THE ARRIVAL OF the Spanish meant not only a new power controlling the salt but a huge increase in demand for industrial salt. The Spanish introduced herds of cattle that needed to be fed salt and whose hides were cured with salt in a prosperous leather industry. Obsessed with the extraction of precious metals, the Spanish invented the patio process for silver mining in mid-sixteenth-century Mexico. In this process, silver was separated from ore by using salt because the sodium in the salt extracted impurities. Silver mining by the patio process required huge quantities of salt, and the Spanish
...more
