Bisbee Turquoise mine

This mine produced in my opinion some of the most unique and different turquoise of any of the turquoise mines. The turquoise ran from a pale blue to a very vibrant bright blue. The matrix patterns were awesome, because the mother rock was a lot of the time lavender color, this would cause the matrix to be lavender color, very unique. Even the spiderweb a lot of the time was red or lavender. Of course there are no set rules of what turquoise should look like that came from this mine. Not all the turquoise had the lavender matrix or webbing, some was just pure blue and no matrix or the matrix was the colors that came from the other mines. There are certain characteristics that only certain mines have and the stones that that mine produces that are within those characteristics can be identified.The stone that came out of what they called the lavender pit had very distictive colored matrix. They say the lavender pit was named after Harrison Lavender the manager at the Copper Queen. Later he became the Vice President of Phelps Dodge out of Douglas Arizona. I think that was just a coincidence. Had the pit been blue I do not think it would have been named after him. The Lavender pit they say when it rained, the water that flowed from it looked almost like blood. I know when I cut a volume of this stone the saw water is almost blood red and so is the water in the grinder, very messy stone to cut. The host rock or mother rock in this pit was a lavender color. A lot of the turquoise mined from this pit has a purple reddish color matrix in it. Turquoise from this mine had a lot of intense colors of blue, red and black very collectable. I consider Bisbee as the Top collectable turquoise. The quality of top grade Bisbee was unmatched by any other mine. Bisbee had a very unique quality to it that no other turquoise had; it was a natural treatment that mother nature put into the turquoise in the ground. Top Bisbee turquoise would actually grow into the matrix and would smoke as it is termed. This smoke was a lavender color .The vibrant blue that would form right next to and with vibrant black and the lavender colors is totally unique. Bisbee also produced high-grade red webbed turquoise. Of course a large percentage of turquoise cut from this mine looks just like the other Arizona mines with absolutely no Lavender color in it at all. But some rough does not even have a little of this lavender color matrix, and cuts just a nice blue stone.Most dealers that aquired Bisbee turquoise would go to Bisbee as well as other copper mining towns and sit in the local bars and buy turquoise from the miners as they came in.The miners would take turquoise out in their lunch boxes. This is how a lot of turquoise was acquired back then as the copper mines destroyed the turquoise in the processing of the ore.
Copyright @ 2010 James Saunders