And while he sat waiting for the results of his latest find, the prospector leaned back agains the trunk of a tall ponderosa pine tree and idly wove three of the tree's long needles around the third finger of his left hand, dreaming of when he'd have enough gold to marry the beautiful woman waiting for him back in Boston.
The door of the assay office banged open, jolting him out of his daydreams. His friend stepped out, waving that button of pure gold. "Congratulations," he shouted. "You've finally struck it rich!" As the prospector reached out for the gold, he discovered in his hand a perfect heart, which he had made from the pine needles. "If this heart could somehow be cast in this gold," he thought, "it would make a wonderful gift for my bride-to-be." He asked his friend if this would be possible.
To make a long story short, the assayer had been a jeweler before he came to Arizona, and he knew exactly how to use the pine needle heart as a model – so he cast from it a perfect replica in gold, and the prospector sent the gold pendant, in the shape of a heart, back to his love in Boston. And not long after that, the two were united.
Although origins of this legend are as winding and dusty as the road up to Crown King, and much of it appears to be fiction, an old prospector from Boston has found a few grains of truth in it.
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The old prospector from Boston modeled these two 14-karat hearts from Crown King ponderosa pine needles and added top quality peridot and amethyst from Arizona. Both the faceted amethyst and the piece of uncut amethyst are from the Four Peaks Mine, west of Scottsdale, and not far from the locality of the legendary Lost Dutchman Mine.
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