Interview: Warren Boyd of Potentate Mining

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Interview: Warren Boyd of Potentate Mining

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There's a video in this that I'll post here for you, but for those who prefer text there's also a transcript, so I will give you a bit of the transcript as well as the video. Enjoy! :)

Interview: Warren Boyd of Potentate Mining
July 22, 2020

"A couple of months ago, we had the great pleasure of sitting down with Warren Boyd of Potentate Mining, specializing in beautiful sapphires from Rock Creek, Montana. Watch the video here, or scroll down for the transcript below!



Transcript:

David:
Hi everyone, David Saad here from Skyjems.ca. Thank you all so much for joining me. It is an honour and a pleasure to have Mr. Warren Boyd here from Potentate Mining. He’s absolutely one of the most highly-regarded field gemmologists and geologists in the country. He’s worked on mines in six different continents, and really knows more than just anybody I know in the business. I'm super lucky, I've known him since I was a little kid. He's a friend of the family and I have him here for you. So thank you so much for joining me.


Warren:
Thank you David, that's a very kind introduction. And yeah, when you said I'd worked on six continents I actually had to check that out to make sure you were correct, and...pretty close! I haven't been to Antarctica yet but I'm not in a rush.


David:
So Warren, today we're gonna be talking about Potentate and specifically Rock Creek sapphires. Just gonna have some questions for you and go from there. First question I wanna ask is, can you give our viewers a brief history of sapphires in the Rock Creek area, and how they were first discovered?


Warren:
Well that's an interesting question. Montana sapphires are not new, they're not new on the market. The deposits in Montana were actually discovered in the 1800s. And this particular area, the project we're working on, owned by Potentate Mining, was discovered in 1892 I think. I tracked down the first newspaper article. Prospector Bryan was out looking for gold and came across these shiny little pebbles, which he kept in a jar for his grandchildren. According to the newspaper article, he took them to jeweller Weyland. I don't know who that is, but jeweller Weyland back in 1892, 93, identified them as sapphires. So that was the first recorded occurrence of sapphires at Rock Creek, near Philipsburg, Montana. In 1902 they were in jewellery at the Paris Exhibition.

So they were very much known by the industry in the early 1900s. So the really scariest mining happened between 1905 and 1935 where sapphires were mined primarily because it was a large volume of sapphires there, and they were mined...well there were gems, they were recovering the gems, but the bulk of the sapphires were being used in the Swiss watch industry and the client for this shipment at that time were the Grubel and Jeweller in Switzerland, who in turn were selling to the Swiss watch industry. And that's well-documented history.


David:
That is absolutely fascinating. So, fast forward a bit if you can tell us a little bit about how Potentate first began operations in Phillipsburg, Montana and how have things been growing over the years? ... "

https://skyjems.ca/blogs/news/interview ... ate-mining
PinkDiamond
ISG Registered Gemologist


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