountain.

Sibley wrote to his superior, William Clark, of this site that he called the Rock Saline,

It is a level flat of redish colored sand containing about 500 acres longitudinally intersected by a small stream [the Buffalo] which flows into a branch [the Cimarron] of the Arkansas. It is bounded from S.E. to N.N.W. by very lofty hills, whose sides next the saline area are for the most part perpendicular and faced with rugged rocks of gypsum of various kinds intermixed with red clay and some flint. From the bases of these hills issue many springs of salt water. There are also four springs that arise within the flat. . . . The water of the springs in the flat is so strong that salt will not dissolve in it. After a long series of very hot weather this section is nearly all covered with a solid rock of salt from 5 to 12 inches thick, and immediately round the four springs, a kind of hollow cones of salt are formed more than two feet above the general surface; at one of these I hewed out with my tommahawk a block of salt 16 inches in thickness. . . . The quality of the rock salt is unquestionably superior to any that I ever saw. It is beautifully white. . . . herewith are some few specimens of this salt, and also some of gypsum.

These salt samples were not the first sent east from Jefferson's Salt Mountain, however. In 1804 Meriwether Lewis, en route west, had interviewed a French trader in St. Louis about a saline "on a considerable southern branch of the Arkansas." Notes of this interview, along with salt samples acquired by Auguste Chouteau, were carried to Jefferson by Pierre Chouteau. Thus Jefferson once held in his hands salt from the mountain that had caused him so much embarrassment. It is unclear whether he ever realized where it came from. He donated the salt samples to the American Philosophical Society.

Slides of the Big Salt Plain here exhibited were taken by Tom Isern in 1976.

Bibliography

Isern, Thomas D. "George Champlin Sibley, 1811 and 1825-1826," in Joseph A. Stout, Ed., Frontier Adventures: American Exploration in Oklahoma (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1976), pp. 19-37.

Isern, Thomas D. "Jefferson's Salt Mountain: The Big Salt Plain of the Cimarron River," Chronicles of Oklahoma 58 (Summer 1980): 160-175.

Isern, Thomas D., Ed. "Exploration and Diplomacy: George Champlin Sibley's Report to William Clark, 1811," Missouri Historical Review 73 (October 978): 85-102.

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