One of Nevada’s most famous turquoise mines is the Number Eight. It’s gone by several other names over the years, and other operations nearby like to bask in the reflected glory of the Number Eight name, but it does refer to a specific mine, not a district. It was actually quite a small vein, and it’s now defunct — has been since the mid-1970s or so — but it produced some of the highest-grade American turquoise ever mined (and still on the market today). It wound up being a very lucky strike indeed for several generations of turquoise miners.
THE DISTRICT
The Number Eight mine is located in what is now known as the Lynn Mining District in Eureka County, in central Nevada. The district apparently takes its name from an early-20th-Century prospector, Fred Lynn, who was the first modern settler to find gold in the area. In 1907, he opened placer mines along Lynn Creek (he apparently named the watershed after himself, and it stuck). But he was far from the first to have a lucky strike in the area, and gold was far from the first valuable mineral mined there.
Like the rest of the state, Eureka County has a long and storied mineralogical history. As with mining districts around the state, minerals and gemstones were extracted from the earth in what is now Eureka County for centuries by members of area tribes, including the Paiute and Shoshoni, long before Europeans set foot on the continent. But once prospectors and settlers invaded the area in the latter half of the 19th Century in search of fortune and fame, mining operations began in earnest, and the rugged landscape was soon dotted with everything from small individual claims to full-scale corporate operations that would last well into the next century. Occasionally, a mine operator would give a nod toward the indigenous peoples driven from the area in the service of the settlers’ quest for wealth, naming individual mines after various tribes or giving them other “Indian-sounding” names.
Eureka County was originally a part of Lander County (now adjacent along Eureka’s western county line, and home to the source of the world’s most valuable turquoise, Lander). Prospectors had struck silver in the Cortez area in 1862, more than 100 miles from the nearest town (Austin) in Lander County. The residents of the mining camp tired of the long journey to conduct official business and demanded formation of their own government; the area officially broke off from Lander and reconstituted itself as Eureka County in 1873. The county itself has a geographic area of just under 4,200 square miles, with water constituting less that one-tenth of one percent of that area. The population is small — with fewer than 2,000 residents total counted in the 2010 census (an increase of more than 300 people since the 2000 census), it works out to less than half a person per square mile. It’s a drastic drop from the numbers of its heyday: The first area census was recorded in 1880, and counted nearly 7,100 residents. The county was, of course, named for the precious metal strikes in the area, as was its eponymous county seat.
THE MINE
The mine now known as the Number Eight sits north of Carlin. The reported date of its “discovery” (i.e., the first time someone of European ancestry noticed the significance of the land), varies, with some reports putting it at 1925. Although that particular land area was no doubt mined for silver and other minerals much earlier, the first official claim that is recorded dates to 1929, and was held jointly by Earl Buffington and Lawrence Springer. Before long, they sold the claim to a man named Ted Johnson, and it then was resold repeatedly to a number of stakeholders whose names are instantly recognizeable to students of Nevada’s mining history, including Doc Wilson, Lee Hand, and the famous Edgar brothers.
I’m not sure that anyone has ever run to ground the definitive explanation of the name, which seems to have been given to the claim by the Edgar brothers. According to one version, it was so-named for a legend that the eighth claim would strike the best vein of turquoise. It’s probably at least as likely that it was simply the eighth in a series of claims they staked in the area, but either way, the legend has proven somewhat true in retrospect: It produced an unusually stable turquoise, considering the large amount of finely webbed matrix, and also produced perhaps the highest proportion of large nuggets of turquoise ever found anywhere. And by large, I mean huge: It produced the single largest turquoise nugget ever recorded, found on June 23, 1954, by brothers J.M. and T.G. Edgar and their associate, Marvin Symes (of “Frogskin turquoise” fame), weighing in at 150 pounds. The “nugget” was also gem-grade turquoise, unusual for one so large, but rather than cut such a specimen, they decided to keep it for posterity, and it now resides in an Albuquerque museum.
The mine was tapped out by the end of the 1950s, and by 1960, the claim was bought up by the Newmont Gold Company’s Blue Star Mine, which sought gold (and found it, as well as copper, beneath the exhausted turquoise veins). The last reported regular mining of turquoise there occurred in 1976. In the 1980s and 1990s, Blue Star excavated the entire area as an open pit mine in its quest for gold. In 1990, the mine workers uncovered a new vein of reportedly high-quality spiderweb turquoise a foot across, but the company was interested only in the gold, an all tha was saved from that vein, allegedly, was some 25 pounds of the turquoise. The company commenced digging up, dumping, and completely burying all remains of the Number Eight Turquoise Mine and its environs as a giant mound of mine waste.
THE TURQUOISE
Number Eight turquoise is, in relative terms, one of the more valuable forms of American turquoise. Like a lot of its counterparts from other mines, it falls into two basic categories: 1) reasonably-priced gem-grade stone that is beautiful and of good quality for use in jewelry, but is not particularly pricey; and 2) old high-end natural stone with unusually spectacular matrices that often has great historical value and can be quite expensive. As noted above, the mine is now depleted; as far as anyone knows, what is now on the market is all there will ever be of actual Number Eight turquoise. Quite a bit of it is still in circulation, including rough and nuggets. Most contemporary cabochons cut from it will likely cost a modest $3 to $6 per carat; those from the higher-grade veins might run from $10 to $15 per carat, but probably not much beyond that.
Where the real value appears is with old cabochons, where there is no risk of stabilization or other treatment and the stone’s own natural beauty is visible (and touchable). You’re most likely to find these in existing jewelry pieces, particularly vintage Indian jewelry. In such circumstances, a piece can run from several hundred into the thousands, depending upon age, the size and quality of the cabochon(s), and the identity and skill of the silversmith who created the piece.
Number Eight has also sometimes been used for beads, particularly in vintage Pueblo jacla-style necklaces. Such necklaces are composed of a long strand of beads, terminating at the bottom in loops of similar beads usually hanging some two to four inches in length. The loop pendants, typically in an elongated teardrop shape, were originally made by adding traditional Pueblo and Diné jacla earrings (large teardrop-shaped loops that were first made only of heishi, then eventually of turquoise, coral, and other beads in nugget, doughnut, or rondel shapes). Depending on who you ask (and where they live), the word may be pronounced variously as something approaching JAHK- lah, ZHAAK-lah, or the Spanish-influenced HAHK-lah, and is allegedly a Diné (Navajo) word that originally translated to something along the lines of “ear string,” although it is seen more frequently in Pueblo than in Navajo jewelry.
Number Eight turquoise comes in the stone’s archetypal blue and green shades, but tends toward the lighter end of that spectrum. Blues are often the clear pale blue of a robin’s egg, sometimes even a lighter aquamarine color; they rarely get much darker than a light sky blue. The darker blue shades often tend to be more valuable. The greens, which tend toward seafoam and green-tinted aqua, are less common, and thus similarly valuable. They also tend to be seen more often among older stones, some of which is due to actual color, but some of which also comes from years of wear and absorption of skin oils and other substances.
But the hallmark of Number Eight is its matrix: Regardless of color or material, the matrix virtually always appears as a tracery of fine spiderwebbing throughout the stone. The example at the very top of this post is perhaps the most common: copper, which creates webbing in a delicate golden-bronze color. As in the pendant shown, the matrix pattern tends to be both small and fairly uniform, creating a constant and consistent repeating pattern across the entire stone. Most of it occurs in very fine jagged lines that meet and join and cross each other, marked sporadically by slightly larger mineral deposits that appear as little swatches of bronze color. Sometimes the copper’s color is more intense, making it appear to be a metallic brick red. But some veins of Number Eight are shot through with another mineral: chert, like that visible in the Four Directions pendant shown immediately above. A hard black stone, chert creates matrix in a similar pattern of fine lines, but instead of glowing warmly they look like cool whorls of ink traced by the finest of quills.
The matrix is part of what makes Number Eight so valuable to artisans. It possesses that trademark “Indian turquoise” beauty, but unlike many other forms of turquoise with heavy matrix patterns, it’s relatively hard and stable. Left untreated, turquoise even at its clearest and sturdiest is still relatively delicate and subject to fracture; once matrix is introduced into a vein of stone, risk of breakage rises substantially. After all, the matrix itself is an inclusion (and thus an incursion) into the integrity of the stone; it’s already created a fissure. Along with its great beauty, matrix webbing creates natural lines of fracture. Number Eight is thus unusually stable compared to others of similar composition, perhaps in part because of the relative delicacy and uniformity of the webbing.
It’s a lovely stone, and perhaps a lucky one, made all the more attractive today by its relative scarcity. Wings currently has nothing in inventory made with it. The heart pendant at the top was sold some four years ago to a friend who has since walked on; the pendant shown below was sold to another customer even longer ago. He has a couple of small Number Eight cabochons in stock, as well as one large and very old one that may wind up never being used in a sale piece. Eventually, he’ll create more pieces with Number Eight turquoise, and when he does, I’ll post photos of them here on the site.
Up next week, another major Nevada mine, with more stunning colors and patterns.
~ Aji
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