It's the deep blue ones

Quite a few years ago my friend, Will Chaussee, asked me to take some time during my trip to Thailand to see if there might be any Thai interest in purchasing sapphires from his mine in Montana.

Will had a cedar lumber company in Bothell and sold out his interest in it to spend full time mining sapphires.

The mine was halfway between Hamilton and Philipsburg, Montana on mountain road 38.

We were invited several years in a row to vacation at the mine. There was good fishing in a creek running nearby, and, of course, the promise of sapphires.

You could purchase a bucket of gravel from the mine and keep any sapphires you found.

When Will learned of my upcoming trip to Thailand, he asked me to take a sample container of his sapphires to see if there might be a market for them.

He was interested in acquiring the blue sapphires which Thailand was famous for.

His Montana sapphires were mainly muted and had no deep blue gems.

I had found a red sapphire at Will’s mine in Montana, but it was highly fractured.

As time grew near for my trip, Will called and wanted to get together. He was in Bothell and had something, he said, to talk with me about.

He found at his mine a sapphire that had the image of a pagoda in it and was seeking for a way to have me present it to the king over there.

He had a gold case made for it and gave it to me to take with me. That’s another story that I will tell in detail someday.

One of the things I planned to do was visit the family of a young man we had sponsored at UW.

I told the student that when at his home I wanted to visit the sapphire mining area in his country and he assured me that his nephew would be my guide and take me there.

I made it to his family’s place up-country from Bangkok.

On the given day, we drove for a couple of hours to a rather dirty and dry area where a number of holes were dug in the ground. The deal was that you could purchase the right to dig a certain size hole and through some arrangement keep any sapphires you found. Sapphires there were of a deep blue and the color that Will was seeking.

I found someone who appeared to have some status and told him my story and showed him the sample sapphires that I took with me.

He showed little interest explaining to me in broken English that he only dealt with blue sapphires. He was more interested in my story than the samples I showed him.

I did get to see his layout and watch a man facet a beautiful blue stone into a sellable gem. The machine was powered by the man with his feet, a similar method like they used to use in the old sewing machines.

I watched a few miners dig down and send their gravel to the top in buckets. All were two-person operations. No blue sapphire while I was watching, even though I was assured that they were there.

No market for the Montana muted colored gemstones. I was a bit reluctant to give my report upon my return home.