Wear a Piece of the Legend: The Story of Cody Stone

There aren’t many ways to hold a piece of Buffalo Bill’s story in your hand. This is one of them, and unlike most things attached to his name, this one comes with paperwork.

Cody Jewelers is the exclusive retailer in Cody carrying Cody Stone, a rare ore mined from a claim once owned by Buffalo Bill. Every piece is a fragment of the same Arizona mountain the showman bet his fortune on more than a century ago, and no two are alike.

What You’re Actually Wearing

Cody Stone is milky white quartz veined with gold, silver, copper, and tungsten, an unusual combination of metals to find together in a single stone. Each stone in the line is cut deliberately to put those minerals on display. Look closely at a finished piece and you can often see the gold itself, real flecks and nuggets of native metal caught in the quartz, alongside threads of silver and copper. Because it is natural ore rather than a manufactured gem, the pattern in every piece is different, the layout of metals unique to that stone and that stone alone. They are, in the truest sense, wearable pieces of art.

The stone also does something almost no gem can. Hold a piece under ultraviolet light and parts of it come alive: a soft blue glow from scheelite, the tungsten mineral, and in some stones a vivid flash of orange from another fluorescent mineral in the rock. There is a lot going on inside a stone that is otherwise pure Old West.

The Mountain that Made the Legend

In the early 1900s, Buffalo Bill went looking for one more frontier. The man who gave our town its name sank his hopes and a fortune into a cluster of gold mines near Oracle, Arizona, in a district called Campo Bonito on the slopes of the Santa Catalina Mountains.

The mountain held real treasure. Gold, silver, and copper ran through the quartz, along with tungsten, the metal then in sudden demand for a brand-new technology: the filaments of Thomas Edison’s electric lights. Cody and his partners turned six claims into a major mining corporation, and Cody himself wrote that a deal he struck supplying tungsten to Edison was the biggest he had ever put through.

The Last of the Stone

After Cody’s death in 1917, the mining property eventually passed to a Tucson artist named William “Flint” Carter. He was the last private owner to mine the ore and shape it into jewelry, naming it Cody Stone in the showman’s honor. In 2010, Carter guided a miner named Jackie Lee into the Campo Bonito workings through the original Cody Tunnel to mine fresh stone. That stone now belongs to Lee and Loren Breckenridge, who craft it by hand into the pieces you can buy today. Carter has since passed on.

Here is what makes each piece rare in a way few stones can claim. No more Cody Stone is being mined. What exists is all there will ever be, cut from a finite supply taken from a mine that the town’s namesake once owned and lost a fortune chasing.

Back Home in the Town He Named

There is a quiet symmetry in a stone named for Buffalo Bill finding its home in Cody, the town he founded and the one that still carries his name. Whether it is a gift, an heirloom, or something you simply want to keep close, a piece of Cody Stone is a tangible, traceable piece of the legend this whole town is built on.

Cody Jewelers is the only place in Cody you’ll find it, while the supply lasts.

[Community Contributor]

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