Timeline

The record, in two parallel rows. This is where a new historical finding lands.

Parent: history.md

Every row carries its source and its tier. A row states what a source says and when - not what this project concludes from it. That is what keeps this file stable while the model is still correcting itself.

Two rows, because the gap between them is the story.

• EVENTS - what happened on the ground.
• THE RECORD - when it entered print, and who copied whom.

Read across them and the genealogy becomes visible: the deposit was worked from about 1907 and the outcrop found in 1936, but the name everyone repeats does not enter the mineralogical record until 1948 - while sitting on a federal map since 1917.

How to add: append a row in date order, with source and tier. If the date is inferred rather than stated, say so in the row. Never delete a row - supersede it with a later one and leave both, the way confidence ratings work.

EVENTS

THE RECORD

What the two rows show that neither shows alone

1. The name predates the literature by seventeen years. "Paradise Valley" is on the 1917 federal sheet; the first mineral writer to use it in print is Dake in 1938; the state record does not carry it until 1948. It was never a mineral writer's coinage.
2. Twenty-eight years of tier-1 state print rests on a tier-6 anonymous filler note. Bulletins 136, 173 and 189 are transcriptions of each other. Both of Bulletin 136's cited sources were read on 2026-09-08. Melhase 1934 does not contain the valley name at all; the name comes from an unsigned, untitled, two-sentence filler paragraph at the bottom of a magazine column in March 1935, which cites no source and names nobody. Murdoch and Webb transcribed it accurately - that was never the defect. The defect is that the state's mineral record and every later retelling inherited the authority of the bulletin while the underlying observation had none. Repetition never became corroboration; it just became old.
3. The varietal name is bracketed to 1930-1940. "Un-named" in June 1930; "paradise jasper" by March 1936; "poppy jasper" by November 1940. And absent from the state's own record as late as 1966.

But the bracket dates the WORDS, not their attachment to this deposit - a distinction drawn 2026-09-08 after sweeping all 527 issues of Desert Magazine. The 1940 phrase names no locality; "poppy stone" is attached to the locality by Dake in 1938, "poppy jasper" not until Pitts in 1947. And "poppy" was a generic lapidary pattern word in this period, applied to Arizona, Death Valley and South Dakota material in the same run. A pre-1957 advertisement offering "poppy jasper" is not evidence of Morgan Hill stone.

The 1935 note sits inside that bracket and may explain it. In March 1935 the place name is in print with a stated cabochon use; twelve months later "paradise jaspers" is a varietal name. The note itself gives no varietal name - it says jasper found in Paradise Valley, which is a locality statement. So the bracket is unchanged and this is a candidate mechanism, not an earlier attestation. Flagged as a hypothesis. 4. The state's gem records never credited Santa Clara with jasper while its manganese records described brightly colored chert here in detail. That asymmetry is itself evidence about when and how the gem identity arose.

Gaps this file makes visible

• 1836-1906: nothing. Seventy years between the grant and Pitts, with no entry in either row.
• 1972-2003: nothing but the MRDS digitisation. Thirty years with no account at all - the fee-dig era ends and the web era begins, and the join is undocumented.
• The four ILL documents sit at the head of the record row and are unread.
• Who owned the deposit between 1948 and 1971 is unknown - Grape Gold Winery, "the other property owner", then a rock shop, with no chain between them.