San Antonio College Library

This book takes a look at an ordinary substance--salt, the only rock humans eat--and how it has shaped civilization from the very beginning.

Century after century, camels and their drivers have traveled the sands between the fabled city of Timbuktu and the infamous salt mines of Taoudenni, hauling supplies from the proverbial end of the earth to an even farther-flung outpost, deep in Mali's slice of the Sahara. They return laden with tombstone-sized slabs of solid salt. While nearly all of the great trans-Saharan trade routes have disappeared, the Caravan of White Gold--so called because...

Chronicles the El Paso "salt war" of 1877, in which the region's Mexican Americans, who believed that the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo conferred common ownership of the salt lakes at the base of the Guadalupe Mountains, revolted against the Austin-based baking interests that staked a legal claim on them.