The Great American Sapphire

By Stephen M Voynick
Mountain Press Publishing Company
1985 ISBN 0-87842-193-9

Stephen M Votnick writes:

To most Americans, the word sapphire has an intriguing foreign flavor conjuring images of crown jewels, sultans, turbaned natives, and the steamy jungles of exotic places like Ceylon and Burma. Many Americans, including myself, were quite surprised to learn recently that the United States had suddenly emerged as a commercial source of what some gem experts consider the world’s finest sapphire. Even more surprising was that the entire production came from little-known Montana mine with the unlikely name of Yogo, a mine which, sixty years earlier, had produced $25 million in fine cut sapphire for the British.

My interest in western mining led me to Yogo where I found not only a mine, but a remarkable geological story backed by a century of rich Montana history. That history, in passing from generation to generation, had evolved into a loose collection of colorful frontier folklore and romanticized legends. More fascinating was the real story that lay hidden in disjointed company files and correspondence, dusty geological reports and decades of yellowed newspaper clippings—even in some of the works of Charles M Russell. Yogo was far more than a common tale of mineral discovery and exploitation; it was the culmination of a forgotten chapter of American history—the search for precious gemstones.

America’s frontier expansion coincided with a great period in gemstone history that included discovery of the Siam and Kashmir sapphires, the South African diamond fields, and the British development of Burma’s legendary Mogok Stone Tract. Americans headed west in love with, and obsessed by, gold. But they were also aware of the possibility of—and perhaps even anticipated—the discovery of native precious gemstones. Yet, when sapphires were finally discovered in Montana, the same miners who wrote the book on gold were shown to be profoundly naïve in matters related to precious gemstones, thus opening the door to eager British gem merchants.

Unlike that of the great gold strikes, the Yogo sapphire story did not die with the frontier. Although yesterday’s claim stakes and sluice boxes are gone, equally exciting chapters in the Yogo story are now being written in corporate board rooms, gem industry trade journals, gemological laboratories and, most importantly, in the display cases of thousands of retail jewelry stores across the United States.

Montana’s Yogo sapphire deposit is a true bonanza that economically overshadows many major gold strikes, but sapphires, while far more valuable on a weight-for-weight basis, were unlike gold. Gold required merely digging and selling; sapphires demanded marketing, a lesson that hopeful American sapphire miners would take ninety years to learn. Yogo is an historical treasure, but the story of the Yogo sapphires is really just beginning, for only now are South African diamonds, Colombian emeralds and Burmese rubies being belatedly joined by a native American precious gemstone that is every bit their equal—the Montana sapphire.