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Home›Dose of History›Diamond Fields in Arizona?

Diamond Fields in Arizona?

By Andrea Aker
October 26, 2010
15183
7

Excerpt from Valley 101: A Slightly Skewed Guide to Living in Arizona, a collection of Clay Thompson’s columns for The Arizona Republic. (Originally published October 20, 2002.)

Q: I have an 1891 map that shows an area in northeastern Arizona as “Diamond Fields.” Have diamonds been found in this area, and if so, are diamonds mined there now?

A: This turned out to be pretty interesting. There is indeed a wide spot on the road near the junction of U.S. 160 and Arizona 118 called Diamond Fields.

For help on this matter I called the Old Scout himself, state historian Marshall Trimble, and asked him if he had ever heard of Diamond Fields. That was dumb. Of course he’d heard of Diamond Fields. That’s why he’s the state historian, and you and I aren’t.

In 1872, a pair of prospectors named Philip Arnold and John Slack walked into a bank in San Francisco with a bag full of diamonds and rubies and other gems they had found at a site that they refused to divulge.

DiamondThey were, of course, crooks, and the gems were industrial-grade stuff they had picked somewhere.

Nonetheless, they conned a pack of investors into setting up a $10 million syndicate in what became known as the Great Diamond Hoax.

You have to remember, as Trimble pointed out, that this was a time when folks thought you could find gold in any coyote hole in the West. A brochure for one mining scheme at the time showed an ocean-going ore ship steaming up the Hassayampa River, Trimble said.

The hoax is a long and colorful story, but it comes down to this: When pressed for details, Arnold and Slack led a blindfolded representative of the investors to a site in southern Colorado they had “salted” with their low-grade gems. The plot was eventually undone by Clarence King of the U.S. Geological Survey who found the site and quickly spotted the hoax. Arnold and Slack skipped town with $155,000. In the meantime, however, diamond fever was sweeping the West, and prospectors were scouring the land looking for Arnold and Slack’s bonanza. One focus of the search was in far northeastern Arizona where, of course, there were no diamonds, but there is still Diamond Fields.

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7 comments

  1. Wandering Justin 27 October, 2010 at 08:13 Reply

    Cool story! While Diamond Park may have been a hoax, I found a reference to a kimberlite pipe on the Navajo reservation (See http://www.icmj2.com/04Jul/04JulFeature.htm). Since kimberlite pipes are the source of so many diamond mines, that would be a logical place to look. The article says diamonds there are microscopic (if present at all), but there are lots of other gem-quality minerals.

  2. Lucette lindberg 30 April, 2015 at 19:29 Reply

    Read an article in the paper about a year ago that up north you can go and find diamonds in the rough. Is this also a hoax?

  3. Daniel Labedz 28 March, 2016 at 05:36 Reply

    You can find diamonds in Arizona near the meteor crater that were created by the pressure of the impact. The difference is that these diamonds are both cubic and and hexagonal crystalline structures formed when graphitic impurities within the meteorite were instantly transformed into diamonds. This hexagonal variant of diamond is called lonsdaleite and is hexagonal because it has retained the original crystal lattice stucture of graphite.

    • Laurie Dickson 20 July, 2017 at 15:40 Reply

      How very interesting! Thank you!

    • Karl B 23 August, 2017 at 17:27 Reply

      Is this mineral now called moisinite?

  4. Vernon 25 March, 2018 at 19:44 Reply

    I have seen molten rocks across the navajo reservation. Kimberlite rocks that have diamonds and also meteorites wit diamonds. Bling bling Its weird some of them look like reptiles and came across rocks that look like reptile eggs wit crystals inside

  5. Charles 22 September, 2019 at 05:14 Reply

    Thank you it was very hellpful

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