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Updated: May 12, 2025
It was but a poor rancho, like all the others in the valley, and, indeed, throughout most parts of Mexico, built of large blocks of mud, squared in a mould and sun-dried. Many of the better class of such buildings showed white fronts, because near at hand gypsum was to be had for the digging. Some of greater pretension had windows that looked as though they were glazed.
They were constructed of adobe brick and of stone, and plastered over in both cases with gypsum, which made them a brilliant white; and some were constructed of a red porous stone. The fact that the houses were plastered externally leads us to infer that they had not learned to dress stone and lay them in courses.
After several soakings, alternating with breaking of clods and treatment with gypsum, the former alkali patch was given some seed. How the men watched the land day after day, and how the first green sprouts of corn were hailed! The alkali patch was changed. Cousin Harriet was rejoiced. "There's so much land saved," she said. "It's a great change." Neil listened to the words as in a parable.
The shades of evening were closing over the earth, and the alabaster hills were assuming an ashy blue colour, when the little cavalcade emerged from the dusty ravines of gypsum, and once more trod the green prairie.
After travelling three hours and a half we passed over and amongst a range of low hills, a volcanic jumble with earths of all colours, seams of gypsum stuck up edgeways, and many other things. I used once to sigh and groan over not having brought a geologist with us, but I was wiser by that time.
He found, in the red soil of the isle, a large mass of that white earth, called gypsum, which, when wetted and burnt, makes plaster of Paris; and which, when ground, makes a fine manure for some soils, as the careful Dutchmen well knew.
My soil is sandy loam with light traces of white alkali, although it does not seem to be detrimental to the growth thus far. I am in the dairy business and will have by winter enough manure to top-dress the field. Would it be good policy to use the manure, or would it be more satisfactory to top-dress with gypsum? Would it injure alfalfa to pasture lightly after the last cutting?
In southwestern Kansas extensive Permian beds of rock salt and gypsum show that here lay great salt lakes in which these minerals were precipitated as their brines grew dense and dried away.
Gypsum seems to help, but I don't know how much to use. The amount of gypsum required to neutralize black alkali depends upon how much black alkali there is to be neutralized, and no definite amount, therefore, can be prescribed beforehand as sufficient without a determination of the amount of alkali.
For the same reason the travellers were unable to sight the immense development of granite-embedded quartz, which lurks amongst the hills to the inland or east, and which here subtends the whole coast-line. They imagined themselves to be in a purely Secondary formation of gypsum and conglomerates, cut by a succession of Wady-beds like the section between El-Muwaylah and 'Aynunah.
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