Royal Blue Turquoise: Field Guide to Nevada's 1,200-Pound-a-Month Mine

Royal Blue Turquoise: Field Guide to Nevada's Most Contested Name

Start with the thing most listings get wrong: "Royal Blue" is first of all a colour, and only secondly a mine. Oscar Branson, writing about the ideal colour of turquoise, records that the authorities agree the finest colour is called "Royal Blue" — and adds, in parentheses, that this is not especially a reference to the Royal Blue Mine.¹ He is quoting the trader Lee Hand, who held that wherever it is found, from Nevada to the Sinai, royal blue turquoise is essentially identical and there is none finer.¹

So a stone described as "royal blue" may be a colour grade, a mine attribution, or a seller blurring the two. That ambiguity is the single most useful thing to carry into a purchase.

Field Notes by Mateo James

The mine itself is real and well documented. It sits in the Royston district of Nevada, and Branson identifies it as the district's main producer.¹ Schiffer places it the same way: the Royston area's Royal Blue mine, discovered in 1902, producing dark green and blue stones with brown matrix.²

Close-up of a large evenly colored blue-green turquoise cabochon set in silver with stamped leaf-shaped silverwork at the edge, the stone showing no visible matrix — An even, matrix-free blue-green stone. "Royal Blue" in Branson's sense describes colour of this order — intensity and evenness — independent of which mine produced it.¹ **A general reference stone, not attributed to the Royal Blue mine.**

The date is genuinely contested — and we are not going to resolve it for you

Two respectable sources give two different origin dates, and they cannot both be precisely right.

1902. Schiffer states the Royston area's Royal Blue mine was discovered in 1902.² Branson likewise treats it as one of the older tunnel mines of that era.¹
Late March 1903. Chambless and Ryan are more specific than either: "In late March 1903, [two prospectors] of Tonopah, Nevada located the Royal Blue about eight miles north of Crow Springs on the western slopes of what they referred to as Quartzite Mountain."³ One of the two locators is named U.G. Workman; the other surname is damaged in our scan and we will not guess it.

Chambless and Ryan give a month, a distance, a direction and named locators — the texture of a primary record such as a claim filing. That does not automatically overrule the other sources. The two accounts may not even conflict: district activity in 1902 and this particular claim located in 1903 would reconcile them. We present both, attributed, rather than quietly picking the tidier one.

"Tiffany" and the economics of a good name

The naming problem around this mine is not new, and it was not accidental. Chambless and Ryan quote C.T. Johnson, who later worked the Royal Blue and was closely associated with Lee Hand from the 1920s on, from a 1976 interview. Johnson's verdict, on the habit of attaching a prestigious name to turquoise from anywhere: "Tiffany was the most abused name for turquoise mines in the west."⁴

The incentive he is describing — maximizing a brand name for marketing purposes — is exactly the incentive operating on the phrase "Royal Blue" today. A century apart, same mechanism.

A grid of twelve turquoise close-ups: a top row of green stones veined with brown and black, a middle row of bright blue stones with dark and metallic-flecked matrix, and a bottom row of pale blue stones with almost no matrix — The colour and matrix range turquoise actually occupies. Schiffer describes this mine's output as dark green and blue with brown matrix — a description that lands in the upper rows here rather than the clean blues below.² General reference stones, no mine attribution.

One more name collision

"Royal Blue" has also served as a former name of the Number Eight mine, according to Lowry and Lowry.⁵ So a historical reference to "Royal Blue" material is not guaranteed to point at the Royston-district mine described on this page. When a name is doing three jobs — a colour grade, a Nevada mine, and a disused name for a different Nevada mine — the name alone cannot carry an attribution.

A horizontal strip of six turquoise close-ups progressing from an almost clean pale stone through increasingly dense brown webbing to a dark, tightly packed nodular cluster — Matrix density varies continuously, which is part of why colour-and-pattern descriptions travel so easily from one mine's name to another's stone. General reference stones.

Collector's Handbook

Ask which sense is meant. "Royal blue" as a colour grade is a legitimate descriptive use documented in the literature.¹ "Royal Blue" as a mine attribution is a claim about origin. A seller should be able to say which one they are making.

Treat the origin date as contested. 1902 per Schiffer and the older-tunnel-mine framing in Branson;²¹ late March 1903 per Chambless and Ryan, who name locators and a location.³ A listing that states either date as settled fact is going further than the sources.

Remember the Number Eight collision. "Royal Blue" was also a former name for the Number Eight mine.⁵

Prestige names attract abuse — this is documented, not cynical. A man who actually worked this mine said as much about "Tiffany" in 1976.⁴

We strive for accuracy. This field guide entry is compiled from the published references cited below and is continuously updated with new information from the artists, their families, and the community. Hold a claim record or documentation that settles the 1902/1903 question? Get in touch — corrections are welcomed and credited.

Sources

Branson, Oscar T. Turquoise: The Gem of the Centuries. Treasure Chest Publications, Santa Fe, 1975. The colour-of-turquoise discussion, in which the ideal colour is called "Royal Blue" with the explicit parenthetical that this is not especially a reference to the Royal Blue Mine, quoting Lee Hand; and the Royston district entry identifying the Royal Blue as the district's main producer and one of the older tunnel mines. Cited without page numbers: the left margin is clipped on the colour-discussion block in our scan and the printed folios for these passages are not legible, so the text is paraphrased rather than quoted verbatim and no page is asserted.
Schiffer, Nancy N. Turquoise Jewelry, revised 4th edition, 2008. Printed pp. 11–12 (the Royston area's Royal Blue mine, discovered 1902; dark green and blue stones with brown matrix). This passage falls between the printed folios 11 and 12 in our scan, so it is cited as a span rather than pinned to one page.
Chambless, Philip, and Mike Ryan II. Turquoise in America, Part One: The Great American Turquoise Rush 1890–1910. Callais Press. Printed p. 157 (the late-March 1903 location of the Royal Blue about eight miles north of Crow Springs, western slopes of Quartzite Mountain; U.G. Workman of Tonopah among the locators).
Chambless, Philip, and Mike Ryan II. Turquoise in America, Part One. Printed p. 161 (C.T. Johnson, interviewed 1976, who later worked the Royal Blue and was associated with Lee Hand from the 1920s: "Tiffany was the most abused name for turquoise mines in the west").
Lowry, Joe Dan, and Joe P. Lowry. Turquoise: The World Story of a Fascinating Gemstone. Gibbs Smith, 2010. Cited without a page: 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 ("Royal Blue" as a former name of the Number Eight mine).