Do-lt-Yourself Diamonds

The diamond season at Murfreesboro, Ark., opened early this spring when word got around that Fred Wood, a sawmill worker from Chidester. had found a ten-carat stone. It ought to bring $8,000, says Wood, and it is not the only diamond that he has found. "I don't do no digging,'' he says. "I just walk and look." He plans to name his find the Orval E. Faubus diamond, for his state's Governor.

Glittering Pebble. A few diamonds have been found in other parts of the U.S., but they are considered freaks, probably carried long distances by rivers or glaciers. The Murfreesboro diggings--at best a poor relation of the famous diamond "pipes"' of South Africa--are genuine. Ages ago, a volcano must have erupted in what is now Arkansas. Presumably that geologic hiccup eventually resulted in an impressive cone, but hundreds of millions of years of erosion wore it down. The only remnants were traces of the lava that once filled the volcano's vent. The lava was kimberlite, named after Kimberley, South Africa, and as it disintegrated, it released a few diamonds.

Those that remain today seem to be concentrated in 65 acres of land set in the piney woods 3 1/2 miles from Murfreesboro (pop. 1,100). The field first became prominent in 1906 when a young guide, John Wesley Huddleston, picked up a glittering pebble after a rainstorm. When a Little Rock jeweler pronounced it a genuine high-quality diamond, a rush of buggy-borne diggers, many of them women in ground-sweeping skirts, swarmed into Murfreesboro. Few of them found diamonds, and most of them soon went home. But ever since then, the diggings have been a steady tourist attraction.

Real diamonds of impressive size turn up occasionally. One. found by Mrs. A. L. Parker of Dallas in 1956, weighed 15.38 carats, and has been valued at $85,000. How many others have been found is something of a mystery. One local rumor suggests that many are picked up but to avoid income tax are not reported. A contrary rumor holds that the field is sometimes salted with rough diamonds to stir up tourist interest. A third rumor whispers that Arkansas would be a major diamond producer if an international diamond combine had not managed somehow to block every attempt to work the deposits by large-scale mining methods.

Sedentary System. The mining methods used at present are simple and relaxed, returning considerable pleasure and a very few diamonds to tourists who pay $1.50 for a day's digging. Last year 65,000, including kids at 50-c- per head, slopped through the muddy gullies. Many of them, says State Geologist Norman F. Williams, "are little old ladies who might be in their flower beds. They come dressed to kill and end up taking off their shoes, hiking up their skirts and wading in the mud." Women get the most excitement. Some of them shriek or faint when they find a tiny diamond.

Champion gem hunter is a man from St. Louis who hardly moves at all. He selects a likely spot, sits on the ground, and peers at the bare earth. For hours, as the sun's angle slowly changes, he watches for a tiny glitter. It may be only a bit of quartz or a chip from a broken pop bottle, but when he sees the glitter, he dares not move his head. He just stares rigidly so as not to lose the gleam, while his wife, who has been waiting for orders, follows his directions and picks up whatever he has spotted. This sedentary system has yielded 42 diamonds.

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