After Harmony and Amargosa shut down in 1888, the mule team's route was moved to the mines at Borate, 3 miles (5 km) east of Calico, back to Daggett.

In 1877, six years before twenty-mule teams would be introduced in Death Valley, Scientific American reported that Francis Marion Smith and his brother had shipped their company's borax in a 30-ton load using two large wagons, with a third wagon for food and water, drawn by a 24-mule team over a 160-mile (260 km) stretch of desert between Columbus, Nevada and Wadsworth, Nevada.

[2] When loaded with ore the total weight of the mule train, wagons and all, was 73,200 pounds (33,200 kg; 36.6 short tons).

Feed and water for the return trip were dispersed at camps along the road by outbound teams from Mojave pulling empty borax wagons.

At one point on the route an additional 500-US-gallon (1,900 L) wagon was added to the outbound train to take water to a dry camp, which was used by a return team and the cycle repeated.

In the Proceedings Fifth Death Valley Conference on History and Prehistory, two articles discussed freight operations in the Mojave with specific details on the use of mules and horses.

Both men were responsible for readying the team, feeding and watering of the mules, and any veterinary care or repairs that needed to be done.

Cora Keagle recounted his history in an article, "Buckboard Days in Borate", published in Desert Magazine in September 1939.

The exhibition teams were typically mules for the promotion value, but Smith explained that in actual use, wheel horses were a standard practice.

Joe Zentner wrote of the origins of the advertising campaign on the Desert USA website in "Twenty Mule Teams on the move in Death Valley".

A short item in the June 1940 edition of Desert Magazine mentioned that two of the original borax wagons were en route to the New York World's Fair.

The item followed with the note that muleskinner "Borax Bill" Parkinson[4] had driven an original wagon from Oakland, California, to New York City in 1917, spending two years on the journey.

In 1958, a twenty-mule team made a symbolic haul out of the new pit at U.S. Borax, commemorating the transition from underground to open-pit mining.