Turquoise Brown
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Bisbee Turquoise Is One Of Best-Known Products Of Historic Copper Town
The southern Arizona mining camp of Bisbee once had a population of more than 20,000 and produced some 8 billion -- with a “b” -- pounds of copper metal, but in many quarters, it’s best known for the few hundred tons of turquoise that it gave the world.
Bisbee turquoise was encountered in great quantities in the 1960s, about the same time that Arizona Highways magazine started publicizing the gemstone that was being set in silver by Navajo craftsmen. The fame of Native American jewelry and of Bisbee turquoise soon went worldwide.
Because the best Bisbee turquoise was a deep blue, with a matrix of chocolate brown, it often was the gemstone of choice for Native craftsmen, and as their fame increased, so did that of the stone they were using. Good turquoise is relatively hard (6.5 on the Mohs scale, with talc being 1 and diamond being 10, vs. only 5.5 for lesser turquoise), it polishes to a brilliant sheen and will maintain that look over a long period.
Finding large quantities of Bisbee turquoise
While smaller amounts of turquoise were found in Bisbee underground mines, which began operation in 1880, it wasn’t until a major pocket of the material was hit in the Lavender open-pit mine in the 1960s that it was available in large enough quantities to become a commercial success.
Bisbee’s copper was almost entirely mined by underground methods, with thousands of workers going each day deep into the bowels of the Mule Mountains, for the first 70 years of operations. A small surface operations was conducted in the 1920s, but it wasn’t until the early 1950s that a significant surface, or open-pit, mine got under way. Bisbee mines also continued to be worked underground during that period.
Large off-road haulage trucks, capable of carrying up to 65 tons of broken ore, or metal-containing rocks, were loaded by large electric shovels. They carried the ore to a crusher, where it was further reduced in size and fed into a concentrator, where grinding and chemicals made it possible to capture most of the metal. An ore concentrate was then shipped to a nearby smelter, where 2,000-degree temperatures melted the material, allowing the metals to be separated from other less-valuable materials.
As mining progressed in the ever-deepening pit, it frequently encountered great boulders of Bisbee turquoise, its beauty making it easy to pick out from the gray and brownish rock that hosted it. Miners frequently grabbed as much of the turquoise as they could and it left the jobsite with them. Throughout the history of the mines, the company had a policy of letting miners take away whatever attractive minerals they could find.
Bisbee hosts some 330 species of minerals
And Bisbee offered lots of those. With more than 330 species of minerals found in the Bisbee mines, it’s one of the richest, most diverse ore bodies in the world. (Some of that mineral diversity can be seen today at the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum, which hosts and extensive exhibit developed in affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution.)
The mining company eventually halted the collection of Bisbee turquoise because some miners were taking great safety risks to get to it.
Today many jewelers in Bisbee actively seek local turquoise from families of miners who collected it decades ago. One company, Bisbee Blue, has the right to mine turquoise from the old dumps and offers local material, set by Native American silversmiths, at its store at the Lavender Pit viewpoint.
Bisbee turquoise is a souvenir of local mining heritage that a visitor to the historic mining camp can take home and be proud to show off for years to come.
About the Author
Gary Dillard is an Arizona native who researches, speaks and writes on the history of his region and the borderlands. Learn more about his subjects at westernaudiohistory.com.
