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Bisbee Blue or Bisbee turquoise refers to the turquoise that comes from copper mines located in the vicinity of Bisbee, Arizona. Bisbee turquoise can be found in many different shades of color and quality, from soft, low quality pale blue, to the quality hard brilliant blue turquoise and almost every shade of blue in between. The highest grade of Bisbee Blue turquoise is almost lapis lazuli blue and has a brownish-red spiderweb matrix. Green turquoise is also found in Bisbee.
Though small amounts of turquoise were found in the Campbell shaft mine, as well as in stream beds in the Mule Mountains, the vast majority of Bisbee turquoise surfaced when the Phelps Dodge Corporation started open pit mining operations at the location now known as the Lavender Pit, especially the eastern side of the pit. Large amounts of a conglomerate rock bed needed to be removed before the copper ore located more deeply could be reached. This sedimentary conglomerate "waste" rock was the host for most of the turquoise, in both vein and nugget form.
During the time that the largest quantities of turquoise were being extracted from the mine, the company made no organized effort to recover it. It simply got loaded into large dump trucks and hauled off to the "dumps". During this time (primarily from the late 1950s to the late 1960s), some of the recovered turquoise was obtained by company employees taking it home in their lunch boxes, etc. Though this activity was prohibited, the prohibition was rarely enforced. For several years (mostly the early to late 1970s), these individuals, locally known as "dumpers", were the only source for this fine turquoise aside from those who were granted exclusive access to collect turquoise existing in the mine dumps during a set day annually for a marginal fee.
During this time, Phelps Dodge leased out the dumps to Bob Matthews. Matthews and associates were the only legal miners of the Bisbee turquoise and other copper minerals in history besides the annual dig pass holders. Matthews sold large lots to the famous artists the Zacharys from Albuquerque, New Mexico, the owners of the Turquoise Museum in Albuquerque, John Hartman in Durango, Colorado, and many other famous artists and traders. Some of Matthews' turquoise was sent to Durango to be made into jewelry by his brother-in-law Cecil Mickelson's jewelry company. The company made Bisbee Blue and Villa Grove inlay turquoise jewelry up until the 1980s. In the early 2000s the Durango Silver Company, bought what was thought to be left of the Bob Matthews/Cecil Mickelson Collection of Bisbee turquoise. This collection amounted to approximately 500 lb (230 kg) of rough Bisbee turquoise. Still, numerous reputable artists and suppliers continue to sell what remains of the exquisite and highly collectible turquoise from Bisbee.
Turquoise is an opaque, blue-to-green mineral that is a hydrated phosphate of copper and aluminium, with the chemical formula CuAl6(PO4)4(OH)8·4H2O. It is rare and valuable in finer grades and has been prized as a gemstone and ornamental stone for thousands of years owing to its unique hue. Like most other opaque gems, turquoise has been devalued by the introduction of treatments, imitations and synthetics into the market. The robin’s egg blue or sky blue color of the Persian turquoise mined near the modern city of Neyshabur in Iran has been used as a guiding reference for evaluating turquoise quality.
Bisbee is a city in and the county seat of Cochise County in southeastern Arizona, United States. It is 92 miles (148 km) southeast of Tucson and 11 miles (18 km) north of the Mexican border. According to the 2020 census, the population of the town was 4,923, down from 5,575 in the 2010 census.
The Mule Mountains are a north/south running mountain range located in the south-central area of Cochise County, Arizona. The highest peak, Mount Ballard, rises to 7,500 ft (2,300 m). Prior to mining operations commencing there, the mountains were heavily forested with large Rocky Mountain Douglas-fir and other conifers, but these were all cut down for housing needs and to feed the ore smelting furnaces in Douglas, Arizona, approximately 20 miles due east. Now, the primary vegetation of the Mules consists of manzanita brush, juniper, lowland oaks and pines, and various grasses. To the east of the mountain range lies Sulphur Springs Valley, and the San Pedro River and Valley to the west.
The Lavender Pit is a former open pit copper mine near Bisbee in Cochise County, Arizona, United States. It is located near the famous Copper Queen Mine. The Lavender Pit was named in honor of Harrison M. Lavender (1890–1952), who as Vice-President and General Manager of Phelps Dodge Corporation, conceived and carried out this plan for making the previously unprofitable low-grade copper bearing rock of the area into commercial copper ore.
Phelps Dodge Corporation was an American mining company founded in 1834 as an import-export firm by Anson Greene Phelps and his two sons-in-law William Earle Dodge, Sr. and Daniel James. The latter two ran Phelps, James & Co., the part of the organization based in Liverpool, England. The import-export firm at first exported United States cotton from the Deep South to England, and imported various metals to the US needed for industrialization. With the expansion of the western frontier in North America, the corporation acquired mines and mining companies, including the Copper Queen Mine in Arizona and the Dawson, New Mexico coal mines. It operated its own mines and acquired railroads to carry its products. By the late 19th century, it was known as a mining company.
Falconbridge Limited was a Toronto, Ontario-based natural resources company with operations in 18 countries, involved in the exploration, mining, processing, and marketing of metal and mineral products, including nickel, copper, cobalt, and platinum. It was listed on the TSX and NYSE (FAL), and had revenue of US$6.9 billion in 2005. In August 2006, it was absorbed by Swiss-based mining company Xstrata, which had formerly been a major shareholder.
Chrysocolla is a hydrated copper phyllosilicate mineral and mineraloid with formula Cu
2–xAl
x{H
2–xSi
2O
5)(OH)
4•nH
2O (x<1) or (Cu,Al)
2H
2Si
2O
5(OH)
4•nH
2O).
James Walter Douglas was a Canadian born mining engineer and businessman who introduced a number of metallurgical innovations in copper mining and amassed a fortune through the copper mining industry of Arizona and Sonora.
The Bisbee Deportation was the illegal kidnapping and deportation of about 1,300 striking mine workers, their supporters, and citizen bystanders by 2,000 members of a deputized posse, who arrested them beginning on July 12, 1917, in Bisbee, Arizona. The action was orchestrated by Phelps Dodge, the major mining company in the area, which provided lists of workers and others who were to be arrested to the Cochise County sheriff, Harry C. Wheeler. Those arrested were taken to a local baseball park before being loaded onto cattle cars and deported 200 miles (320 km) to Tres Hermanas in New Mexico. The 16-hour journey was through desert without food and with little water. Once unloaded, the deportees, most without money or transportation, were warned against returning to Bisbee. The US government soon brought in members of the US Army to assist with relocating the deportees to Columbus, New Mexico.
Louis S. Cates was an American mining engineer and businessman. He was president of Phelps Dodge from 1930 to 1947.
Louis Davidson Ricketts was an American economic geologist, metallurgist, mining engineer and banker who pioneered development of copper mines in the U.S. state of Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora.
Daniel Willis James was the son of an American merchant who with his cousin, William Earl Dodge Jr., transformed Phelps, Dodge & Co. from a predominantly mercantile business into one of the largest copper producers in the world.
Copper mining in Michigan became an important industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its rise marked the start of copper mining as a major industry in the United States.
Copper mining in Arizona, a state of the United States, has been a major industry since the 19th century. In 2007 Arizona was the leading copper-producing state in the US, producing 750 thousand metric tons of copper, valued at $5.54 billion. Arizona's copper production was 60% of the total for the United States. Copper mining also produces gold and silver as byproducts. Byproduct molybdenum from copper mining makes Arizona the nation's second-largest producer of that metal. Although copper mineralization was found by the earliest Spanish explorers of Arizona, the territory was remote, and copper could seldom be profitably mined and shipped. Early Spanish, Mexican, and American prospectors searched for gold and silver, and ignored copper. It was not until the completion of the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1876 that copper became broadly economic to mine and ship to market.
The Copper Queen Mine was a copper mine in Cochise County, Arizona, United States. Its development led to the growth of the surrounding town of Bisbee in the 1880s. Its orebody ran 23% copper, an extraordinarily high grade. It was acquired by Phelps Dodge in 1885.
The New Cornelia mine is a currently inactive open-pit copper mine in Pima County, Arizona, United States. It was the only productive mine in the Ajo mining district, and is located just outside the town of Ajo, which was built as a company town to serve the New Cornelia mines. The roughly circular pit is one and a half miles across at its widest point, and 1,100 feet deep at the center. Although not generally regarded as a 'dam', the New Cornelia Mine Tailings is often cited as the largest dam structure in the United States with a volume of 7.4 billion cubic feet.
The El Paso and Southwestern Railroad began in 1888 as the Arizona and South Eastern Railroad, a short line serving copper mines in southern Arizona. Over the next few decades, it grew into a 1200-mile system that stretched from Tucumcari, New Mexico southward to El Paso, Texas, and westward to Tucson, Arizona, with several branch lines, including one to Nacozari, Mexico. The railroad was bought by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1924 and fully merged into its parent company in 1955. The EP&SW was a major link in the transcontinental route of the Golden State Limited.
William Earl Dodge Jr. was an American businessman, activist, and philanthropist. For many years, he was one of two controlling partners in the Phelps Dodge Corporation, one of the largest copper mining corporations in the United States.
The Detroit Copper Mining Company was an American copper mining and smelting operation based in Morenci, Arizona. Incorporated in July 1872, it existed as an independent company until 1897, when a controlling interest in the company was purchased by the predecessor of the Phelps Dodge Corporation. It continued to exist as a subsidiary of Phelps Dodge & Co until 1917, when all Phelps Dodge operations in the area were consolidated into the new Phelps Dodge Corporation, Morenci Branch.