Sleeping Beauty Turquoise: Field Guide to the Matrix-Free Sky Blue

This is a deliberately short page, and the shortness is the point.

Sleeping Beauty is probably the most commercially important turquoise in this guide and it is the thinnest in our sources — Lowry’s entry runs to about four sentences. There is no discovery date, no discoverer, no ownership history and no closure information anywhere in the books we hold. We could pad this page. Padding it is exactly where a page like this gets caught, so instead we have written down what is actually documented and marked the rest as missing.

Where it comes from, and where the name comes from

The open pit is in the Globe/Miami District of Gila County, Arizona¹ — a copper-mining area, where the turquoise is a by-product. Lowry describes open-pit copper operations of this kind as having “produced thousands of pounds of turquoise as a by-product of copper mining.”¹

The name is topographic, not romantic: “from a distance, the mountain range where this copper mining area is located resembles a sleeping woman.”¹

What to match on — the absence is the identifier

Lowry describes the colour as running “anywhere from a chalky white to a sky blue with a clarity that can rival similar turquoise that is famous from the countries of Iran and Chile,”¹ over what is mostly a natural white matrix.¹

In practice that means uniform sky-blue with little or no visible matrix. On most mines you identify the stone by reading its matrix. Here you identify it by the matrix not being there — which is also precisely why it is straightforward to imitate with treated or foreign material.

Why it is everywhere

Volume. Lowry records that Sleeping Beauty and Kingman production “was so great that the sheer volume was able to supply large quantities around the world, thereby becoming famous sources of turquoise.”¹ The Indian Arts and Crafts Board brochure names Sleeping Beauty and Kingman as “the most commonly marketed American turquoise”² — though see the independence note on that source, because it is not a second voice.

It has become famous “especially in European and Middle Eastern markets as well as with the Native American Zuni Pueblo artists in New Mexico.”¹ The stone also travels to be cut: Lowry captions a photograph of Iranian hand-cut Sleeping Beauty beads.¹

The one ownership-adjacent fact our corpus carries: Leonard W. Hardy leased the Sleeping Beauty, along with the Kingman mine.¹ No dates are given for the Sleeping Beauty lease.

The fraud, and the treatment question

Lowry: “tons of Mexican and Chinese turquoise have been misrepresented and sold as Morenci, Sleeping Beauty, Lander Blue, Lone Mountain, as well as many other mines.”¹

There is a second axis here that matters more for this mine than for most, because the clean look is reproducible: “a natural high-grade Sleeping Beauty turquoise stone is always worth more than an Enhanced Sleeping Beauty stone that was processed to look similar to it in color and clarity.”¹ “Enhanced,” in the Indian Arts and Crafts Board’s vocabulary, means a patented process used to darken the colour of low or medium grade turquoise to imitate a higher grade.² Ask which one you are buying, and get the answer in writing.²

Current status

Our sources do not say, so we do not either.

The most recent reference work we hold is Lowry, published in 2010. It describes the Sleeping Beauty open pit in Gila County as a working copper operation producing turquoise as a by-product, and records no closure. We have not found a citable source in our corpus for the mine’s current status, so we do not state one.

We are aware of what is widely repeated in the trade about Sleeping Beauty’s turquoise production ending. It is not in our books. Until we can cite it, it does not go on this page — and if you see it stated as fact elsewhere, it is worth asking that seller what they are citing.

As Lowry puts it, “which mines are active can change year to year depending on whether someone invests the money to reopen an old mine or discovers a new one.”¹

Field Notes by Mateo James

A short honest page beats a long confident one, and this is the page where that trade-off is most obvious. Everything a content farm would put here — the discovery story, the closure year, the ownership chain — we simply do not have a source for. Publishing it anyway would make this page read better and be worth less. If you are buying Sleeping Beauty, the questions that actually protect you are whether the stone is natural or treated and whether the seller will put the mine of origin in writing.

How this page is sourced. Every factual claim above is drawn from the printed reference works listed below and is footnoted to the book it came from. Where our sources disagree we say so and do not pick a winner; where they are silent we say that too, rather than filling the gap. Nothing on this page comes from general web knowledge.

Sources

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.
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.