by Jack Nisbet
By that time, word had leaked out that the Hughes family had found a meteorite. A newspaperman came nosing around the planked section of the road, but Hughes covered his cart with gunnysacks and kept his mouth shut. When the reporter asked Hughes point-blank to uncover the prize, he flatly refused. “I told him the sun might warp it,” he recalled with a twinkle in his eye.
Portland resident A. W. Miller—“a student of geology, mineralogy, meteorology, and other ologies”—was initially dubious upon hearing rumors of the discovery, telling one journalist that in spite of overblown stories, no verified meteorite had ever been found in the Pacific Northwest. He cited a recent incident that began with a blaze of light across the night sky, then people near Lake Oswego claiming to have found pieces of an exploded meteorite. Called upon to assess one of the fragments, Miller found that it “proved to be only a bit of slag from the iron works there.”
Despite his skepticism, Miller relayed the news from Willamette to his contacts at the Smithsonian Institution, and a staff geologist there wrote back, encouraging him to visit the site. When Miller reached the Hughes place, he “was not able to secure much information of value,” according to an interview in the Portland Morning Oregonian. “The ‘meteor’ was covered in sacks and wraps and he did not feel at liberty to disturb it much.”
But no number of gunnysacks could hide the fact that there was more to the story. “There is some dispute as to the proprietorship of the mass,” continued the article. “The land on which it was found by Mr. Hughes is claimed by another and an effort is being made to move it onto the ground of Mr. Hughes. It may be imagined that the situation is strained.”
Neither the strained situation nor the rude sack camouflage kept Miller from ruminating about the stone’s net worth. “Iron is worth about 1 cent a pound and nickel about 3 cents,” he told the newspaper reporter, “but as a meteor its value depends upon who wants it and how badly it is wanted.”
The Smithsonian Institution wanted the stone badly enough to reroute its specimen collector F. W. Crosby from fieldwork in California. Upon his arrival in Willamette, Crosby was able to convince Hughes to allow a quick examination of the object in question. After some preliminary pounding with his rock hammer, the collector commented on the meteorite’s iron content, some distinct pits caused by heat as it passed through the atmosphere, and a rusted surface that indicated “the monster may have been buried in the hillside for many centuries.”
Crosby estimated that the stone would weigh between ten and twenty tons, far larger than any in the hands of the Smithsonian at that time. He then shared his opinion that “the Government alone can afford to acquire the ownership of the meteor” because of the great expense of its purchase and removal, and he conjectured that because of its enormous weight, the stone would unfortunately be of less value to its owner than if it were a quarter of its actual size.
Crosby also attracted a local shadow, in the person of Colonel L. L. Hawkins, proprietor of the free museum in Portland’s city hall. Hawkins began to speculate that the meteorite would travel to the 1904 World’s Fair in Saint Louis, then return to Portland for the 1905 celebration of the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition.
The front page of the Morning Oregonian of October 31 displayed a photograph of the Hughes meteorite, which looked like a magnificent breast-shaped sculpture, securely chained to its cart. HUGE METEOR FOUND NEAR OREGON CITY proclaimed the banner above the photo. LARGEST EVER FOUND IN THE UNITED STATES.
Amidst all this bustle, Ellis Hughes finally managed to winch the cumbersome cart to his property and roll the stone onto the ground. It lay on one side, with its highly eroded bottom raked up at about a forty-five-degree angle—a very good position for viewing. He erected a shed around it and attached a sign announcing a price of twenty-five cents. In those days, rail lines ran from Portland to Oregon City, and an electric streetcar extended to the settlement of Willamette. From that point, viewers had to walk the final two miles to reach the Hughes farm, but they came in droves anyway. While gawkers had their pictures snapped in front of the papered backdrop of Hughes’s shed, local pundits continued to speculate about where such a treasure might eventually land.
One report stated that Colonel Hawkins was “quite certain to secure the mass of metal for the free museum, as several directors of the Oregon Iron & Steel Company, on whose land it was found, are of the opinion that it should be placed in this museum.” The foresighted Hawkins had personally visited the meteorite’s original resting place on iron company land; he had also obtained a fragment of the stone, and was only waiting for expert confirmation of its authenticity before making final arrangements with company directors. “The persons who have gone to considerable labor and expense in moving the mass by means of tackles and a rude carriage on block wheels … have not waited to ascertain the value of it and are therefore likely to be out and injured,” wrote one reporter, obviously in sympathy with Hawkins. “If the mass is simply bog iron it is of but little value. If it is a meteorite its value as a curiosity would hardly pay for transporting it any great distance.” This article ended, as would many later accounts, with a twist of humor.
The taking and carrying away of all sorts of things has become all too common in these days, but a mass of some seven tons of base metal has not been dragged half a mile before, and if the attempt to carry it away should succeed it will be necessary for anyone on whose property a meteorite shall fall in the future to see that it is not allowed to cool.
The Oregonian countered with a more general history of meteorite discoveries, penned by A. W. Miller. After referencing the famous Athens meteor of 476 BC and a recent schoolboy ruse involving a chunk of slag from Oregon Iron and Steel’s smelting furnace, Miller expressed his belief that the size of Ellis Hughes’s stone would be equal to or greater than Peary’s famous Greenland find. “It is to be regretted that the monstrous mass of nickel steel near Oregon City is to become a subject for litigation and the only ones to be benefited by its discovery are likely to be the attorneys,” he lamented. “Were it not for the parties who made the discovery and brought it out, it might have remained buried in its secluded spot many generations more.”
Among the curious visitors who paid twenty-five cents to see the meteorite was an attorney for Oregon Iron and Steel. “He offered $50 for the whole piece, and said he wanted to show it at the Buffalo World’s Fair. I wouldn’t listen to him,” Hughes later told an interviewer. According to one account, the lawyer backtracked along the trail that Hughes had blazed for his cart and reached the recent excavation on his employers’ land. With that raw track as evidence, the company filed suit to regain possession of the meteorite. Colonel Hawkins, taking advantage of the publicity to champion his own cause, revealed that the foreman of the iron company had told him it wasn’t worth hiring a crew to break up the meteorite for smelting, and that the Smithsonian had plenty of other specimens on hand. “The place where it naturally belongs is in the free museum here, and there it will doubtless be deposited.”
January 1904 saw the first scientific article about the meteorite, titled “Clackamas Meteoric Iron,” published in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Taking most of his information from A. W. Miller’s report, the author speculated that the “Clackamas Iron” would rank in size with Peary’s Greenland find and another famous discovery still residing in Mexico. The Science author had seen a photograph of the Oregon meteorite and longed to investigate its classic dome shape, elliptic base, and small pits. Obviously, much technical work remained to be done on this most promising specimen.
A Scientific Vendor
In February 1904, Professor Henry A. Ward arrived in Portland after a cross-country train trip. Seventy years old that year, Ward had been hunting geologic curiosities most of his life, supporting himself as a natural history professor, a gold miner, a dealer of curiosities, a friend of Wild Bill Cody, and an early instigator of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Ward did po
ssess undeniable skills: the director of the Smithsonian once introduced him as “the Napoleon of young American zoologists,” and it was Ward’s laboratory that stuffed and mounted P. T. Barnum’s elephant, Jumbo, after the famous pachyderm was struck by a train. Now in the latter years of his career, Ward spent much of his time careening around the globe. A brief notice that appeared in a Portland paper on February 13 identified him as an “enthusiastic student collector and dealer in meteors, who is constantly on a route about as erratic as that of a meteor.”
From Portland, Ward made the rail, streetcar, and pedestrian journey to view the Clackamas Iron. “Professor Ward stated that while here he had no intention of trying to secure the meteor for commercial purposes,” a reporter wrote, “but as he is a buyer and seller of meteors some were afraid he might endeavor to gain possession of it to take it out of the state to sell.” When questioned more pointedly, Ward denied the charge, but the journalist was far from convinced.
[Ward] is an enthusiast on the subject of meteors, always willing to part with any he may acquire for a reasonable consideration, and some imagine that he would pluck the planets from their orbits, the stars from their sphere, tear the constellations from the skies, knock a hole in the bottom of the great dipper, sunder Gemini, hound Ursa Major from the firmament, shear Aries, put a ring in the nose of Taurus, halter Pegasus, put on exhibition the modest, retiring seventh sister of the Pleiades, yea, even change the position of the pole star if he could by so doing secure control of any of these heavenly bodies or constellations for commercial purposes. It is not likely, however, that he will obtain possession of the Oregon meteor, for the real owners of it are not liable to allow it to be taken from the state and lost to the City Museum for any sum he is likely to offer for it. They are too patriotic for that.
The ruthless enthusiast in question was at that same moment composing a detailed description of the Oregon meteorite, which he read before the Rochester Academy of Science in upstate New York on March 14, 1905. His paper, which ran to almost five thousand words and included stunning photographs, was reprinted in the July 9 edition of the Scientific American Supplement, capturing the attention of enthusiasts across the continent.
Ward rechristened the Clackamas Iron with the more mellifluous name of the “Willamette Meteorite.” He described the slopes above the Tualatin River, where it had been buried within “a primeval forest of pines and birch” at an elevation of 380 feet above sea level. He gave a heroic account of Hughes’s journey with the stone to his family farm. “It was a herculean struggle between man and meteorite, and the man conquered,” wrote Ward. “It is unpleasant to have to record what followed.”
After recounting the distasteful legal arguments of possession versus ownership, Ward took the pulse of local residents. “Public opinion is divided as to the probable outcome,” he reported. “But sympathy lies mainly with Hughes, the finder of the mass, and the only man recorded in common life or among scientific collectors as having run away with a 14-ton meteorite.”
Ward then summarized his scientific analysis. “My first work was to take full measures,” he declared. The stone turned out to be a little over ten feet in length; its breadth across the base, seven feet; the vertical height to the summit of the dome, four feet; and the total circumference of the base, twenty-five feet four inches.
The professor compared the shape of the rock to a stubby cone marked with a subtle asymmetry: while a cross section through the upper dome would describe an almost-perfect circle, a slice of the lower part would present an oval form. He used the German term brustseite to politely convey the rock’s smooth breast shape. Assuming that the apex of the dome must have formed the leading edge of the missile as it entered the atmosphere, he imagined the relentless annealing effects of terrific heat and slow cooling as it plunged to Earth. These forces would have created its consistently rounded character, even though it showed none of the fine polish or pitting he had seen on other meteorites. He wondered if some small scabs of a faintly deeper color, sprinkled randomly across the brustseite surface might be pockets of melted minerals, but he could draw no further conclusions because of the unfavorable viewing conditions. “I may be permitted to again remind the reader,” wrote the professor, “that I could study the meteorite only while kneeling in the mud, holding an umbrella over my head in a heavy fall of rain and sleet, and with a temperature too cold to comfortably hold a pencil.”
Ward was especially fascinated by the stone’s extremely varied surface. A border that extended entirely around the meteorite’s lower half was covered with small fingerprint-shaped pittings, called “piezographs,” which he had seen on other aerolites. This border also contained a series of perfectly round boreholes, one to three inches in diameter and three or four inches in depth—again, similar in appearance to other meteorites. But neither Ward nor any other geologist had ever described anything like the openings that appeared on the stone’s upper face: “deep, broadly open basins and broad furrows or channels cutting down deeply into the mass.” The professor again theorized that these indentations must have contained nodules of some mineral, such as troilite, that was softer than the surrounding iron, and that those nodules must have melted during entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Ellis Hughes, in fact, had used one such handy opening to chain the monstrous rock to his cart.
Ward then investigated the bottom of the meteorite, which Hughes had exposed when he rolled it to the ground.
We have before us a most singular and astonishing group of concavities and caverns … they cross the mass from side to side and end to end … They make a confusion of kettle-holes; of washbowls; of small bath-tubs!
We recognize at once that we are not treating of an ordinary meteorite phenomenon. We are observing an action or effect of decomposition, carried to its more extreme degree. We are reminded of the deeply water-worn surfaces of limestone in certain caves. Of eroded blocks of gypsum; or, most of all, of the cragged protuberances of old coral rock.
The professor believed that the cavities were the result of water erosion, not a trip through space, reasoning that centuries of accumulated vegetable debris, working in the acidic environment of a Northwest rain forest, may well have encouraged this decomposition. Many visitors to Hughes’s display photographed their children curled up in the little bathtubs, or their infants nestled in suitable niches. These snapshots provided the most iconic images of the Willamette Meteorite, including a pair that appeared in Ward’s Scientific American piece.
At the end of his paper, the professor turned his attention to the deeper mysteries of the stone. From the moment of its discovery, curious onlookers had hammered at the edges of its ragged basins, breaking off chunks to carry home. Ward had collected his own souvenirs, and the Scientific American Supplement included a photograph of one such relic, penetrated by one of the odd boreholes and scarred with the pittings of the stone’s primordial journey. His assistant in Rochester had etched its surface with acid in order to analyze the interwoven bands of molecular structure that geologists use to catalog meteorites. Ward had also sent fragments to two laboratories for chemical analysis, confirming Portland reports that the meteorite contained more than 91 percent iron and around 8 percent nickel, but adding traces of cobalt and phosphorous to the mix. “Perhaps,” mused Ward, “more about the inner structure of the iron may be developed as the mass is further sectioned.”
A Considered Judgment
Meanwhile, back in Oregon, time marched toward an April court date pitting Ellis Hughes against Oregon Iron and Steel. The company’s lawyers had every reason to be confident, according to a legal precedent from northern Iowa. In spring 1890, a massive fireball had streaked across the skies of Winnebago County, littering the countryside with a shower of meteorite fragments. Locals picked up several hundred pieces that ranged in weight from a few ounces to eighty-one pounds. A Minnesota geologist, hearing of the incident, rushed to the site, where he learned that a certain tenant farmer was willing to sell a chunk “
about the size of a water bucket.” Bidding against another collector, the geologist succeeded in purchasing the piece for more than a hundred dollars in cash and departed with the prize in the back of his buggy. But upon learning that the tenant farmer did not actually own the field where the fragment had landed, the defeated bidder called the sheriff, and the argument ended in litigation. After several appeals, the Iowa supreme court ruled that a meteorite, although it might be classified as “celestial real estate,” legally belongs to the owner of the land where it falls.
Ellis Hughes countered the case research of Oregon Iron and Steel’s lawyers with a legal twist of his own. According to an Oregon statute, cultural relics belonged to the tribes who traditionally used them, but only for so long as such cultural use was sustained. Hughes argued that the meteorite was an abandoned Indian artifact, no longer in use, and therefore legally available to anyone who claimed it.
Hughes’s defense team called on a seventy-year-old Klickitat man identified as Susap or Joseph. Tribal records from the early twentieth century show a Joseph Susap enrolled as a native of mixed heritage: Klickitat (a people with traditional territory north of the Columbia River) and Clackamas (a people whose traditional ground lay mostly south of the river). Susap testified that he remembered the meteorite from his childhood, when there were many trees around it. As a boy, he had often hunted in the company of a Clackamas headman named Wachino, who told Susap that the stone was made of iron, and that “young Clackamas warriors were initiated by being compelled on the darkest of nights to climb the hill and visit the lonely spot where the celestial visitor reposed.” Tribal members would also go to this stone to wash their faces in the water that collected in the holes on its surface. Before hunts or raids, some would dip their bows and arrows in those natural basins. Susap said that Wachino and the old people called the stone Tomanowos. According to early anthropologist and linguist George Gibbs’s Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon, “Ta-mah-no-us” was “a sort of guardian or familiar spirit; magic; luck; fortune.”