I Found a Two-Carat Brown USA Diamond
Glenn W. Worthington
Copyright 2012 by Glenn W. Worthington
Smashwords Edition
The following is the true story of how I sought for, and found a 2.13-carat, brown diamond at Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds State Park. I named it “The Brown Rice Diamond” because that is what it resembled when I found it. But we had it cut into a lovely, 1.21-carat marquise diamond that is worth $9,800. My discovery was awarded “One of the Best Finds of 2010” by the editors of Western and Eastern Treasure Magazine.
My Biggest Diamond Find Ever
I have had a lot of success finding many, good diamonds in the Crater of Diamonds State Park’s east drainage area. Among them was a two-thirds-carat, naturally heart shaped, white diamond and a 2.04-carat, flawless yellow gem. But after many months of digging and washing in the east drainage ditch, I felt like the good, reachable, diamond-rich gravel was running out in that area. I decided that I wanted to find a new area in the park to search for diamonds during the winter of 2009/2010.
I took my six-foot-long, T-handle probing rod and walked to the southern end of the diamond search field. This is where I had found my first ten diamonds way back in the summer of 1978. I remember at the time that other miners had dug and found diamonds on both sides of a pathway. But during the seven weeks I was there no one dug IN that dirt roadway. Maintenance vehicles drove up and down it to clean mud out of the trough where miners washed the gravel that they dug. Now the maintenance crew did not drive there anymore because about two decades earlier, covered wash pavilions had been built on the diamond search field to the north. So, people no longer used this old trough or the pathway leading to it.
(This is how the Pig Pen Sluice Box at the south end of the search field looked when I found my first ten diamonds in the summer of 1978. It is not hard to understand how it got its name.)
(This is one of two, covered wash pavilions that replaced the old Pit Pen Sluice Box.)
Since the dirt pathway was no longer in use it was permissible for me to dig there. But the question in my mind was whether someone ELSE had thought of this and dug all of the good gravel out years earlier. To determine this I pushed my six-foot-long probe rod into the dirt to feel for gravel. Time after time I pushed it all the way down to the handle and never felt the hoped-for grind of gravel against the rod. Apparently, the only thing there was gravel-free silt.
I was ready to abandon my idea when two of my diamond-mining friends, Bill and Dave, walked by and saw what I was doing. They, too, had been out searching for a new area in which to dig. When I explained what I was doing and why, Bill offered to use his seven-foot-long probe rod to check the area. Maybe the gravel I was hoping for was just a little deeper. When he pushed his rod down into the probe holes I had already made, Bill hit gravel just six inches past the reach of my rod. So, we had good news. No one had beaten us to the gravel. It was still there waiting to be dug up.
Bill, Dave and I agreed to spend weeks digging up that area together. At the end of each day of digging we planned to evenly split the buckets of gravel we recovered. Whatever diamonds each one of us found in our buckets were ours to keep.
(Shown here is the author, Glenn, at left and his diamond digging partners Bill in the center and Dave at the right. This picture was taken beside the Crater of Diamonds’ Leader Board. All three miners were featured on it for finding large diamonds.)
In the very first hole the three of us dug together in the old, dirt pathway we hit a solid object about four feet deep. At first we could not see it for the mud, but the ends of our shovels told us this long object ran diagonally across the entire length of our hole. We dug around it and cleaned it off. Bill and Dave still did not recognize it, but I knew what it was because I had seen a portion of it buried at the park 32 years earlier. It was a 102-year-old water pipe. It was made of wood lath wrapped with coils of wire, and it was incredibly well preserved for having been underground for so long. It measured six inches in diameter on the inside and eight inches on the outside. So, this old pipe had been capable of delivering a large volume of water.