On a chilly morning in the fall of 1977, Mr. J. D. Porter took out across the desert to hunt quail. It was a good morning to hunt, and by 10 o’clock he had bagged enough birds for his supper. Before heading home with his catch, JD hollowed out a spot in a dry creek bed where he could doze. He rested there for a while, looking up at the crystalline sky and listening to the lizards scratch in the sand.

Feeling refreshed and ready to hike back to his truck, JD stood up and brushed off his canvas trousers. When he bent down to pick up his bag, he noticed an unusual rock at his feet. The rock was creamy white and rough on one side, but on the other, a deep purple glistened in the late morning sun.

JD was a man with an eye for the unusual. Some of his friends considered him a bit eccentric, owing to the collection of peculiar artifacts he had gathered from his travels around the world. He had a keen mind, too, and had invented and successfully marketed the touch-light lamp.

When JD saw this unusual rock, he was immediately intrigued. Could it be Amethyst? No, he had seen raw Amethyst before, and this rock was different. He rubbed the dust off the purple surface and polished it with a puff of warm breath. The rock was even more beautiful than it first appeared. So JD gathered several of the rocks scattered in the creek bed, stuffed them in his hunting vest, and took off across the desert.

JD was a busy man. He hung up his vest when he got home and moved on to other, more urgent matters without giving another thought to the rocks he had picked up that morning. Three years passed before JD would find time enough to go hunting again. When he reached for his vest in the closet, it was heavier than he thought it should be, and bulkier, too. At that moment he remembered his last hunting trip and the rocks he had collected in his vest. He pulled them out of the pockets and was charmed all over again by their pleasing purple surfaces.

On this day of hunting, the rocks were more on his mind than quail. JD had hunted the same desert area many times before, so he easily found his way back to the creek bed where he had taken his nap. There, he found more of the lovely rocks, which he again took home in his vest. His curiosity about their identity could only be satisfied by sending samples to Mr. John McLean, a research mineralogist at the Colorado School of Mines.

Imagine JD’s excitement when John sent him a letter stating, “As far as I know, a quartz variety of this kind has not been previously reported.” That was all JD needed to launch a more serious hunt for a greater quantity of the quartz rocks. Ultimately, he staked 40 claims in the area where the rock surfaced, and mined more than 50 tons of the gem-quality material so unique in color and chemical characteristics. He was thoroughly convinced of its beauty after he had carvings, bevel-cut gems and cabochons made from the raw rock. Once again, JD’s instincts had served him well, from hunting quail, to rambling through the desert, to picking up a chunk of unusual rock.