Royston Turquoise: Field Guide to a District, Not a Mine

Royston is the one name in this guide that does not belong to a mine. Lowry’s own heading for it is “Royston District,” and the entry underneath describes several separate deposits worked and sold under a handful of different names.¹ Branson, independently, records “many mines in the Royston district producing turquoise.”³ So a tag that says Royston is naming you an area, not a hole in the ground — and that is worth knowing before you pay for provenance.

Where it comes from, and why one name covers several deposits

The district is in Esmeralda County, Nevada, and Lowry records that the first recorded mining occurred in 1902, with multiple deposits and claims discovered in the area since.¹ Schiffer corroborates the date from the other direction, recording that the Royston area’s Royal Blue mine “was discovered in 1902.”²

Lowry lists the names those deposits have been marketed under — Oscar Wehrend, Royal Blue, Bunker Hill and Royston — and records that “the Royal Blue site is the largest.”¹ Branson says the same thing in different words: “The Royal Blue Mine is the main producer.”³

Why one name won is stated plainly by Lowry: because most of the turquoise from these multiple sites has “a similar look and color,” material from the area is “generally marketed using the name Royston.”¹ That is the whole mechanism, and it is not a marketing trick — it is what happens when neighbouring deposits produce stone you cannot tell apart.

Chambless arrives at the same district framing from provenance research rather than mining history, reporting that artifacts have been linked to turquoise mined from the Royston District in Nevada — while stating in the same breath that research is in its early stages.⁴ We carry that hedge along with the claim, because he did.

The colour — and the two different scales our sources speak at

This is the part that gets flattened elsewhere, so here are the two statements separately, each at the scale its own source used.

At district scale. Branson records the mines of the Royston district producing turquoise that runs from “deep green to deepest blue.”³ That is a district-wide range, and it is the only district-wide colour statement in our corpus.

At mine scale. Schiffer describes one specific deposit: the Royston area’s Royal Blue mine “has given up stones of dark green and blue color with brown matrix.”² That sentence is about the Royal Blue mine. It is not about the district.

The two can be connected, but only through steps that are themselves sourced, so here they are. Royal Blue is the largest site in the district¹ and its main producer³; the district’s deposits share a similar look and colour, which is the stated reason they are all sold as Royston.¹ Follow that chain and Schiffer’s brown matrix can reasonably speak for much of what reaches you as Royston. Skip it and you have quietly turned a one-mine sentence into a district fact.

Branson also plates “unmounted Royston stones, illustrating the great variety of color and matrix pattern found in this locality.”³ That is a plate caption rather than body prose, so we treat it as reinforcement and never as the load-bearing sentence.

Two things our books do not say. No source in our corpus attributes spider-web matrix to Royston, and none gives it a hardness grade. If you meet either stated as fact, it is not coming from these four books.

The fraud — why this page does not say “golden brown matrix”

Look up Royston anywhere else and you will meet the phrase golden brown matrix almost immediately. Before deciding what to do about that, we went looking for it in our own books.

It is there — twice, and neither time is it Royston. Branson uses “a golden brown matrix” to describe Manassa green from the King Mine in Colorado, and separately records Lone Mountain turquoise being graded into “golden matrix; black matrix, and spider web.”³ The word “golden” appears nowhere in our sources in connection with Royston. Brown matrix does — through Schiffer, and scoped to the Royal Blue mine.²

What we are not saying. We are not telling you the trade is wrong about Royston. Absence from our corpus is not absence from the mineral, and we have no basis for the stronger claim. What we can give you is exactly what our sources support and exactly where they stop, which is the boundary this entire page is built on.

Who worked it, and what the record will not carry

Lowry names Julius Tannenbaum as “one of the more famous names to have mined this area.”¹

He is also unusually blunt about the district’s reputation. Royston “has been said to produce millions of dollars worth of turquoise, yet there are no fences, castles, mansions, or paper trails to confirm” such claims of prosperity.¹ We would rather quote that than the legend.

On ownership, Lowry records three recent owners of the area’s deposits: John Martin, the Otteson family, and Philip Chambless.¹ Disclosure: that third name is the co-author of another book on this page’s source list.⁴ We would rather flag that than quietly cite a source with an interest in the subject.

This section is short, and short is the honest length. One name is what the record in front of us will carry.

The Royal Blue name collision

There is an unresolved conflict inside our own sources here, and smoothing it over would be the easy thing to do.

Schiffer’s alias table lists “Royston (also called Royal Blue),” and lists “No. 8” as a separate entry — so Schiffer does not treat the two as the same thing.² Lowry, meanwhile, records Number Eight’s claims in Eureka County as being known as “Royal Blue, Royal Blue No. 1, and Blue Star.”¹ Both statements sit in books we rely on, and they describe deposits several counties apart.

We are not going to pick a winner on your behalf. The practical version is simple: “Royal Blue” on its own is ambiguous in the literature, so ask which deposit and which county — and expect that the answer will often not be available.

Current status

Field Notes by Mateo James

The thing worth carrying out of this page is that “Royston” answers a smaller question than it looks like it answers. It tells you an area in Esmeralda County. It does not tell you which deposit — and our own sources say the deposits look alike, which is precisely why they all ended up sharing one name on the tag.

That is also 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.

If you are offered Royston with a confident single-mine provenance and a colour description our books do not contain, it is worth asking that seller what they are citing.

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. Schiffer, Nancy. Turquoise Jewelry. Schiffer Publishing. Cited at the book level.
3. Branson, Oscar T. Turquoise: The Gem of the Centuries. Cited at the book level from part two of our scan. Scan condition: this volume carries heavy OCR damage. In the sentence cited here for the Royston district’s colour range, one word is destroyed in our scan, so only the unambiguous phrase “deep green to deepest blue” is quoted and the surrounding sentence is paraphrased rather than reproduced.
4. 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.