Dazzling dreams in the mud

HIS friends razzed him. His wife rolled her eyes. But whenever Bob Wehle could get away, the warehouse manager from Wisconsin would head to the Crater of Diamonds in search of treasure.

Last month, Wehle was sifting soil through a stainless steel screen when he picked up a peculiar pebble. It was gleaming, and the color of a lemon drop.

“Now that is a diamond!” he recalled hollering. It was a serious sparkler indeed: a 5.47-carat canary yellow gem of unusual clarity. He called it Sunshine.

“My wife, she’s OK with this now,” Wehle, 36, said with a chuckle. “My friends, they’re not laughing at me anymore.”

The discovery of Sunshine was another glittering chapter in the legend of Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds State Park, one of the more unusual public attractions in America.

For a $6 fee, visitors can scour the mouth of an ancient volcano in search of a priceless stone. Most days one or two get lucky, as a 9-year-old from Illinois did this spring when she scooped up a clear white diamond with her toy shovel and named it Sparkles. The 50,000 people who visit each year find ground rules that are tantalizingly simple: finders keepers.

“It’s like going to Las Vegas and pulling the lever on a slot machine,” said Alan Opel, 58, of Monrovia, summarizing the park’s appeal after a day of mucking through the mud in vain. “Only here, the chance to hit the jackpot costs a whole lot less.”

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SINCE an illiterate farmer named John Huddleston found what he called “diamints” here a century ago while preparing to plant turnips, this gravelly, greenish patch of dirt about two hours from Little Rock has yielded more than 75,000 diamonds: shimmering marvels worth thousands as well as brownish stones too cloudy to cut into jewels. It continues to attract dreamers in search of instant riches; cheapskate fiances desperate for free engagement diamonds; and die-hard rockhounds yearning to uncover a gem so precious that it will grant them immortality.

Typical of the tourists fantasizing over finding “retirement rocks” were Brandon and Harmonee Sanchez. After watching a television report on Sunshine, the young couple -- she sells homes; he sells ads for a phone directory -- jumped into their car and drove six hours that night from Oklahoma City to Murfreesboro.

The next morning, they enthusiastically raked the diamond field and picked up one glimmering rock after another. After 45 minutes, they were exhausted -- and excited. They named the largest An-gem-lina Diamond in honor of actress Angelina Jolie, and were preparing for lives of fame and fortune. But when Brandon and Harmonee showed the stones to park officials, they learned that they had found worthless quartz.

“She said she was having a lot more fun when she thought quartz were diamonds,” said Brandon, 29.

Tiny Murfreesboro (pop. 1,800) long ago capitalized on the public’s fascination with precious stones. Restaurants and souvenir shops that ring the old courthouse at the center of town, and hotels such as the Queen of Diamonds Inn and Diamond John’s Riverside Retreat, cater to starry-eyed tourists

The state park also features a campground, a small water park, a shop that sells gems and diamond-themed knickknacks, and booths where prospectors can rent shovels and screens. Many families bring picnic baskets for a daylong outing, but more than a few leave early once they realize that finding a diamond is difficult.

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ON a recent Saturday, more than 400 people crammed the crater -- a relatively flat 40-acre plot that looks more like a furrowed field in the middle of the woods than a prehistoric volcano -- and staked out positions among the lumps of dirt, which were soggy from a thunderstorm the day before. Grandfathers and grandsons sat side by side, picking up anything that shimmered. One couple rolled a stroller out into the muck, searching for a sweet spot to excavate.

Diamonds often are spotted right on the surface, especially after a hard rain washes dirt off the stones. But most are found through a laborious process: scooping buckets of dirt, sifting it through screens, and scanning the gravel. Park officials turn over the top layers of soil every month to give tourists a fighting chance.

“You have to have a passion for it, because it’s not going to come easy. You get out of it what you put into it,” said Eric Blake, 31, a carpenter from Wisconsin who visits the crater with his fiancee several times a year. He has uncovered more than two dozen diamonds, none of any real value. As he spoke, he unrolled a cellophane cigarette pack wrapper and rolled out a scrawny diamond he had discovered that morning. It was opaque and pinkish white.

Over the years, countless speculators pushed schemes to mine the diamond field, but even those that got off the ground never made much money. An arson fire in 1919 destroyed one attempt at commercially mining the volcano, and some locals still hold wild theories that the De Beers international diamond cartel conspired to scuttle exploration in Arkansas. But experts cite a less dramatic reality: Companies that plumbed the volcano’s throat found that it did not contain enough quality diamonds. It became a state park in 1972.

“The fact is that most of the material that comes from there is not very valuable; the diamonds are clouded,” said William G. Underwood, 74, a Fayetteville jeweler who was the first certified gemologist in Arkansas.

Still, most of the major diamonds found in the United States were found at the park, providing plenty for amateur diggers to dream about.

The largest, named Uncle Sam, was discovered in 1924 and weighed in at 40.25 carats. (A carat is equal to 0.2 of a gram.) The top 10 were all above 10 carats, including a 17.86-carat canary yellow diamond that is on display at the Smithsonian. The biggest found since the site became a state park, a 16.37-carat diamond named Amarillo Starlight, was spotted in 1975 by a Texan on vacation with his family.

The diamonds are the pride of Arkansas: In homage to the Natural State, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wore the Kahn Canary, an uncut 4.25-carat diamond found at the field, to both of President Clinton’s inaugural galas. A diamond also appears on the commemorative Arkansas state quarter.

Of the more than 435 diamonds found this year at the crater, Wehle’s Sunshine is the second largest. A Texas couple found a 6.35-carat brown diamond in September, though it is considered less valuable because of its color. The Okie Dokie diamond, a 4.21-carat canary yellow gem found in March by an Oklahoma state trooper who had heard about the park on the History Channel, was valued by Sotheby’s auction house at between $15,000 and $60,000. Sunshine is similar in quality, said park officials who saw both stones.

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WEHLE has traveled to the park several times a year since 2003 after watching a television show called “The Hunt For Amazing Treasures.” He had found four diamonds before coming across Sunshine last month while sifting his 14th bucket of dirt.

But the other diamonds were so small that his friends mocked him by squinting whenever he showed them. Now his friends beg to see Sunshine, but he has stashed it in a safe deposit box until he can have it examined by an expert in New York.

When news of dazzling diamonds breaks, Jim Houran pounces. A Dallas research psychologist who helps hotels determine the best people to hire, Houran is also a gem collector with a passion for Arkansas diamonds. He bought the Okie Dokie for an undisclosed sum, and he is hot for Sunshine. He never cuts the diamonds, preferring to display them in their natural state.

“I don’t buy just any diamond. I look for the noteworthy ones -- the ones that end up on television, or were collected by the famous miners, the local legends,” said Houran, 37, who funds his diamond hunts with the profits from a collection of rare quartz from all over the world that he sold to a Houston museum.

For one local hero, the hunt for diamonds was never about money. It was about leaving her family’s mark on history. Shirley Strawn’s great-great-grandfather, Lee Jordan Wagner, was the man who found the beautiful yellow Arkansas diamond at the Smithsonian. Alas, he did not have the presence of mind to name it after himself -- an oversight that haunted him.

Strawn’s grandmother told her that if she were ever lucky enough to find a special stone, she had to name it for Wagner. In 1990, after years of combing through the gravel and dirt under the guidance of the most famous of all the local rockhounds, “Diamond Jim” Archer, Strawn finally found the one.

It was only 3 carats in the rough. But it had an extraordinary luminousness. Strawn saved her money and sent it to New York to be cut. In 1998, the American Gem Society gave the diamond a grade of 0/0/0. It was flawless. An Arab sheik offered a large sum for the diamond. Instead, Strawn gave it to Arkansas after a private group raised $36,000 to pay her to keep the treasure in state.

Some in Murfreesboro think Strawn, who works the graveyard shift at an EZ Mart, was crazy for turning down more money. She has no regrets. Her pal, Archer, died several years ago of a heart attack on the diamond field, and was not found until the next morning. Someday, she too will pass. But in the park’s visitors’ center, there is a ring on display in a secure glass case, and hundreds of tourists gawk at it every day. It is called the Strawn-Wagner Diamond.

Such are the stories that fill the minds of tourists with visions of easy wealth. But after a few hours on the Crater of Diamonds, most realize -- sadly -- that fortune will never be with them.

“This is for the birds!” said Doris Postoak of Oklahoma, who drove to the park for the first time to test her luck on her 72nd birthday. “You can’t find nothing in all this mud.”

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miguel.bustillo@latimes.com