Headed for the DeBeers mine this year. This is DeBeers first mine outside of South Africa. DeBeers controls the diamond market and I’m surprised they weren’t prevelant here.
“Headed for the DeBeers mine this year. This is DeBeers first mine outside of South Africa. DeBeers controls the diamond market and I’m surprised they weren’t prevelant here.”
_______________________________________________________________
Gimme your mailing address and I’ll send you my dog-eared copy of “Barren Lands,” by Kevin Krajick, 2001, all about the long fascinating hunt for diamonds in North America. It is chuck-full of diamond history but centers on two swashbuckling geologist/prospectors who hunted all over the continent for kimberlite pipe formations (all small percentage of which contain diamonds) and finally found what they sought in the Canadian tundra, kicking off the great nineties’ diamond rush. It’s a helluva story.
Among other colorful anecdotes, the book mentions some of their unconventional, not-too-terribly-legal soil sampling excursions on remote ranches in the Wyoming and Montana borderlands in the eighties, which I can’t help but think may form the factual nucleus of the (much-amplified) “Black Helicopter” legends of the not-so-old West.