Mineral specimen mortality

The fixation with ore is the demon enemy of mineral specimens. Gilbert Gauthier and Bill Pinch have both often told the sad story of the fabulous collection of uranium minerals accumulated by the Union Miniere mining company in Zaire. A visiting factotem from the front office in Belgium was brought to the large collection room and shown the beautiful things that had been saved.

"These are the treasures of the Shinkolobwe," said the proud mine manager, in reference to the company's most prolific mine.

The visiting executive was not impressed. In his view the company's shareholders were being shortchanged by not benefitting from the metal content in the specimens. He waved his arm over the collection as expansively as the proud mine manager had done: "Take it all to the crusher," he ordered. And that was the end of the Union Miniere collection.

Mine managers usually care only about ore and are often hostile to the concept of preserving mineral specimens. They hate losing time while people scrounge around the working face looking for little collectibles. Things were no different in the Maine pegmatite quarries during the 1920's. At the Maine feldspar quarry on Mount Apatite they worked to recover industrial-grade feldspar, and had only disdain for the occasional lithium mineralization. The feldspar around the little gem pockets was always of inferior grade.

In 1927 several little pockets had been encountered, and apparently the miners had stopped to collect some specimens each time. This annoyed the managers, who ordered them to "blow" (destroy) the next pocket so as to preclude any time-wasting collecting. The pockets had thus far yielded only quartz crystals; but, as luck would have it, the next one was a tourmaline pocket of huge proportions.

The first crystals seen on the working face were thumb-size gem-grade tourmalines embedded in soft cookeite. It was the largest gem pocket ever found on Mount Apatite, and perhaps in all of Maine, but it was not to be saved. It required more than a week of mining to work all the way through the huge pocket area. Under strict orders, the miners blasted away, and every blast rained tourmaline fragments across the quarry. For months afterwards, gemmy crystal sections were picked up all around the quarry, and in later years a systematic search of the dirt and dumps turned up a huge quantity of broken tourmaline fragments, in colors from a distinctive pale blue-green to "watermelon" pink and green.

People who are mining through hard rock specifically to find specimens often have to use explosives, too, and those explosives are generally emplaced in drilled holes. But how close is the drill hole to a good crystal pocket? Not having X-ray eyes, the driller never knows. Odds are, therefore, that good specimens are sometimes going to get blown up, even when mining with the best of intentions.

That happened to George Godas at the Pure Potential mine in La Paz County, Arizona. The Pure Potential, which George held under claim, was best known for superbly bright and lustrous red vanadinite crystals, cavernous but with a high degree of transparency. George had recently dug out the best vanadinite ever found there, and had also found some remarkable little wulfenite crystals.