[Caitlin]

Hi Mikeyy
Have you read Kunz 1908?
I remember from that book that looking for mussel pearls was a huge pastime in the late 19th century. That was after centuries of Spaniards and other Europeans had traded trinkets for massive numbers of pearls from the American heartland.

He mentions that in the previous 2 decades 1888-1908) several pearl companies had formed and were still yielding over 1/2 million $ in pearls annually. He cites 8 pages of examples, recounting which rivers were cleared out first then a chronological record of the ongoing plunder. No one stopped until all the pearls were gone in any popular river and there were so few mussels, it was no longer fun for American families to picnic by rivers and looks for mussels with pearls.

Then someone would find another river or creek and every one would fish that one out. Many of those areas followed the same pattern of the South American and Panamanian pearls plunders. Also the Bay of Cortez pearls. 99% of the early sources for American pearls have still not recovered.

The Americas have yielded incredible numbers of pearls to the early explorers, but just about everything was gone by shortly after Kunz wrote his book-- a fantastic book about pearls written before the advent of cultured pearls.