The Well Diggers in Kansas Hit a Stone Floor at 90 Feet — The Salt Above Had Never Been Disturbed

In the autumn of 1887, in Reno County, Kansas, a crew was digging a water well on a quarter section a few miles out from Hutchinson. They were digging it by hand, the way every well was dug then: a shaft about four feet across, one man at the bottom with a pick and a bucket, two at the top on the windlass. The head of the crew was a Mennonite named Jacob Regier, one of the families that had come into Kansas in the seventies with Turkey Red wheat and stayed. By the nineteenth day they were through sixty-odd feet of red clay and shale. Then the pick went in easy and came back ringing, and what came up the shaft was white.