Gold and Turquoise

The ancient workings on the second face centre on Mount Chalchihuitl, a pre-Columbian turquoise mine in the Cerrillos Hills whose great pit American visitors were describing by 1858. In the early 1890s the American Turquoise Company, tied to Tiffany & Co., bought the best mines on neighbouring Turquoise Hill. Its manager, James McNulty, blasted into the old Native shafts with dynamite and shipped some $2 million worth of stone to Tiffany, and later conceded that the Pueblos believed they held a prior right to the mines. Prices collapsed after 1909, and the company was gone by 1915.

What the plaque says

Official Scenic Marker Gold and Turquoise First gold placer mining west of the Mississippi began with the discovery of the precious metal in the rugged Ortiz Mountains south of here in 1828, 21 years before the Cali- fornia gold rush. Since then, the district has produced more than 99,000 ounces of placer gold and gold is currently pro- duced from lode deposits. Official Scenic Marker Gold and Turquoise The prominent hills to the east and to the left are the Cerrillos Hills, site of ancient turquoise mines worked by the Indians centuries before the arrival of the Spanish. The Cerrillos ("little hills") are regarded as the oldest mining district in the United States, and New Mexico is a major turquoise producer. Elevation 6,200 feet.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Palace of the Governors — 17 mi
  The long adobe on the north side of the Santa Fe plaza, called the oldest public building in continuous use in the country, though its own founding date is in dispute.
• Bandelier National Monument — 19 mi
  Rooms carved into soft volcanic tuff in Frijoles Canyon, named for a Swiss scholar who was led there in 1880 by a man from Cochiti Pueblo.
• Fuller Lodge — 26 mi
  The upright-log dining hall of a boys' ranch school, which fed and housed the Manhattan Project after the Army bought the school in 1942.
• Valles Caldera National Preserve — 29 mi
  A crater thirteen miles across, floored with grass, left by an eruption 1.25 million years ago and owned privately for 140 years under a law that called it vacant land.

More markers nearby

• Amelia Elizabeth White and Mary Cabot Wheelwright — steps away
• Bicentennial Celebration / La Bajada — steps away
• Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) — steps away
• Maria Gertrudis Barceló, Doña Tules — steps away