In the winter of 1995/1996 I decided to pursue a web presence with minerals.  It was a slow march but on July 20, 1996 Trinity Mineral Company was born. I was still employed by the United States Forest Service - a branch of the US Department of Agriculture.  At the time I was serving on an eight week detail as the District Ranger on the Ukonom Ranger District on the Klamath National Forest.  This is a pretty and very remote area situated in the Klamath Mountains in Siskiyou County,   California. I had been working religiously on the fledging Trinity Mineral Company website since earlier in the winter and wanted it all to be perfect before "throwing the switch" (this I would later come to appreciate, was really centered around a misplaced fear of being rejected).  I had been a serious field collector of minerals since the mid 1970s and had what I thought was a pretty decent inventory of minerals.  I really had no idea of how little I really knew of what was out there.  I had always had a keen interest in the science of mineralogy since my college days and felt that the merging of computers (I had developed several complex computer programs to analyze vast arrays of numerical data related to stream channel morphology and sedimentology) and minerals (my true passion in life) would be a way to keep more dollars in my pocket and out of Uncle Sam's since I fully expected to lose money while engaged in this "business".

The layout for the initial website would be based around a theme of virtual "rooms".  Users could click open a room and see what was inside.  Since all of the specimens I had available in 1996 were self-collected I was able to provide a narrative about the collecting trip - the details of how I collected the specimens, any particularly interesting item about the collecting trip and then the minerals themselves.  It seemed like a unique way to do it. Heck everything was unique then as there were only three other mineral websites online at the time - Amethyst Galleries, Ososoft and UC Minerals. Two of these came online after I had made my decision to start work on a website.  Bob's Rock Shop was also in full swing back then having been launched in November 1995.  In 1996 mineral websites and people who were interested in rocks were few so Bob Keller actually had time enough to review my website and provide some comments.  I am deeply indebted to Bob for his early comments, aid, and prominent visibility on Bob's Rock Shop. More about Bob later on. The day before "throwing the switch" I had a moment of clarity and realized that the web would be a way to engage people in a previously unimagined way.  Why not have an "Auction Room"?  I would take a few pictures of a mineral and let any users that happened by place a bid on the rock by sending me an email if they were interested in it.  I set the initial time frame for the first and only specimen - a neptunite - at two weeks and then July 20th came along. It was time to throw the switch.

I had been a regular user/reader/contributor to two email lists called Rocks and Minerals and Rockhounds.  The number of people on the mailing lists was probably several hundred at the time and to me it seemed a good way to get the word out about my new website. So, on the 20th of July, after considerable wavering, I sent a note out to the two lists making mention of my website.  It took about 1 day for the first order to come in for a tourmaline specimen from Pala that I had collected in the mid 1970s at the Stewart mine.  A TN specimen about 1.5 cm in length for a whopping $25.00. I was stunned at how fast the first, then second, and then third orders came in. Three orders within the first seven days!! Wow! Not having grand expectations goes a long way in generating feelings of joyousness.   The bids were rolling in too on the neptunite specimen.  It was up to $9 already after one week!!  That first auction specimen eventually sold for $37 to a fellow from Louisiana and that was the start of all mineral auctions on the web. It did not take long for that idea to catch on. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery indeed. But then a good idea like this would have come along sooner or later anyway.

Oh yeah, lest I forget, I was still employed to do a job for the Forest Service. In early August my detail ended and I then found myself in a place I did not intend or want to be in. Dronely working at a job I was fast losing interest in and one that I could ill afford to discard. So I evolved into a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde persona working on the website during the night and wishing I could work on the website during the day. I would work on it during all of my breaks and lunch hour.

The second dilemma became evident after the first three months.  Unless I got more specimens I would soon run out of material for the site. Tucson! In February, 1997, I went to Tucson again for the first time since 1978. Nineteen years afforded Tucson a lot of time to grow up and out. The Desert Inn was now the Pueblo Inn and there were numerous venues all over town.  I was not quite prepared for all the minerals that were to be seen at this event.  So, I took my $2500 that I had allocated for acquisition and headed out to see what I could find.

There were several people I had met through the Internet and they included Bob Keller, Keith Hayes, Chris French, and Rob Lavinsky. Bob, of course, was the "Grand Poobah" of the mineral web world with Bob's Rock Shop.  I had made a suggestion on the rockhounds mailing list that we collect as many web people as we could for a meeting in Tucson.  So, those of us on the mailing lists arranged, via email, to meet up at the Executive Inn on the Monday evening before the main show.  There were, I think about 6 or 7 of us all together including Greg Holland and Don Parsons.  That was the extent of the online mineral dealers at the time. I remember Bob Keller saying that someday everyone here in Tucson will be familiar with and tied to the web on some level.  I knew that I would be.  You have to remember that at this time videos with minerals presented on them were the venue model for moving minerals of significance outside of shows.  I also knew that that would be a dead model in a year or two even then.  In February 1997 Rob did not yet have a functioning website - more or less just a billboard site that Bob Keller had developed for him with information about minerals that were on his videos. (It was not until the summer of 1998 that Rob actually got a functional website up and running after I spent a few days with him in San Diego showing him how to take pictures and generate a site and then post it to the web.)

This 1997 visit to Tucson was quite pivotal in my understanding of the potential that the web offered to bring minerals to an audience much larger and broader than anyone had previously imagined.  I had one of those rare epiphanies where some turn of events unfolds and from it a concept is derived.  I was in the Holiday Inn and saw where a fellow was walking the halls on a cellular phone and describing what he was seeing to an unknown buyer.  I was intrigued so I stealthily followed and watched.  He was relaying what he was seeing and the person on the other end was making "buy" and "no buy" decisions based on his comments.   Clearly, this guy was spending a lot of time working his gums on the phone where a simple picture could have made a "buy" or "no buy" decision much simpler.  That stuck with me and later that night as I was photographing specimens at the Econo Lodge in Tucson for the Trinity Mineral Co website a bell went off:  why not set up on site and convey the Tucson Show experience to the WWW in real time?

All the way on the two day drive back to Weaverville I thought about that and what was possible.  I knew that I would need some connection in Tucson during the Tucson Show where I could operate as a sort of base to create this "virtual" experience.  I knew that 1997 was going to be a busy year of just thinking about this concept.  During this year I began working with Rob more and more.  He was selling specimens to me as he was still focused on his mineral videos.   The web sales continued to expand rapidly and it was that summer that I knew my career course had changed. On July 5th I tendered my resignation with the US Forest Service and embarked on a full time career as a mineral dealer.

My concepts for the website were changing almost weekly with new ideas popping into my head about how to present minerals. Up to this point every website out there simply posted minerals to a webpage with no thought of organization.  I came up with a concept for presenting minerals by continent, presenting minerals by chemical similarities or specific localities such as Tsumeb or Franklin.  I felt that this would be an effective way for people to find what they were looking for without having to sift through all the other stuff with a static page offering. Now days this is the "norm" but it happened first with me in 1997.

During the Fall of 1997 I started to gather requests from my website viewers.  In November of 1997, I "surveyed the dealer landscape" looking for the person or persons who I thought would readily grasp the potential and was compelled to contact Rob Lavinsky with the offer of developing an online Tucson Show in 1998 so as to make Tucson accessible to everyone who could or would never ever make it there.  I suggested to Rob that since he already had a room at the Executive Inn with some space that it would be a simple process for me  to set up with my lap top in the kitchen area and then photograph specimens to put on a website called "Virtual Tucson".  Some of you may remember that initial effort. Anyway, at Tucson 1998 Rob helped out by looking for specimens for me to place online and tended to his show room while I tended to the "Virtual Show Room".  We had a crude show report and the layout of the site was quite remedial by today's standards.  But it got the point across. Overall, we had mixed success that first go round but were compelled to continue on.

It became apparent to me also that more than one guy was needed to crank out webpages during the show so I looked out there again and came up with Chris French as a potential compadre with this venture.  Chris already had well honed webpage skills and with Rob's connection in the E.I. I felt we were ready to march onward. At a breakfast between the three of us we collectively came up with "The Virtual Show" as a concept for bringing the Tucson experience to the WWW audience as well as other shows.  After the end of the show Chris French approached us and offered to cover the Fossil and Gemstone end of things in an effort to present a larger glimpse of Tucson.  We agreed to give it a whirl and registered a couple of domains to use for the next coming show which was Costa Mesa.    That show taught us some hard lessons about technology and politics so the notion of future efforts at short time frame venues such as Costa Mesa or Springfield were scrapped.  We still felt the time frame for a Virtual Denver was sufficient to pull it off.

During the summer months of 1998 I had contacted Bob Keller who's known across the cyber rock landscape as the force behind Bob's Rock Shop.  I had conveyed to him that one of his show reports from Denver would be of benefit to the world wide web audience and it would be a great (free) chance for him to get to Denver. We spent 10 days kegged up at the Motel 6 about 1 mile from the Holiday Inn and put on the Virtual Denver Show from there.  Rob was stuck at home in school for most of the Show but contributed a lot with pictures and text which further reinforced the
power of the Internet to affect the way we work.  Denver was a larger success so we made plans to expand for Tucson in 1999. After the Denver Show Chris, Rob and I decided that Chris' efforts were better spent helping his clients with their websites so we split up with Rob and I pursuing a mineral based effort. 

Bob Keller worked like a mad man developing some customized software for Rob and me to use during the 1999 Tucson show.  I must have spent 100 hours on the phone with Bob going over the design and testing various features of the program.  He did a great job on it and it performed very well over all for us.  Rather than working out of the Executive Inn for this show I took a room at the Frontier Motel which is located right next door to the Executive Inn.  Colleen, my wife, joined me about 10 days into the show and we were able to ship packages direct from Tucson - an interesting and novel touch but one that about cost me my marriage.  Bob's built us a virtual "Star Ship" as far as websites were concerned.  He'd done a magnificent job of allowing Rob and I to drop specimens into a database system which would build web pages on the fly so to speak.  After the show, however, the financial return was not what was expected and we all more or less felt that the best course for Bob was to focus on Bob's Rock Shop and his reporting through his websites on the shows.  Rob and I did a little soul searching and decided that we should regroup and forge ahead with a broader group of people.

During the summer of 1999 I spent considerable time talking with my brother Jim Veevaert, who is now a marketing VP for Microsoft about how we could improve upon what we had in terms of a working page.  Jim helped move us to more complicated cgi and perl scripting which enabled us to create the search features which were unique to the WWW Rockshop experience. It also enabled us to develop a feature that allows individual viewers to create their own page of special requests.  Essentially, all we do is fill the "pot with rocks" and let viewers find their own interests from the available array.  We also are able to generate "specials" pages which direct viewers to items that we feel are important in terms of what is new at the various shows. I used this concept to develop a new site at the time called "Rare Minerals".  I registered the domain rareminerals.com and used this to exclusively market rare mineral species.  I used key elements also to facilitate the search of the database.  (In January 2006 Bare Escentuals, a cosmetic company from San Francisco, gave me a crazy amount of money for that domain - I mean a CRAZY amount of money. I maintained the site under a new name called RareTerra.Com today.)

Next we contracted out to develop a custom automated mineral-based auction that at the time was, in my probably not so humble opinion, second to none.  This auction was patterned after the existing Trinity Mineral Co auction using a live format at the closing.  I conceived this notion of a fuzzy closing for auctions in 1999 and now everyone is using it.  The auctions become a live auction at the end and this new software would allow it to be fully automated.

Rob and I enjoyed more and more success with this model but as is the case with most things in life... things and ideals change.  Rob wanted to blast into the mineral dealing stratosphere and I was more concerned about keeping things simple.  Hence, we parted ways shortly after the Tucson 2002 show and have developed our separate visions for the web based world of mineral dealing.   I really found, in 2002, that as I entered my mid 40s that keeping things simple and being responsible for my own actions was really the best thing for my sanity.  It was really more of a difference in philosophies more than anything else.  Interestingly, I have found a level of activity that stabilized around that time with me moving more towards generating a blog about mineral shows that I attend and offering my take on what is/was new at them in the mineral world and also a brief commentary on the state of the business.  That burst of creativity between 1995 and 2000 has subsided dramatically which is fine with me now that I am just three months short of turning 50. 

My vision for the future is to get away from the hype and glory seeking and move more towards a system that helps people improve their understanding of the basics of mineralogy.  I have seen a lot of people coming into this business with only a marginal understanding of mineralogy. There are hundreds of websites if not thousands with people offering minerals for sale today and I would suspect that few of these dealers could easily name the six basic crystal systems.  Many of these sites have replicated the ideas that were conceived and developed during my first four years of being on the web.  Oh well, life goes on and I am gratified that I was at the cutting edge when it was all being developed and have influenced so many people.  It was a lot of fun and a very exciting time. I am also working with a very select group of similarly minded people in limited partnerships such as Steve Perry, Keith Hayes and the group of outstanding dealers participating at mineral-auctions.com.

Thanks for taking the time to read this small bit of history.  It accurately conveys the sequence of events as it all happened and it's how I got to be where I am now at the end of 2006 - 10.5 years since I threw the "switch" on Trinity Mineral Company.

Cheers!