Day 7 - Arkansas - Crater of Diamonds

Daisy State Park, Daisy
Saturday, 7 March 2020

White Oak Lake State Park campground is on a finger of White Oak Lake.  My campsite doesn't really have a view of the lake, but we got a good look at it on our early morning walk.  The sun was just coming up and there was mist covering the lake.  The sky was a deep rose and clear blue, and it reflected on the lake.  Really lovely.

As we walked the campground drive along the lake, we startled a Great Blue Heron which took off to another spot; and when we'd walked on farther we came to that spot, startling the heron again.  This time when it took off, it had some ugly things to say to us.  Very irritated (the heron, not us).

I saw 2 different kinds of pop-up campers.  One was an old-fashioned VW camper; the other was a kind I've mentioned before, but this time I memorized its name so I could look it up.  It's made by Northstar and fits on the bed of a pickup.

You can maybe see that whole top half pops up to make more room inside, or folds down for a low driving profile.  They're making all kinds of outdoor equipment these days.

A recent trend in homemade campground equipment I've been seeing are plastic buckets filled with lights.  Most campgrounds these days furnish each campsite with a candy-cane-shaped pole with a hook on the end so people can hang a lantern without setting a tree on fire.  Lately I've seen lots of people hanging a white (usually) plastic bucket on them with white lights inside, and they plug the lights into the outside socket most RVs and trailers have now, and leave them on all night.  Not enough light to disturb the neighbors but enough so people can sit out in the evening and come and go to the bathroom during the night.

On a hill above my campsite some folks have pitched several very old-style tents - the kind that look like Civil War photos.  And these folks seemed to be wearing homespun clothes or something like that.  They were cooking bacon on their campfire, which could be smelled all over the campground down below, and after walking for a while I was ready to go up and ask for some.  The office said they're reenactors, though not for the Civil War site a few miles down the road, as I had supposed, but instead for an annual display of a French Colonial battle back in Revolutionary days.  The Civil War reenactment comes in a few months, they said.

today's route

On the road
I saw a Redbud starting to flower, and a tulip magnolia that was also starting - much farther behind than Lousiana, which is after all farther south.  But those flowering white trees are gorgeous - tall and full.  I saw someone had planted an avenue of them at their house.

Back to Prescott and on along the road northwest.

I saw a dog and cat along the roadside that looked like they were together.  I'm sure they were from a nearby house, though I didn't see any, but I couldn't help wondering if they were emulating movies they'd seen about dogs or cats or dogs and cats traveling hundreds of miles across country (I'm sure that's it).

Large fields, large herds of cows, scattered houses, pine woods.  This is what I saw for much of the day.  Japonicas and daffodils are blooming away.  Occasional cemeteries.  The wisteria is getting started now too.

I passed a house with a kid coming across the yard out of a nearby batch of trees, looking like Norman Rockwell had been painting him.  He was wearing jeans and knee-high boots and a flannel shirt buttoned up to his neck, and he was carrying a fishing pole and tackle box.  I'm sure if I'd been closer I'd have been able to see he had red hair and freckles.

We went through the small town called Delight, pop. 279, Home of Glen Campbell, they say.  And a sign saying I was on the Heritage Trail called Trail of Tears.

I passed numerous creeks and their reliefs, some right on top of each other.

I passed a mobile home that hadn't been mobile in years.  It was out along the road by itself, and off to the side it had one of those portable metal roofs on legs, which was incongruously sheltering a beautiful, new Corvette.  Easy to see what that homeowner spent his money on.

I saw a house with a lot of black cows in the pasture next to it, and a lot of black chickens in the yard.

All the radio stations seem to be either Christian or country.  There's a lot of them, but it's not much of a variety.

Pike County Courthouse

I came to Murfreesboro - this one in Arkansas, not Tennessee.  As I was negotiating the town, which involved circling the county courthouse, I saw a family of Amish going to a restaurant for lunch.

This courthouse, built in 1932, is extolled as "the area's most impressive example of the Art Deco style of architecture."  Which may give you an idea of the general level of architectural creativity in this area.

Murfreesboro, pop. 1,641, is best known as the nearest town to the world-famous Crater of Diamonds, which I visited, and where the ranger at the front desk explained the number of kids around by telling me this week is spring break for Texas.  Well, I'm here from Texas so I guess I can't complain.

Crater of Diamonds
It's not a deep crater that you look down into from the rim, as I'd half expected.  Instead, it's called a crater because when the volcano blew its lid many centuries ago, it created a 600' crater (geologically speaking) filled with lava and diamonds.

Diamonds are created deep in the Earth's mantle (the layer between its core and its crust), where temperatures are higher than 2,000°F and the pressure is greater than 725,000 pounds/square inch.  The heat and pressure modify the atomic structure of the graphite that's there.

top: diamond
bottom: graphite

This graphic depiction finally explained to me why diamonds are hard and graphite is soft, which I've never understood before.

So there are all these diamonds deep down inside the Earth where nobody would ever see them if it weren't for volcanoes.

The one here was formed many millions of years ago, as these exhibits show.

Our volcano here was formed down deep enough to reach the diamonds in the mantle.  They came up through what's called a pipe, a martini-glass-shaped tube from the mantle to the Earth's surface.  That's the orange shape you see in the illustration below.  So when the gas that had been building up pressure finally blew up, it did so from down where the diamonds were and they came up too.

Apparently, it's not unusual to find a number of other gemstones in the deposit of this type of volcano, and they are found here, too: jasper, amethyst, garnet and peridot, among others.

The diamonds were first discovered here by a man named John Huddleston in 1906.  He lived on this land with his wife Sarah, her son and their 6 daughters (only 2 of whom grew to adulthood).

some of the Huddleston family

He'd apparently had tough going trying to support his family with farming, and his discovery made a real difference to them.  He first found a 2⅝ ct. white diamond and a 1⅜ ct. yellow diamond, and eventually sold the land for $36,000, which is what he thought was a fair price.

The land changed hands many times, with each successive commercial mining venture unsuccessful.  It was finally opened as a tourist attraction in 1952, with the owner even appearing on I've Got A Secret.  (Not too surprising he stumped the panel.)

Finally in 1972, the State of Arkansas bought the land and opened it to the public.  It's the only diamond mine in the world where anybody can come and look for diamonds, and keep whatever they find.  That includes the garnets and other gemstones.  Since then, park visitors have found more than 30,000 diamonds.

Adults pay $10/day; kids 6-12 pay $6; kids under 6 are free.  The park has staff readily available to help visitors identify the stones they find.  Some say it's often very muddy so folks should wear clothing with that in mind.  But it seems a lot of parents are delighted to give the kids a chance to grub around in the dirt for a few hours at such a low cost.

I'm not including a photo of the work bench mentioned in this sign (left) because it's just a table with a strong light above it.  But you can see this 8.52 ct. diamond was found as recently as 2015.

I know the photo at left is fuzzy, but the ring was rotating and this was the best of several shots I took.  They say that this is the real diamond, but why wouldn't the owner want to wear it?  I would.  It was found in 1998, weighed 3.03 carats in the rough, and what you see now weighs 1.09 carats.  It has the rare perfect grade of 0/0/0.

These and many others have been found since this crater became a state park.  Some include the Amarillo Starlight, 16.37 cts., found in 1975; the Star of Shreveport, 8.82 cts., found in 1981, and the Illusion Diamond, 8.66 cts., found in 2011.  The ones most people find, though, are about a third of a carat or so - which is still nothing to sneeze at for $10/day.

The largest diamond ever found in North America came from this crater.  It was found in 1924, weighed 40.23 carats, and is called the Uncle Sam.  At both of Bill Clinton's presidential inaugural balls (1993 & 1997), Hillary Clinton wore the Kahn Canary, a yellow diamond found here in 1977, diamond cut, weighing 4.25 carats.  It's considered an unofficial symbol of Arkansas.  There was also the Star of Arkansas, at 15.33 carats, found here in 1956.

And as a parting note, here are some little nuggets of information I found at the museum.

By the way, a diamond is incredibly hard, but that hardness makes it very brittle.  If hit hard, say by a hammer that some diamond seeker is using, it can fracture along those cleavage planes.

There were many other displays at the museum.  Way too many (I thought) showed the history of the land exchanges, but lots explained the various qualities of diamonds and other gemstones, and examples showed how to tell the difference between diamonds and man-made substances.  Lots of different kinds of things.  And it was all free.

The campground here was nearly full, so I went farther along the road for the night.

Back on the road
From the crater, it wasn't even 25 more miles to the next state park, and for most of that the road was climbing.  But it was climbing in a series of swoops - up a hill, then down, then up a slightly higher hill, then down, then up an even higher hill which I could see from the first of the swoops.  Then I came to downhill s-curves, which they recommended I take at 40 mph or even 30 mph - and since I've been driving this RV, I've learned to pay attention to those recommendations.

We came to Daisy, pop. 115.  As far as I can tell, its only real reason for existence now is as the gateway to the Daisy State Park.

I passed a house where a woman was getting into her car, and she was almost a caricature from the '60s: dark hair in a French twist, white-rimmed cat's-eye-shaped glasses, dark blue polka dot dress.  Nothing odd about any of those things, but all together, the effect was unusual for this century.

Sadly, this park doesn't have wifi and I can't pick up a signal.  I'd hoped to be able to stay a couple of days here but will have to press on tomorrow.


Addendum
I'll just throw in some of the diamond exhibits I took photos of that I don't want to arrange or explain, but I thought they were interesting and don't want to just delete them.













scales and jewelers loupes and stuff

WWII information

these next 2 show increasing amounts of hardness in stones, from talc to diamond

The Field of Dreams - it got much more crowded later in the day.

Every now and then, after the field's been picked over for a while, the State replows the ground to try to turn up more gemstones.  And apparently they find some almost every day.  Even after all these years.  Remarkable.