The southern Arizona mining camp of Bisbee once had a population of more than 20,000 and in nearly a century of operation produced more than 8 billion pounds of copper metal, along with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of gold and silver, but to many who know the city, its finest offering has been the few hundred tons of turquoise that it gave to the world.
Bisbee turquoise was encountered in great quantities in the late 1950s and 1960s, about the same time that Arizona Highways magazine started publicizing the gemstone that was being set in silver by Native American silversmiths, particularly the Navajos. The fame of this jewelry and of Bisbee turquoise soon went worldwide.
Because the best Bisbee turquoise was a deep blue (symbolic of the Southwestern sky), 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. High-quality 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. Bisbee turquoise is among the hardest available.
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 mid-20th century that it was available in large enough quantities to become a commercial success.
Bisbee’s copper was mined predominantly 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 open-pit mine, the Sacramento, was tried in the 1920s, but it wasn’t until the early 1950s that a significant surface, or open-pit, operation got under way. The underground mines of Bisbee mines continued to be worked during those years.
Large off-road haulage trucks, capable of carrying up to 65 tons of broken ore (huge for that time), were loaded by giant 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. The concentrate was then shipped to a smelter at Douglas, 25 miles distant, where 2,000-degree temperatures melted the material, allowing the metals to be separated from other less-valuable materials, including iron and sulfur.
As mining progressed in the ever-deepening pit, it frequently encountered large boulders of Bisbee turquoise, its beauty making it easy to pick out from the dull gray and brownish rock that hosted it. Miners frequently salvaged 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.
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 an extensive exhibit developed in affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution.) Bisbee turquoise is on display in the open-pit section of the exhibit.
The mining company eventually halted the collection of Bisbee turquoise because some miners were literally taking their lives into their hands in attempting to grab it from the masses of ore that were being dumped.
Today, many jewelers in Bisbee and elsewhere actively seek local turquoise from families of miners who collected it decades ago. One company, Bisbee Blue, has the rights 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 many visitors to the historic mining camp opt to take home as a souvenir that they can be proud to show off for years to come.