The trade name “White Buffalo” is used to identify this beautiful stone coming out of Tonopah, Nevada. The legendary Otteson mining family owns the mine where the white stone grows, surrounded by black chert which creates beautiful patterns, and sometimes in rare and more expensive pieces, a spider-web matrix. The stone grows in veins, is hard and cuts like turquoise, but geologists are inconclusive about whether it is technically turquoise or not. In the industry, this stone is generally referred to as “White Buffalo”.

There are other times you will hear the term “White Buffalo Turquoise”. Sometimes it is incorrectly used to refer to Magnesite or Howlite, calcite and quartz materials, but there is also an authentic Sacred Buffalo Turquoise which is a very hard, very light, very rare turquoise that comes out of the Dry Creek Mine.