Today, I want to take a look at another type of Arizona turquoise: Bisbee.
By name, it’s perhaps the most famous Arizona turquoise. It’s one that’s been used in Indian jewelry for a very long time, and is one of those like Morenci that, by color and matrix, is often regarded by the public as “real Indian turquoise.” I tends to be hard and stable, and therefore well-suited to cutting, cabbing, and use in Indian jewelry.
It’s also relatively rare: The mine no longer produces, meaning that what’s already in circulation is all there is. That, coupled with its gem-grade quality, makes it one of the more valuable forms of American turquoise.
BISBEE, ARIZONA
Bisbee in 1916. Image credit: Library of Congress.
Bisbee is a small town in the southeast corner of Arizona, nestled in the Mule Mountains, just under 100 miles southeast of Tucson. Since 1929, it’s been the Cochise County seat (that title formerly belonged to Tombstone), and the most recent census record a population of 5,575 residents — roughly a fifth of the population of some 25,000 (including itinerant speculators and laborers) that it enjoyed in its mining heyday around 1910.
The town was officially founded in 1880, but the area was “discovered” (yes, I’m using that term ironically) three years earlier, by Cavalry scouts and at least one civilian employed as a tracker, searching for “renegade Apaches.” An aside here: Yes, the phrase “renegade Apaches” appears in the very first sentence of the “Bisbee History” section of the official Web site of the town of Bisbee. Considering what we’ve already covered about the genocidal intentions of the federal government and the U.S. Army toward the Apache, the present-day use of such terminology, and in such an offhand, matter-of-fact (and ahistorical) way, demonstrates how thoroughly ingrained anti-Indian racism is in the dominant culture.
But back to the history, with a bit more accuracy than the “official” version. That civilian tracker, a man named Jack Dunn, apparently found no Apache (unsurprisingly, since they were highly-skilled military tacticians and strategists), but he did find minerals. Lots of minerals. Lead, copper, silver, gold. All highly valuable to the Army, to the U.S. government, and to the speculators and settlers who would soon invade the area in a massive wave. At the end of 1877, three prospectors jointly filked the first copper claim in the area, and within two years, some one hundred separate claims had been staked in what was by then known as Mule Gulch.
When the town itself was founded in 1880, it was named for a local judge, DeWitt Bisbee, who was one of the backers of the mining operation that had already been set up in the area. Known as the Copper Queen Mine, it was instrumental in giving the area its nickname, “Queen of the Copper Camps.” The town filed a city charter in 1902, and officially incorporated as the City of Bisbee. By 1910, it was the largest city in the Arizona Territory, and would become the new county seat 19 years later.
Today, it is a small tourist town and magnet for collectors, artists, and history buffs. The town has gone to great lengths to preserve the appearance of a “Wild West” mining town (an appearance likely fueled as much by the imagery in decades of old Westerns as by actual history), and features tours of the town and the old Copper Queen Mine.
THE QUEEN OF THE COPPER CAMPS: BISBEE MINING OPERATIONS
As noted above, Bisbee’s primary claim to fame has long been its status as “Queen of the Copper Camps.” The Copper Queen Mine was the original commercial mine that anchored such operations in the area, but it was surrounded by claims of all sizes and varieties.
In 1881, the Phelps Dodge Mining Company opened the Atlanta Mine next to the Copper Queen; four years later, it acquired the Copper Queen and merged the two into one massive mining operation. Four years after that, the Iron Horse made its way to and through Bisbee, and the presence of the railroad vaulted mining operations to a whole new level. And proving that some things never change, by the middle of the 1890s, Phelps Dodge held a stake of some 90% in the Copper Queen, and had acquired most of the smaller mining operations in the greater Bisbee area. Phelps Dodge would hold the mine throughout the remainder of its life.
Also proving that some things never change, Phelps Dodge provided some of Bisbee’s other claims to fame: claims that are, in retrospect, more claims to infamy, particularly from environmental and human rights standpoints. In 1917, fueled by wartime demands for copper, the Copper Queen became Arizona’s first open-pit mine, creating heightened access to the copper and other minerals below, but also creating a scar upon the land that will never fully heal. More, by the 1950s, Phelps Dodge had embraced open-pit mining across the board, and began ripping open the earth in the never-ending quest for mineral wealth and profit. This is par for the course, and the role of Phelps Dodge should come as no surprise: The corporation, along with numerous other multinationals, remains a major player in the practice of carving scars upon sacred land in the pursuit of profit. [I’ve written at length about such scars, here, and here, and here, among many others.]
Meanwhile, the company engaged in fiercely anti-labor practices from an early date. The first decades of the Twentieth Century saw an effort by workers across the country to organize into unions to ensure fundamental rights. And when I say “fundamental rights,” I’m not talking about what we think of today as employee rights regarding pay equity and work breaks (although that in no way diminishes the importance of these rights). I’m talking about something as fundamental as the right to survive a workday, preferably with all of one’s limbs still attached and intact.
Mining has always been dangerous work. It still is: Witness the recent mine cave-ins around the country, one of which involved workers and families who Wings knew as a teenager when he was stolen from his family and home and farmed out to live and work in Utah as part of the Mormon Indian Placement Program (IPP). But in the early part of the last century, such operations were virtually unregulated, with all of the power residing exclusively in the hands of the wealthy corporate taskmasters, and with workers regarded openly as a wholly expendable material asset.
In 1917, the Industrial Workers of the World (known colloquially as the Wobblies) voted to take action. They called for strikes at mining operations all over the country, including those in Arizona. Their actions met with swift and violent reaction. In Arizona, these reactions were called, antiseptically, “deportations,” but with the weight of the baggage that term carries today, it’s perhaps more indicative of what such actions actually were.
The first was known as the “Jerome Deportation,” because it involved striking IWW mine workers at mines in Jerome, Arizona. Three days after the IWW called for a strike, some 250 armed vigilantes struck: In actions that would both echo and foreshadow human rights violations that became outright genocide, the vigilantes rounded up some 6- IWW members who were suspected of being involved in the call for a strike, herded them into railroad cattle cars, and “deported” them. At Prescott, nine were pulled off, arrested, and jailed, then released back onto the cars; they were then shipped first to Needles, California, then back to Kingman, Arizona, where they were finally released after swearing to refrain from future “labor agitation.”
The second occurred later that year, and was less secretive: Instead of armed “vigilantes” handling the deportation, Phelps Dodge openly took matters into its own hands. Corporate enforcers took a page from the vigilantes’ playbook, though, rounding up striking mine workers at gunpoint and shipping them en masse out of town, and out of state, to Las Hermanas, New Mexico. Phelps Doge, though, proved to be much more efficient: Instead of a paltry 60-odd workers, the company “deported” more than 1,000. None of this was unusual for mining corporations; I’ve written elsewhere about the human rights violations inflicted upon largely-Hispanic mine workers and their families in Silver City, New Mexico — and upon the actors who had the temerity participate in a film telling the story of their struggle during the the rabid campaign terror imposed by McCarthyite anti-Communist forces in this country in the 1950s.
Labor unrest and environmental impact notwithstanding, Phelps Dodge fully embraced open-pit mining in the 1950s, while continuing underground operations simultaneously. One of the company’s targets at this time was Sacramento Hill, a hill that contained low-grade copper ore. The Copper Queen’s manager, a man named Harrison Lavender, believed that open-pit mining would yield far greater quantities of ore, and so Sacramento Hill was turned into an enormous open-pit operation that would take the name of the mine manager himself (hence Bisbee’s famed “Lavender Pit”). By the time the Lavender Pit shut down at the end of 1974, the pit and its adjoining shafts and tunnels covered more than 1,500 miles. Phelps Dodge would cease all copper mining operations at Bisbee entirely in 1975. Over the Copper Queen’s existence, nearly a full century, the corporation pulled billions of pounds of minerals from the earth: 2.8 million ounces of gold; 102 million ounces of silver; millions of pounds of lead, manganese, and zinc; and an astonishing 8 billion pounds of copper.
By the 1960s, miners were regularly finding veins of turquoise during their work, and began carrying home nuggets of the sky-blue stone in their lunch boxes. Finally, in 1972, one of the miners was given what is reputed to be the only lease even granted for mining turquoise at Bisbee. Over the next two years, until the Lavender Pit closed, he reportedly extracted some 2,000 pounds of turquoise.
As noted above, Bisbee turquoise is no longer being mined; the veins are reportedly exhausted. However, Phelps Dodge Corporation was acquired in 2007 by multinational mining conglomerate Freeport-McMoRan, about whose activities I have also written at length. Freeport-McMoRan has reportedly begun preliminary work in the Bisbee area, with an eye toward launching extractive operations once again. This is not good news.
BISBEE TURQUOISE
As we covered in the very first Turquoise Tuesday post, turquoise is a mineral that occurs secondarily to the formation of copper. At Bisbee, turquoise is not the only such mineral to have been found in the copper mines; azurite, malachite, and a number of other minerals were present, too, and some of them are of the same gem-grade quality in their own mineral classes as much of the Bisbee turquoise.
The quality makes it both collectible and valuable — much more so than most other Arizona turquoise (and most other turquoise, period, although we will cover mines later that are more valuable yet). Gem-grade Bisbee cabochons can average anywhere from $10 to $30+ per carat. The really high-quality “collector’s grade” cabs can run in excess of $50 per carat. And, of course, it’s possible to find lower-end stones, as well.
The same qualities that make Bisbee turquoise valuable on the market also make it especially useful in Indian jewelry. It’s a hard, solid, stable stone, and although matrix is common in it, the matrix tends to broad and bold. In Bisbee turquoise, even spiderweb matrix tends to occur in wider lines than elsewhere. This means that the inclusions have a broader base within the stone, and this makes the stone less susceptible to fracture along matrix lines. Because of this, it’s well-suited to cutting and cabbing, and provides unusually stable and long-lived stones for use in Indian jewelry.
The photo at the top of this post shows Bisbee “rough”: pieces of host rock with the veins of turquoise visible in it. Some people assume that the famous Lavender Pit Bisbee refers to the maroon hue of the host rock, which, in some lights, can appear nearly purple. As noted above, though, it’s actually named for Harry Lavender, manager of the Copper Queen mine; the host-rock colors are merely coincidental.
The turquoise itself usually ranges from a medium robin’s-egg blue to a very deep sky blue. Occasionally, you will find green Bisbee turquoise; some of the lighter greens tend to be less valuable, but the deep teal and forest greens are often very valuable indeed. The matrix found in Bisbee varies widely, from the white swirls and shadows found in Kingman and Sleeping Beauty turquoise to the broad, bold patches of iron pyrite (fool’s gold) common to Morenci turquoise to dark spiderweb and the wide, red-brown swirls known as “smoky” matrix that are classic Bisbee. That smoky matrix comes from inclusions of the host rock, a red-chocolate sandstone or siltstone. It can range from a light brick-red shade to a near purple at the red end of the spectrum, and golden tan to a near-blackish brown. Sometimes, as with the boulder turquoise shown in the photo at the very top, it’s big and bold and blocky; other times, the inclusions are delicate, manifesting only as small traces of red-brown color, as shown in the earrings immediately above. Thanks to the presence of copper and other minerals, cabochons will sometimes show golden-colored streaks and flecks like those in the photo, as well.
The white matrix is more subtle and mysterious, and it’s less common to Bisbee than to Arizona turquoise from several other mine sources, but it’s there.
The necklace shown here was made with an unusually large oval cabochon of natural Bisbee turquoise. You can see, around the edges, slight wisps of maroon smoke drifting across the stone; one faint line, so pale it’s nearly golden in color, crosses the center at a slight diagonal. All across the surface, however, are faint white clouds, much like those of the big southwestern sky.
Some, of course, show the smoky matrix to splendid effect.
This pair had it all: faint hints of white throughout, subtle golden-colored lines, and rich dark splashes of chocolate-colored smoky matrix. These stones were a bit unusual in another way, too. You can see the high gloss the cabber gave them, and it served to set off their color: They were a rich, deep hue, but neither quite sky blue nor really green; they hovered somewhere on the spectrum between the two, with the golden and red matrix undertones giving them a teal-colored cast. They sold almost immediately, of course.
To give you some idea of the unmatched beauty of genuine old Smoky Bisbee turquoise, take a look at this vintage cuff. No, I’m not sending you to a competitor, and the link implies no endorsement whatsoever. It’s simply a rare chance to see real Smoky Bisbee, old-style, in what are perhaps the single most beautiful turquoise cabochons I’ve ever seen anywhere. Be sure to enlarge the photo to get the real effect.
All of the jewelry pieces shown here have long since sold; Wings has nothing in his current inventory that contains Bisbee turquoise. What he does have are a lot of rough, awaiting his lapidary work, and a few Bisbee slabs and cabs that are ready to be set into new pieces. Someone who wants Indian jewelry made with Bisbee could commission something with one or more of the following, of course,but my primary purpose in showing them here is to provide a snapshot of matrix variants.
Now, the deep cobalt blue color here is a trick of the light. This shot was taken in natural light, but on a mostly-cloudy day, and it turned the blues in the stones a brilliant indigo. In reality, the blues are much more a customary turquoise color, mostly blue with a hint of green, but these have some unusual characteristics, too.
The stone at the center is what’s known as a slab. Rough-cut and only lightly polished, it can be set into a rectangular bezel as is, or sliced thinly into separate slabs to be used, for example, for drop earrings. Or, of course, with some additional lapidary work, it can be turned into a glossy cabochon for a larger piece. It’s boulder turquoise, mostly maroon host rock shot through with what is nearly neon sky blue bits of turquoise. On this side of the slab, the turquoise resembles the heartlines so common to spirit beings that appear in Southwestern Indian jewelry, with a naturally-formed “arrow” at the end.
The two top cabochons have more of a greenish cast to them than the others, but still tip onto the blue end of the spectrum. What look like big black patches across the surface are actually swaths of iron pyrite matrix; in sunlight, they glint and gleam like dark silver. On the upper left, you can see a hint of that silvery shade; backing the pyrite matrix in both is a bit of the smoky brown matrix.
The bottom two cabs are something else entirely. They have bits of white and silver underscoring the color of the stone itself, almost as though backlighting it. The turquoise, though, is a psychedelic swirl of greens and blues, ever shifting, ever changing, with a range of color and sense of motion almost like that found in old McGinniss turquoise. The matrix you see here is smoky matrix, like those found in the vintage cuff sold elsewhere that I linked above. But the wisps are so sheer, so delicate, you almost can believe you’re actually seeing them. They’re the kind of stones that, if you stare too long at them, will give you the same sort of floating visions you get from staring at the sun.
These are all expensive stones, no question about it. Anything made with even the smallest of them would not some cheaply. But for someone looking for “real Indian turquoise,” the kind where the stone evinces a spirit of its own, Bisbee is the stone to choose.
Next week: More turquoise from Arizona, from lesser-known sources.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
