In the 1970s, when Jaymus Perry was growing up on the Navajo Nation reservation near Buell Park, Ariz., he and his siblings used to fill coffee cans with the raw peridots and chrome pyrope garnets that they found and sold the gems to local trading posts for spending money.
“The sooner we could fill up the cans, the sooner we could play,” Mr. Perry, now 56, recalled during a recent phone interview from his home in Durango, Colo. “We were just happy to receive funds — $50 in 1974 sure went a long way.”
Unlike Southeast Asia, East Africa and Colombia, the United States is not a large or historically important producer of gems. But what the country lacks in gemological richness, it makes up in a startling variety of gems mined coast to coast, from Oregon sunstone to Maine tourmaline.
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