A long time personal favorite, there are several jewels of insight regarding the Chinese influence on the development of gem mining in San Diego and Riverside Counties; including the annual meeting in San Jacinto Valley at the historic Vosburg hotel, where local prospectors and miners would bring tourmaline from the region to be sorted and acquired by the royal entourage of the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi (皇太后). While this article uses terminology which is offensive by modern standards, I strongly doubt that these words were used with malice at the time it was published.

Reprinted from the bimonthly magazine Calico Print, Vol. IX, No. 4, July 1953, 40pp.
© 1953 The Calico Press, Twentynine Palms, California.

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Half a century ago in the San Diego mountains, between the desert and the sea, men mined beauty—the
FABULOUS JEWELS
of Old Pala and the Mesa Grande
By Harold O. Weight

The story of tourmaline in Southern California really begins: "Once upon a time," for it reads like a fable. Once upon a time the beautiful stones which would make San Diego County a gem mining center of the world were only playthings for Indian and white children—the better ones tradeable for stick candy at country stores. Once upon a time a colored man, who said he was the foster son of a German gem king, operated the world's greatest tourmaline mine. Once upon a time emissaries of the Dowager Empress of China came yearly to sort and choose among the tourmalines; her Mandarins wore buttons of California tourmaline on their hats.

Considering that tourmaline, one of the most beautiful of gems, is eagerly sought the world over, it is astonishing it was so long in being recognized in Southern California. First discovery is credited by George F. Kunz (in Gems, Jewelers' Materials and Ornamental Stones of California, California State Mining Bureau Bulletin 37, 1905) to Henry Hamilton, who found tourmalines on the southeast slope of Thomas Mountain, Riverside County, in June, 1872. Adelaide Arnold, brought up in the San Jacinto country, believes this probably was Jim Hamilton, colored rancher and cattleman who had a ranch in that country at that time. The second official discovery of gem tourmaline in California was reported at Pala, San Diego County, by C. R. Orcutt in 1892. The greatest deposit of all, at Mesa Grande, was officially found in 1898.

But the Indians of Mesa Grande knew about the tourmalines before the white man came. Beautiful colored crystals have been found in their ancient graves. And there is little doubt that the earliest white settlers saw them, without appreciating their value. Mrs Cleason Ambler, who came to Mesa Grande as a child, in the early 1880s, has a pink tourmaline pin from a crystal she picked up long before the official discovery, and made into jewelry in the 1890s by a San Diego jeweler.

According to Vance Angel, who was foreman of the great Himalaya mine during most of its operation and who still lives within sight of it, a man named Orcutt first found and recognized the outcrop, but could not obtain finances to work it. Then somehow Lippman Tanenbaum, New York jeweler, learned of the tourmaline near Mesa Grande, and either came himself or sent an agent in an attempt to locate the gems quietly and obtain possession. One report says that the agent was a man named Heighway.

Ed Stevens, who grew up with the Indians in Santa Ysabel, below Mesa Grande, has a fascinating tale of how the Eastern jewelers actually located the property. "I was one of the boys who traded tourmalines for candies at Mesa Grande," Ed says. "There was a lot of oak trees up there where the tourmaline ledge lies, and in the fall of the year it was one of the best wild pigeon countries in the world.

"Sometimes we'd get there too early for the pigeons, and while we were waiting, we'd pick up tourmalines that had washed down from the ledge, and we'd set them up on the bank and shoot at them. When we'd find an extra good one we'd put it in our pockets. The poor old fellow who ran the store hated to see us coming. We'd want to trade tourmalines for candy, and he already had too many.

"Part of our job on the ranch was to act as errand boys. At the Carricita, which was the northern part of the big ranch in Santa Ysabel Valley, there was a big iron springs, considered very healthful. It was open to anyone who wanted to use it, and people would come up and camp for the summer. One day the ranch foreman told the Indian boy Couro and me to take eggs and meat to a party camped at the springs. We rode up to the tent—and a negro popped his head out.

"We had never seen a colored man before in our lives, and only the fact that we were on horseback kept us there; on foot, we would never have stopped running. He asked us what we wanted, and we couldn't talk. But we finally handed him the meat and eggs. This Indian boy had his hand in his pocket, and he was so nervous in taking it out that he spilled a couple of tourmalines out and they dropped on the ground. The negro saw them right away—and knew what they were. He tried to get us to tell him where we had found them. We wouldn't talk. So he went back into the tent, and we took off, as hard as we could go.

"The negro and the German with him tried to find out where those tourmalines came from. They got an Indian to chop wood for them and asked him about them. He said: 'They're up at Mesa Grande—on the Damron ranch.' So they went up and told Damron they were there for their health and wanted to buy a little ranch. They made a deal—and started right in mining."

The negro Ed Stevens saw undoubtedly was J. Goodman Bray, Jr., a remarkable individual who had been brought up and educated by Lippman Tannenbaum and who was, by his own statement, Tannenbaum's foster son. The German jeweler put Bray in complete charge of the operation of the Himalaya mine at Mesa Grande, and mining started late in 1898. Vance Angel was foreman from about 1900 until the mine closed in 1912.

"It was a blanket ledge, exposed right on the surface," Angel says. "We cut into it just like stairsteps. Shot out the ledge with powder and took out the tourmalines. Wages at first were $1.75 a day and then $4.00, and we had a maximum of 12 men working. Most of the workings didn't go in very deep, but we ran one tunnel back 550 feet, finding one big pocket of gems right at the end.

"The tourmaline brought $15 a carat cut and polished, $2 to $2.50 a carat in the rough. We got almost all colors. I especially remember the deep pink and the deep green. We got two pieces of blue. Tannenbaum went crazy when he saw them, and came clear out from New York to try and find more. But that was all. The best customers were the Chinese. Tannenbaum sold them $120,000 worth one time, $40,000 another."

The richness of the Himalaya mine, the size of some of is gem pockets, can hardly be conceived. Angel recalls: "We sank 30 feet on the apex of the ledge and hit one pocket in which six men worked six weeks, and we still didn't get all the tourmalines out—and it was ninety percent gem material. Handled it like corn cobs until we got tired of handling it." This pocket reportedly produced two tons of tourmaline. Frederick M. Sickler— the original discoverer of kunzite —who is now living near Pala recalls visiting Bray at Mesa Grande shortly after the Himalaya started operating. "The top of the exposed ledge had rotted off," he says, "and the tourmalines were lying on the ground there, thousands of them, thick as the fallen leaves of a tree."

Sickler grew up at Pala, and was in on the story of the great gem mines there almost from the begining. There is a persistent legend that a noted early Indian deer hunter named Valenzuela brought in the first tourmalines there — radiating pink crystals of rubellite in lepidolite.

"Henry Magee—who was quite a prospector—was the first to work on the croppings of what became the Stewart Lithia mine. The tourmalines and lepidolite were red, and he thought the ore was cinnabar. He dug prospect holes and located as a quicksilver mine." When Magee couldn't obtain mercury from the ore he allowed his location to lapse.

Afterwards a native Californian, Don Tomas Alvarado, thought it was a pretty form of marble and took up 40 acres under the Stone and Timber Act.

"About this time," Sickler relates, "a German chemist from New Jersey, Lungwitz, determined that Alvarado's "marble" was lithia ore. The main part of the mine was thought to be on Alvarado's 40 acres, but a mistake had been made in taking it off the map. When Lungwitz had my father and me survey the line, we found only a corner of the mine was on the 40. My father sent word to Lungwitz, but before he could come down Frank Salmons was up in the hills and saw how we had run the line. It made him suspicious and he filed on the Stewart Lithia Mine."

In 1902 Sickler was doing assessment work on the Katerina—a claim on Heriart owned by him and his father an two French Basque prospectors, Bernardo Heriart and Pedro Peiletch—when he came upon the remarkable lilac spodumene now called kunzite. This was its first discovery. In the gem mining excitement which followed, the Pala Chief, the Tourmaline Queen and Tourmaline King operated near Pala.

During tourmaline boom years in Southern California, mines were opened in Coahila, Red and Aguanga Mountains in Riverside County and at Ramona and Rincon in San Diego County. During the first 11 years of this century, total gem production in California was $2,039,279. Then there was a break and in the next 25 years it totaled only $221,419. The break was abrupt. In 1910 production was $237,475; 1911 was $51,824; 1912 was $23,050; 1913 was $13,740; 1914 was $3,970.

China—and the Dowager Empress—had been responsible for the boom. Adelaide Arnold remembers one of the Magees telling her about the annual visits of the Chinese buyers to San Jacinto valley, where they stopped at the Vosburg hotel and sorted the year's tourmaline product of the surrounding mines. Magee said that different shades of tourmaline were used on Mandarin caps, indicating the rank each held. The Chinese revolution in 1911 ended such purchases.

For years the mines lay idle. The market was glutted with stones already mined. But with the passing of decades and the increasing appreciation of the tourmalines, beryls and topazes of Southern California, all this surplus was eagerly absorbed and such gems again assumed importance and demand for them increased. In 1947, Sickler sold his Pala claims to George Ashley, and since then Ashley has mined some magnificent kunzite from the Katerina. The Himalaya Mine at Mesa Grande now is owned by Ralph R. Potter of La Mesa, California, who is operating on a small scale and already has recovered gem tourmaline.

It may be that San Diego County will again become a great gem center. "The demand cannot be supplied," says George Ashley. "The problem is to obtain the stones. Undoubtedly there are as rich pockets of gems in the ledges as have ever been discovered. But it is a pure gamble."