Silver Lace Onyx is found only in the Calico Mountains of California. The Calico Mountain range in the Mojave Desert, California was famous for being one of the largest silver producers in the 1880’s. In fact, this material has been known to have minute amounts of silver. However, it was determined not to contain enough silver to justify the labor and expense of extracting it.
This Wilderness area, as with most of the greater NCA, has a deep prehistoric use by the ancestors of Native American people. It also shows a through-line continuity of use by contemporary Native Americans today. Signs of the earliest human habitation in North America have been found along the shoreline of ancient Lake Lahonton. This massive lake once created beaches and gravel bars against the eastern foothills of the Calico Mountain Wilderness. The earliest people in America walked and hunted Ice Age animals along this shore 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. Part of this early way of living included forays into the surrounding uplands to search for plant foods. They looked for bulbs, roots, seed, and berries. At that time, the Calico Mountains supported much more vegetation. This is something hard to imagine looking up into these colorful and dry mountains today.