AMERICA'S GEMSTONE
Harriss, Joseph A.
In the Southwest, turquoise can make a man feel at home. By Joseph a. Harriss ForeiGn CorrespondenCe has its Charms, to be sure, but even non-combat reporting includes downsides peculiar...
...In the Southwest, turquoise can make a man feel at home...
...Turquoise is turquoise, say many, and a beautiful piece can be made with any of it...
...But that comprises not even one percent of the market...
...Well over 1,000 years As it happens, most of this turquoise came ago, Native Americans hewed out great nuggets of turquoise, cut them into manageable pieces, and sent them down commercial routes through Mexico in a sophisticated trading system, receiving corn and other merchandise in exchange...
...Loading trucks can loosen the stones on their bangles, so many driving the coast-to-coast I-40 stop at his shop for quick repairs...
...With many American mines largely depleted, he notes that much turquoise now on the market is—what else?—Chinese...
...Stooping to pick up a blue nugget for later use in his shop, Magnus commented on how heady and romantic it was for a jewelry designer to own such a property...
...The spiritual importance of the “sky stone” to Native Americans goes back millennia...
...j o s e P H a . H a R R I s s Born and raised on a reservation in Arizona, Tracey began making jewelry at age nine and selling it at flea markets for pocket money...
...For those who want traditional Navajo, Zuni, Hopi, and Pueblo designs there are plenty of Native American craftsmen turning out high-quality pieces in the Southwest...
...The retail value of the stones they mined was probably over a million dollars...
...In 1974 he was spotted by a Hollywood film producer on the campus of Brigham Young University, where he was planning to study engineering...
...They’re not really going to wear a bolo tie with turquoise to their office in Washington,” he says, “but it still means something special to them...
...I don’t want to produce anything that seems Native American,” he says, “because I’m not...
...Lawrence, who, enchanted by the landscape, ended his days in nearby Taos: “Something stood still in my soul...
...In 1988, Douglas Magnus, a Santa Fe jewelry designer originally from San Francisco, bought 50 acres in the Cerrillos area, including the mine sites...
...That’s all well and good, but what I really appreciate about Lowry is that we agree on the transcendental significance of this peculiar jewel...
...Savoring the panorama through crystal-clear air north from the Sangre de Cristo mountains south to the Sandias near Albuquerque, I had to agree with him, and with the English writer D.H...
...I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys...
...And it’s so beautiful...
...Driving into town I like to take a long, nostalgic look at Mount Taylor, an 11,000-foot bluish hulk 60 miles to the northwest, that the Navajo, for whom it was sacred, called Dzil Dotlzi, or Turquoise Moun tain...
...The rest is on show in his Turquoise Museum across from Old Town, with displays of refined and raw turquoise from more than 60 mines and demonstrations in a lapidary shop...
...Turquoise in its many hues and variations reflects our country’s endless individuality, changeability, and diversity...
...Then there is the wealthy American with a house in Acapulco who is in the process of lining his swimming pool with real turquoise tiles supplied from New Mexico...
...So when I get back on the right side of the Atlantic—or left if you’re looking at a map—I make a point of visiting the Southwest where I grew up...
...It notably covered the walls of one of M a R c H 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 3 1 Douglas Magnus a M e R I c a ’ s G e M s T o n e s the splendors of Islamic art, the lavish Samarkand mausoleum of the 14th-century Mongol conqueror Tamerlane...
...You look like an Indian,” said the astute producer, to which Tracey replied the equivalent of “Well, duh...
...It was my turquoise,” he cries...
...I love the colors of turquoise,” he says...
...The stone’s mystical pull as well as its natural beauty helps explain why Egyptian rulers of the First Dynasty 5,500 years ago had it mined by slaves in the Sinai...
...One day I was out in Shiprock, and saw a beautiful turquoise sky over some red rock formations with dark clouds above...
...By Joseph a. Harriss ForeiGn CorrespondenCe has its Charms, to be sure, but even non-combat reporting includes downsides peculiar to the profession...
...pearls with the Persian Gulf or South Pacific, rubies with Burma...
...Obviously a talented graphic artist—with a few deft strokes he drew a perspective map of the Champs-Elysées to show me his favorite café in Paris, which he loves to visit—Tracey gets his inspiration everywhere...
...For one thing, it can entail interviewing furriners speaking broken English, especially in the British Isles (and in Belgium, broken French...
...That shows the emotional dimension of the stone...
...But Ray Tracey, a Navajo living in Albuquerque, is unusual in doing tur quoise jewelry based on a traditional look but with a sophisticated contemporary twist...
...This is perfectly legitimate—unlike the frequent practice of passing off pure blue plastic as the real thing—as long as the seller doesn’t pretend it is natural...
...3 0 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a R c H 2 0 0 8 Joe Dan Lowry Joe Dan Lowry j o s e P H a . H a R R I s s I usually drop in on Joe Dan Lowry, a lanky New Mexican with an easy smile and an encyclopedic knowledge of turquoise that he shares with the rest of us in his handsome book, Turquoise Unearthed: An Illustrated Guide...
...What I try to do is to produce jewelry that is worthy of its heritage...
...Very hard natural turquoise that won’t change color and resists scratches is certainly the highest quality stone and the most expensive,” says Magnus...
...Persian turquoise produced at the 10th-century mines at Nishapur, birthplace of Omar Khayyam, was traded far and wide...
...But I’m not a purist about it and I’m market-aware enough to know what the public wants today...
...Besides authenticity, the other question is where the turquoise comes from...
...And if the price seems too good to be true, it probably is...
...For another, you tend to lose touch with the things that mean home...
...Thinking that a pale-skinned, bearded man newly arrived from the east might be the long-awaited reincarnation of the plumed serpent deity Quetzalcoatl, Emperor Montezuma II sent some of this treasure to greet Hernán Cortés in the spring of 1519...
...The question is whether that matters...
...Archaeologists estimate that, without the aid of modern mining machinery, Indian laborers processed tens of thousands of tons of stone at the biggest mining site on the American continent...
...Flying into Albuquerque gives me the pleasure of arriving at my favorite airport in all the world: human scale, rational, relaxed, and attractively decorated in terra cotta and turquoise tones...
...For ten years he got typecast Indian roles in films like How the West Was Won, Centennial, and others...
...American or The fact is that most raw turquoise is a porous, crumbly chalk too soft to use for jewelry...
...Popular wisdom in many societies has held that it changed color to indicate the owner’s health: this was reflected by the 17th-century English poet John Donne, who wrote of “a compassionate turquoise that doth tell,/By looking pale, the wearer is not well...
...When people ask Magnus how to tell whether a stone is real, he replies, “How can you tell your diamonds are real...
...It’s really a metaphor for our culture...
...And when I spot a Zuni bracelet with cabochon turquoises, or a Navajo concha belt with blue gems in its silver ovals, or a piece of bright Bisbee turquoise winking in a bolo tie, I start feeling home again...
...With today’s techniques, all gemalways best to buy from a reputable dealer and ask for a certificate of authenticity...
...One of history’s first hard-rock mining operations, it was under the high patronage of the goddess Hathor, Mistress of Turquoise...
...Many today feel its emotional appeal as well...
...The solution is to stabilize newly mined stone with clear acrylic resin that soaks into it and makes it workable...
...They call it stabilized, dyed, and other fancy names, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s just doped turquoise and I don’t like it,” Manny Goodman, an old-time turquoise trader from Albuquerque and something of an institution around The Plaza in Old Town, told me before his death in his nineties a few years ago...
...Arnoldus Saxo, a medieval philosopher, held that it both preserved eyesight and induced pleasant hilarity...
...that this wondrous stone not only helped The protective properties of turquoise were appreciated in ancient Persia, where they believed that the hand that wore turquoise would never see poverty...
...Its protective properties were appreciated in ancient Persia, source of most turquoise for centuries— because it came through Turkey to Europe, it got its Western name from the French for Turkish—where it was believed that the hand that wore turquoise would never see poverty...
...Still, it’s anathema to purists...
...Nobody asks where diamonds come from when they’re shopping, but they always want to know where turquoise comes from,” says Lowry...
...Lowry observes that most of his customers want turquoise because it somehow speaks to them...
...Among the priceless Aztec pieces that Cortés duly shipped back to Spain were a spectacular shield and a mask of Quetzalcoatl, both covered in intricate turquoise mosaic and on view today in the British Museum...
...You’d be surprised how proud many of those husky truck drivers with big 16-wheel rigs are of their turquoise rings and bracelets,” Alvin Yellowhorse, a nimble-fingered Navajo craftsman with a shop near Gallup, once told me...
...The Arabian scholar Muhammed Ibn Mansur wrote around 1300 A.D...
...He was echoing many who want only the real thing...
...Combining it with materials like quartz, obsidian, garnet, gold, and mother-of-pearl, Aztec lapidaries fashioned vivid mosaics for ceremonial shields, masks, bracelets, and other ornaments for priestly use in religious rituals—including the mosaic- covered handles of knives used to cut the pulsing hearts from sacrificial victims...
...My latest collection is called ‘Earth and Sky,’” he says...
...3 2 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R M a R c H 2 0 0 8 Joe Dan Lowry foreign...
...its wearer to victory over his enemies but also made him liked by all...
...Presto, earth and sky...
...But this felicitous mix of hydrated copper and aluminum phosphate from arid lands, where groundwater seeps into cracks in rocks and deposits harden over several million years, reached a peak of importance in ancient Mexico...
...M a R c H 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 3 3...
...You’re looking at more than just another gemstone,” Lowry says...
...Not only is turquoise one of the finest gemstones in the world,” he declares, “but it’s in many ways the perfect emblem of America...
...In his Santa Fe workshop Magnus and his three craftsmen do sleek, high-fashion belt buckles, bracelets, necklaces, and the like for connoisseurs willing to pay from $400 to $10,000 for a piece, sometimes working with a customer on a one-of-a-kind design...
...His great grandfather mined turquoise in the 19th century and his grandfather amassed the world’s largest collection of the stuff, most of which Lowry keeps, carefully catalogued, stashed in a vault in Albuquerque...
...And its quality is often good enough to pass muster...
...Lowry comes by his expertise naturally...
...Not to mention the occasional tear gas during Paris riots, or crash landing in the Sahara trying to cover a locust plague in Africa...
...His smooth, understated pieces based on things like stylized arrowheads and bear fetishes range in price from $50 for something simple up to thousands for inlay mixes of turquoise, jet, coral, and lapis...
...E ’ i , y l e w j r h t o y n a h i w s bly caught up in the industry- So with turquoise a Ray Tracy t i ev n i w e j i o u q r v tu eryone s e makin el G r y an s d i sellin a G - stones can be enhanced, t color-chang e ed, e and r fake t d s . wide discussion, if not controversy, over the many kinds of turquoise on today’s market...
...This area produced Persian-quality stones of good hardness,” he told me when we visited a mine together...
...But tur- We assoCiate diamonds with afriCa, quoise, though produced in a few other countries, has long been an integral part of our New World culture...
...originally from the Cerrillos mines just south of what is now Santa Fe...
...In fact, this legendary gem with an infinitely varied matrix and kaleidoscopic colors has a long and well-documented history of being special, even of forming a symbiotic relationship with the wearer...
...And we can guess its popularity in Elizabethan England by Shylock’s outburst in The Merchant of Venice when his scalawag daughter Jessica traded one of his rings for a monkey...
...There can be seen the so-called George Washington Stone, a flat, polished, 6,880-carat, sky-blue Kingman Mine nugget that, with some imagination, resembles the Father of His Country...
...Lesser mortals on more constricted budgets are no less attached to it...
...I use it in reverence for what it has meant to my people...
...Sensing that was a dead end, he returned to his first love of jewelry...
...Maybe so, but we traditionalists hold that if you want a piece of Americana, only homegrown stone from the Southwest will do, even if it’s not from one of the great classic mines like Bisbee, Lander Blue, Sleeping Beauty, or Cerrillos...
...After the prehistoric trading system collapsed, it had another boom of intense mining from 1889 to 1910, when it was owned by the American Turquoise Company of New York...
...Natural, treated, or completely artificial...
...joseph a. Harriss, when not visiting the Southwest, mans The American Spectator’s Paris bureau...
Vol. 41 • March 2008 • No. 2
