A Show of Gold: 50th Anniversary

Tucson Gem and Mineral Society Celebrates its 50th Show

TEXT BY LEO W. BANKS

OLDEN ANNIVERSARY

EVEN IF YOU'VE NEVER experienced gold fever, never considered yourself susceptible to this ancient curse, you'd best watch out. Gold speaks to everyone, knows every language. Its peculiar power can creep over you at any time.

Like this month, for example.

The Tucson Gem and Mineral Society will celebrate its 50th anniversary show in February, with gold as its theme. Dealers, collectors and museum curators will display a king's cache of the precious metal in every size and form imaginable-gold in the shape of seahorses and dragons. Gold that looks like seaweed. A gold boot. A gold flame. A spectacular gold horn, measuring 4.5 inches in length.

When workers completed the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory, Utah, in 1869, the final spikes they drove were pure gold. One of those 5-inch golden spikes will be on display in Tucson. Feeling the weakness yet? Just as alluring will be some of the stories surrounding these specimens.

Example: Back in 1887, miner Tom Groves found a 13.7-pound hunk of gold in Breckenridge, Colorado. He wrapped his precious find in a blanket and went from saloon to saloon, tossing back whiskeys and showing it off.

It came to be called "Tom's baby." The find, now in two pieces, is Colorado's largest surviving gold specimen.

Although tiny by comparison, also expect to see the original nugget that James Marshall discovered while building John Sutter's mill on the American River in 1848, touching off the California gold rush.

This bantam beauty, only half the size of a thumbnail, changed America in ways we're still measuring.

If you like big samples, look for the largest gold bar ever cast-weighing 80 pounds-from the SS CentralAmerica, which sank off the Carolinas in 1857.

[PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 6 AND 7] Since its humble beginning in 1955, the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show now draws collectors from around the world and spreads its displays through miles of downtown venues. At left is a conglomerate of crystalized minerals and gold, valued at approximately $50,000. EDWARD MCCAIN The distorted octahedral crystal of gold on the right comes from the Harvard Collection. BOB JONES Below The collection of Wayne Leicht, proprietor of Kristalle in California since 1971, has been featured in many finemineral publications. EDWARD MCCAIN This year's show features an additional treat for history buffsthe original survey of the land acquired through the Gadsden Purchase, loaned from the Arizona Historical Society, and the original purchase document, on loan from the National Archives and Records Administration.

In 1853, our government purchased from Mexico a 30,000-square-mile strip of what became New Mexico and southern Arizona below the Gila River. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the deal, which made Tucson part of the United States.

The city plans to celebrate the opening of the Tucson Gem and Mineral Society's showand the 30 or so satellite shows that take place simultaneously - with a fireworks display on A Mountain, west of downtown, the evening before the show opens. Some 50,000 visitors will attend the show, including 3,200 dealers.

According to Bob Jones, a member of the permanent show committee and author of a book-length history of the event to be published this month, the shows will display roughly 7 million gem and mineral specimens on 9 miles of table space.

The show didn't start out so grand.

The show's first home, the cafeteria of the Helen Keeling Elementary School, accommodated eight dealers. The three men who organized that 1955 week-end event-Dan Caudle, Clayton Gibson and Harold

Rupert-did so without approval from the Tucson Gem and Mineral Society board members.

The leaders wanted nothing to do with such a crazy idea and refused to put up money to fund it. Caudle and his cohorts went ahead anyway, borrowing display cases from jewelry and drugstores, and from the University of Arizona.

"Boy, were they heavy," remembers Caudle, the only surviving member of the organizing group. "We set everything up ourselves." But the three paid their bills and cleared a handsome $10, which they donated to Keeling Elementary. That precedent continues today. The society donates about $20,000 per year to local charities and to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and the University of Arizona.

The second year, the show moved to a World War II-era Quonset hut located at Tucson's southside rodeo grounds. Caudle, now 81, had to sleep in his truck inside the hut, his shotgun handy, to provide security for the specimens. "Everything was real seat-of-the-pants in the begin-ning," says Caudle. "But it kept getting bigger and bet-ter. Every year we'd think, 'How in the world will we top this?'"

They always did, says Jones, adding that volunteers still do all the work, the only thing that hasn't changed since 1955. The show crossed a threshold in 1961 when the Smithsonian Institution brought an exhibit to town, the first time that prestigious museum had participated in any club event. The British Museum followed suit in 1970.

More milestones followed almost every year, includ-ing the ring meteorite's return to Tucson. This 1,400pound space monster provided a wonderful story around which to promote the show.

Sometime in the early 1800s, settlers found the ringshaped meteorite, along with a smaller fragment, in the Santa Rita Mountains. After the ring was hauled to the presidio in Tucson, Mexico's military blacksmith used it as an anvil.

In 1857, shortly after Mexican forces withdrew from Tucson, Lt. B.J.D. Irwin, a U.S. Army medical officer, found the meteorite half-buried on a side street and recognized what it was. He shipped his find to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., where it remains today.

The ring meteorite's reappearance in southern Arizona profoundly impacted the 1972 show, swelling the crowd to a then-record 19,000.

But the most important factor in building the show's early reputation was the variety and quality of the specimens on display. Collectors adopted the habit of saving their best for Tucson.

"Items would be shown here that had never been shown before," says Gene Schlepp, an exhibitor at the 1955 show and now president of the Tucson Gem and Mineral Society. "The anticipation built every

This year's show will include more than 60 pieces from the Harvard Collection, including its curving gold horn, possibly the most famous specimen of wire gold in the country.

This year. Coming to Tucson was like a trip to Mecca.” But gold has never played a big part in the Tucson show. Until recently, buyers could find little of it at reasonable prices, and getting at new pieces proved unprofitable because it appears so sporadically in rock. However, with an increase in the price of unusual gold pieces, known as specimen gold, it began to pay for individual miners to seek out rare crystallized samples that could be sold for large amounts. Crystallized gold develops from what is called a hydrothermal solution-hot water that surges up from the interior of the earth, dissolves and brings minerals with it-in an open pocket of rock, as opposed to nuggets, which are stream-tumbled.

Technology helped, too. New metal detectors in use over the last 20 years allow miners to go underground and scan mine walls for hot spots. More specimen pieces have been unearthed and a sizeable market has flowered.

“Tucson didn't show its first important piece of gold until 1971, when we had the horn of gold from the Harvard University Collection,” says historian Jones.

This year's show will include more than 60 pieces from the Harvard Collection, including its curving

gold horn, possibly the most famous specimen of wire gold in the country.

Also on display will be the Houston Museum's dragon gold, discovered at the Colorado Quartz Mine four years ago. Careful not to damage it, workers spent three days sawing through the quartz around it with a powerful diamond chainsaw. The piece stands 7 inches high and resembles a sparkling dragon rearing up on its back legs.

Another gold piece, sure to draw public fascination, has a tree root growing through it. In 1959, a miner working at the Red Ledge Mine in Nevada County, California, tipped over a pine tree and found the gold close to the surface beneath it. Collectors consider it among the most interesting pieces ever found.

"The gold is captive in the root," says gem dealer Wayne Leicht of Kristalle, in Laguna Beach. "You can't get the root out without destroying the gold. It also has a clear quartz crystal on it, naturally attached to the gold, which is very rare."

Visitors to this year's show might hear any number of fascinating gold-discovery stories. Leicht tells of the so-called Mojave Nugget, a 13-pound specimen discovered in 1977 in an area of the Mojave Desert that most miners figured had played out. But not crusty, eccentric Guy Paulson. With a metal detector rigged to a long boom dangling in front of his jeep, he inched through Southern California's El Paso Mountains, playing a hunch.

It paid off when the detector squealed and he located the massive nugget high on a canyon ledge. After a few drinks in celebration, he telephoned Leicht and the two met in the middle of the night in Leicht's shop. Paulson had the gold wrapped in his lucky shirt and thumped it down on the desktop. Leicht knew he wanted to buy it, but figured to have some fun first. “I said, ‘Guy, I'm not going to buy this nugget unless you sell me the shirt, too,” says Leicht, one of the world's top experts in crystallized gold. “But he refused, saying, 'Sorry, I can't do that.' Paulson continued mining, bought an RV and made more frequent visits to his girlfriend in Las Vegas. Paulson wouldn't say where he found the nugget, telling Leicht only that it was within a 50-mile radius of the town of Mojave. Fifteen years later, Leicht learned the precise location from Paulson's partner. “People still discover nuggets in that desert, including a recent find of 35 troy ounces,” says Leicht. The troy scale is the international standard of weighing precious metals. A troy ounce, based on 12 ounces to a pound, is heavier than the avoirdupois ounce, the measure we commonly use. Doug Clark's best gold-discovery story dates to the day in 1983, on Valdez Creek, Alaska, when he and his workers pulled 400 ounces of placer gold out of the ground. At $400 an ounce, that added up to a $160,000 day. “But we couldn't stop to celebrate,” says Clark, now'I bought a little 'dozer to shove gravel around, built a sluice box and went out,' says Clark. He had a blast. He also went broke.

In his 30th year of gold-mining in Alaska. “This was September, and we already had icicles hanging off our equipment. We had to keep working to beat the onset of winter.” Except for his unusual success in gold mining, Clark's story proves typical. As a 20-year-old in 1967, he moved with his brother to Alaska, intending to hunt, fish and kill time. Those activities wore out in a few years, so he thought he'd try gold mining. “I bought a little 'dozer to shove gravel around, built a sluice box and went out,” says Clark. He had a blast. He also went broke. But he tried again and eventually made it. He now co-owns two gold properties near Mount McKinley that total 42,000 acres. “I really enjoy doing it,” says Clark, who'll attend the gem show this year. “Every day is like Christmas. Some days it's a good Christmas, and some days it's a poor Christmas.” Steve Rice, of Colorado Nuggets, another successful gold miner, also will attend. His techniques for finding gold include reading outof-print government brochures and books about gold mines, and collecting old maps. And he has a way of engaging retired miners in conversation about potential finds they never got around to exploring. But none of these is the key ingredient. “You need imagination to find gold,” says Rice. If he comes across an interesting valley, Rice tries to figure out the landscape and determine where Mother Nature might've hidden her gold. “If the hills on both sides show evidence of a vein, maybe a glacier cut its way through, splitting the vein,” says Rice. “Then I'll look to see if the valley is rounded on the bottom. If so, the gold will be on the sides of the hills. But in a V-shaped valley, the gold probably will be toward the bottom. “By using my imagination, I've developed a real knack for finding veins.” Hearing that kind of talk at the gem show can bring visions of gold to your eyes. You might even feel the need to lie down. Best not to, though, because then you'll just dream. Of more gold. Al EDITOR'S NOTE: The Tucson Gem and Mineral Society Show will be held at the Tucson Convention Center in downtown Tucson February 12-15. Admission is $5.50; free, children 14 and under with paying adult. Tickets are sold at the Church Street and Granada Avenue entrances to the TCC. For more information, call the TGMS office, (520) 322-5773, or visit its Web site: tgms.org.

Leo W. Banks of Tucson has attended the gem show several times, and still has more to see. He also wrote about the “ghost” of Kendrick Peak in this issue. Tucsonan Ed McCain found some very small platinum nuggets at the gem show for his 10-year-old stepdaughter, Liza, who is obsessed with everything platinum.