Kingman Turquoise: Field Guide to the Mine Behind the Default American Blue

Kingman is the hardest turquoise in this guide to identify by eye, and the reason is uncomfortable: it is the mine that defined what most people picture when they picture American turquoise. Lowry writes that Kingman’s blue, together with similar hues from Sleeping Beauty, “made this color of turquoise the most common ‘look’ of any American turquoise.”¹ A look that common is a look that is easy to imitate, and its name gets borrowed for turquoise that never came from the mine.

Where it comes from

The turquoise is a by-product of open-pit copper mining in the historic Mineral Park area near Kingman, Arizona, in the Cerbat Mountains of Mohave County, at an elevation of about 3,300 feet. Lowry records two main areas of deposits — Aztec Peak (also called Turquoise Mountain) and Ithaca Peak — and notes that the area has produced turquoise “in prehistoric and modern times.”¹

Chambless independently confirms the same two features through a D. B. Sterrett / U.S. Geological Survey figure captioned for Mineral Park, Ithaca Peak and Aztec (Turquoise) Mountain, and a second Sterrett figure listing the Ithaca Peak claim-holders.² Two books, two authors, same geography — this is one of the few places in this guide where we have genuine two-source corroboration rather than one source restating itself.

Our sources disagree about who found it, and when

We are not going to resolve this for you, because our sources do not resolve it between themselves.

Lowry states simply that Kingman was “discovered by James Haas in the late 1800s.”¹ Chambless is more careful and reports the disagreement rather than settling it: James W. Haas “is generally credited with the modern day discovery” of the Mineral Park deposits sometime between the mid-1870s and early 1880s — but Haas himself, writing in Mining and Scientific Press in 1902, claimed he made the discovery “about twenty-eight years ago,” which points at about 1874; Sterrett’s 1906 report gives 1885; and Kunz first reported the discovery in 1885, crediting samples brought by Bernard Moses.²

So: the modern discovery is credited to Haas, and the date is contested between roughly 1874 and 1885 by three separate accounts, one of them Haas’s own. Any page that gives you a single confident year for this is choosing one of three and not telling you.

Working of the deposits long predates all of it. Lowry records production in prehistoric times, and Chambless reports specimens showing evidence of having been worked and a large number of stone hammers found in the area.² That passage is heavily degraded in our scan, so we paraphrase it rather than quote it.

The town, briefly

Mineral Park was founded in 1871 near the camp of Chloride. In 1882, while surveying the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad route, Lewis Kingman put his name on a settlement about fifteen miles to the southeast. By 1887 Kingman had become the county seat; Mineral Park had restaurants, hotels and its own newspaper, its post office closed in 1912, and it is now a ghost town.²

The turn-of-the-century commercial era is documented in some detail — Joseph G. Doty of New York and Haas photographed at Turquoise Mountain on 1 June 1901, the Aztec Turquoise Company working the same date, men working under Haas’s direction, the Southwest Turquoise Company incorporated in 1903 with Charles Sherman engaged to manage the mines.² In November 1902, McNulty wrote to Parker that he had heard the Aztec Company was making large shipments from Kingman.² That is a second-hand report in private correspondence, and we give it as one.

Then the bust: Chambless records that in the Mineral Park area the companies stopped work and the turquoise market went dormant for a number of years.² That is the 1900s–1910s collapse, not a statement about the mine today.

Two figures we are not printing. Our scan of Chambless renders the development-spending and capitalisation numbers with letter o’s standing in for zeros. We can see roughly what they say and we are not confident enough in the digits to publish them, so they are omitted rather than approximated.

How it became famous, and how it got treated

The modern reputation is a marketing story with a name attached. The area “became world famous for turquoise when Leonard W. Hardy marketed it during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.” The Duval Corporation’s open-pit operations originally leased the turquoise rights to Hardy, and since then the Colbaugh family has controlled those claim rights for several generations.¹

Hardy matters for a second reason, and it is one a buyer should know. He was a shovel operator at the Castle Dome open-pit copper mine in 1949, went on to lease both the Kingman mine at Mineral Park and the Sleeping Beauty, and in the 1950s and 1960s “developed the beginning treatment processes, which became known as ‘stabilized’ turquoise, for the Kingman turquoise mine and others.”¹ The first recorded sighting of treated Kingman is 1961, by the cutter Clive Edgar of Manassa, Colorado, at Charles Gregory’s cutting shop in Albuquerque.¹

Schiffer, independently, describes the Kingman mine as having produced “light to dark colored turquoise and a great deal that is treated.”³ Stabilised Kingman is not a modern scandal; it is most of what the mine has sold for sixty years, and the honest question is whether a seller tells you.

What to match on

Blue of the “most common look,” usually over a predominantly white matrix — Lowry writes that Kingman and Sleeping Beauty “mostly have a natural white matrix.”¹

Keep Lowry’s “mostly.” Chambless publishes a photograph captioned Kingman black web turquoise (cobweb) from a private collection.² A black-web Kingman exists. “Kingman equals white matrix” is a rule of thumb that will make you reject real stones.

The fraud, stated plainly

This is the part of the Kingman story a seller has the least incentive to tell you, so we will. Lowry: “Mexican turquoise has been misrepresented and sold as Kingman turquoise since before the 1970s.”¹ He adds that Mexican mines can produce turquoise “almost a perfect match to the more famous Kingman, Sleeping Beauty, and Morenci mines,” and that China’s Ma’anshan produces “blue turquoise similar to the American mines at Kingman and Morenci.”¹

Lowry’s own remedy is documentary, not visual: a buyer who wants a Classic Mine stone “needs to get a written guarantee of the mine source.”¹ That lines up exactly with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board’s advice to get the artist’s name and Tribal affiliation, the mine of origin, whether the stone is natural, stabilized or treated, the place of purchase, the price, the date, and the seller’s business address — in writing.⁴

Current status

Field Notes by Mateo James

Kingman is the name most likely to be on a tag that is wrong, and not usually because anyone set out to lie. It is the default American blue, it has been mined and marketed at volume for seventy years, and material that looks like it comes from at least two other countries. That is why we frame our own sourcing the way we do: most of our turquoise comes from American mines such as Kingman or Royston, or from Campitos in Mexico. “Most” and “such as” are doing real work in that sentence — the list is not exhaustive, and we would rather say so than publish a tidier claim we cannot stand behind.

Sources

1. Lowry, Joe Dan, and Joe P. Lowry. Turquoise: The World Story of a Fascinating Gemstone. Gibbs Smith, 2010. Cited without page numbers: the printed folios in our scan of this title are not legible enough to pin a page honestly, so this reference is given at the book level only.
2. Chambless, Philip, and Mike Ryan II. Turquoise in America, Part One: The Great American Turquoise Rush 1890–1910. Dallas Press LLC, 2011. Cited at the book level. Scan condition: this volume is a multi-column scan whose columns interleave, so passages from it are paraphrased rather than quoted verbatim unless stated otherwise.
3. Schiffer, Nancy. Turquoise Jewelry. Schiffer Publishing. Cited at the book level.
4. U.S. Department of the Interior, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, consumer brochure on the Indian Arts and Crafts Act and turquoise (GPO document gpo58769). Independence note: this brochure states that the Board “collaborated with Mr. Joe Dan Lowry, of the Turquoise Museum” to produce its turquoise information. Joe Dan Lowry is the lead author of the Lowry volume above, so where the two agree that is one voice speaking twice and not independent corroboration.