by Jack Nisbet
For its second witness, Hughes’s defense called Sol Clark, a forty-seven-year-old member of the Wasco tribe (a group whose traditional territory lay farther upstream on the Columbia River). Clark testified that he had heard about Clackamas medicine men performing rituals around Tomanowos, but thought that the practice had ceased around 1870, as tribal numbers began to dwindle in the face of encroaching white settlement.
Hughes’s cultural argument seemed logical to several reporters on the scene, but it failed to sway the jury, which on April 27, 1904, decided in favor of Oregon Iron and Steel.
The court found for the land owners and established a precedent that whatever falls from Mars, the moon, or any other distant sphere, whose occupants are not on visiting terms with the people on Earth, becomes a part of the hereditaments of the land on which it may fall. No syndicate from any of the planets having put in a claim for the meteorite, it is now recognized as the property of the owners of the land upon which it was found.
The court valued the meteorite at $150 and gave the company’s owners permission to repossess the stone. Although Ellis Hughes filed an appeal, his claim seemed to be on its final tack. “If the plaintiff (Oregon Iron and Steel) wins out in suit,” reported one paper, “the meteor will be added to the collections at the Portland Museum.”
Then in January 1905, a new lawsuit appeared to further muddy the waters. Two local officials claimed that the meteorite had been stolen not from Oregon Iron and Steel property but from a contiguous parcel they jointly owned, and they pointed to a crater there to prove it. For the court’s pleasure, they produced several witnesses who swore that the stone currently resting on Ellis Hughes’s property had definitely emerged from the officials’ land.
The jury, perhaps influenced by evidence that this second crater had been recently created with dynamite, again ruled for Oregon Iron and Steel. In addition, they re-valued the meteorite at a staggering $10,000. Suddenly, everyone from West Linn to the East Coast knew this stone represented something more than a curiosity. The judge placed the object under the protection of the Clackamas County sheriff pending the outcome of Hughes’s appeal, which was still waiting to be scheduled before the state supreme court.
By now it was spring, and people were flocking to nearby Portland for the centennial celebration of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. As a show of good will, Ellis Hughes and Oregon Iron and Steel mutually agreed that the disputed stone could be carted to Oregon City and displayed on the courthouse square. Local boosters dared to hope that the many visitors drawn “to see the big meteorite will spend thousands of dollars here and the business men will reap the benefit.”
The tourist attraction had hardly begun its journey to the courthouse square, however, when a state judge ruled that it must stop immediately. Its progress was halted next to a farm belonging to the Johnson family. In later years Harold Johnson, then a young boy, recalled with pride how his father was deputized to guard the stone, and how over the next few months his sleep was often interrupted by souvenir hunters who would sneak onto the property, hammers in hand, and attempt to crack off pieces. “The meteorite would ring like a bell when struck,” Johnson remembered. “Often in the middle of the night the ‘bell’ would clang. Then out of bed jumped Father, grabbed his gun, and muttering to himself, rushed outside.” Young Harold ended up with his own small chunk of the meteorite, obtained, he insisted, from a thief his dad had caught in the act.
It was July before the Oregon Supreme Court heard Hughes’s appeal and upheld the circuit court’s verdict in favor of Oregon Iron and Steel. In his decision, Justice C. J. Wolverton accepted the testimonies that tribal people had used the stone and its “kettle-holes” for spiritual purposes but stated that “mere evidence of a tradition that Indians reverenced a meteorite” was not enough to prove that they had legally taken possession of it, not even by moving the stone or fashioning the basins where they washed. “What is there to show that the Indians dug it from the earth and erected it in place, except its posture, or that they carved out the holes in its crown, except that they are there? If the first peoples never moved or altered the rock, how could they abandon it?” Wolverton concluded that he would follow the precedent set by the case of the Iowa aerolite, granting possession to the landowner.
With this final judgment in hand, Ellis Hughes had to admit defeat. The Clackamas County sheriff released custody of the meteorite to Oregon Iron and Steel, and the company hired twelve men and two teams of draft horses to transport their prize. Working night and day, the crews nudged a heavy-laden sledge to the mouth of the Tualatin River and onto a scow. A steamer towed the barge through the Willamette Falls Locks and down the Willamette River to Portland, where it was unloaded, dragged to a railroad scale, and certified at a weight of 31,107 pounds.
On August 23, 1905, the Willamette Meteorite was unveiled inside the Mining Building at the great Lewis and Clark Exposition. No less a dignitary than the director of the US Geological Survey pulled the cord that swept away an American flag covering the celebrated stone. That ceremony was followed by learned discourses from a US senator and a representative of the Boston Institute of Technology. While the scientist compared the shape of the mass to a flattened Liberty Bell, one reporter was struck by its resemblance to a crawling turtle. Predictably, the day’s events led to fevered announcements concerning plans for a permanent display, with both Oregon City and Colonel Hawkins’s Portland museum contending for the prize.
But before a winner could be determined, a third bidder emerged. Just as civic-minded locals had feared, the interloper was from out of town. New York mining heiress and American Museum of Natural History patroness Mrs. William E. Dodge offered $20,600 for sole possession of the meteorite, with the stipulation that it be kept intact. Oregon Iron and Steel accepted without a murmur of hesitation, and as soon as the Lewis and Clark Exposition closed, the stone was loaded on a train bound for New York City. Transferred from flatcar to a sophisticated heavy-duty cart, the Willamette Meteorite was paraded past Central Park to the steps of the grand museum. There, as local dignitaries swarmed aboard for a photo opportunity, one wheel of the cart sank deep into the asphalt street.
Backwash
Upon its arrival in New York, the Willamette Meteorite received a flurry of scientific attention. In the October 1905 issue of the American Geologist, Horace V. Winchell, the Minnesota collector who had secured the Iowa aerolite, took exception to many of the conclusions Henry Ward had reached while wallowing in the Oregon mud, especially his notion that rainwater could have eroded the fantastic pattern on the missile’s trailing side. An expert from the American Museum of Natural History weighed in the following summer. There could be no doubt that the New York museum had cornered the market on spectacular aerolites, and that Mrs. Dodge’s purchase ranked very high as a public attraction because of its aerodynamic cone, spectacularly corroded base, and dramatic backstory. Ellis Hughes’s imaginative heist remained part of the appeal. The author attempted to clarify anomalies present in the texture and internal structure of the prize, comparing it to others held in the museum’s meteorite collection.
In 1936, the pride of West Linn, along with 569 other specimens collected from around the globe, was moved to a grand display at the new Hayden Planetarium. There the Willamette Meteorite stood tall, second in size only to Robert Peary’s Cape York Ahnighito.
The great Hall of Meteorites generated a new wave of publicity for the Willamette find and, perhaps, a small ripple of guilt from Dr. Clyde Fisher, chief curator of the New York museum. In 1938, Fisher mailed a package to Professor J. H. Pruett of the University of Oregon, who served as the western director for the American Meteorological Society and had worked tirelessly to support the study of Oregon meteorites. “I have had a small piece cut from the Willamette meteorite for the University of Oregon,” Dr. Fisher wrote to Pruett. “We had the specimen polished and etched.… The weight of the specimen is now 181.1 grams. In sending this fragment of the Willamette Meteorite
I do not want the University of Oregon to feel any definite obligation. I felt that your University should have a piece of the largest meteorite ever found in the United States since it came from your state.”
Professor Pruett, in an attempt to assuage the feelings of scientifically-minded Oregonians, displayed the etched meteorite slice from the American Museum of Natural History alongside one of the rough fragments that had been hammered off on the Harold Johnson property. For good measure, Pruett commissioned a life-sized plaster model of the Willamette Meteorite that for years stood on the porch of the university’s chemistry building.
The receipt of this fragment also apparently spurred Pruett to send a photographer and journalism student to West Linn to look up Ellis Hughes. After the final state supreme court decision, he had returned to farming, but he had to admit that he remained bitter about his “inglorious and unjust defeat” three decades earlier.
The Guardian
The saga of the Willamette meteorite continued to evolve in the face of new scientific techniques and old-fashioned detective work. Sleuths who visited the stone’s original depression near West Linn found that the pit was lined with a shard of oxidized iron crust, heavy with nickel; chemists determined that when the meteorite originally landed, it probably weighed over twenty tons. Modern laboratories also confirmed Henry Ward’s notion that the stone’s kettle holes had resulted from terrestrial weathering—when western Oregon’s heavy annual rainfall and acidic forest environment met the meteorite’s troilite mineral in what began as shallow depressions, the result was dilute, aerated sulfuric acid. Further activated by pulses of precipitation, over a long period of time these acidic puddles ate their way into the body of the stone.
The molecular structure of the Willamette Meteorite told a more complex story. This study required carefully polishing and etching small samples of the rock with acid, but luckily, there seemed to be plenty of those available. Today, the locations of museums around the world that claim a shard of the Willamette Meteorite range from Budapest to the Vatican, with many more fragments believed to be in private hands. Spectrographs and photochronographs of thin sections cut from miscellaneous shards reveal recrystallized kamacite and distorted, shock-melted troilite. Sensitive chemical analysis betrays varying percentages of nitrogen and phosphorous. Gas detectors sniff traces of helium, argon, and neon.
Although scientists would like to make a more comprehensive study of the original meteorite, Mrs. Dodge’s stipulation that it remain intact, as a museum display, precludes any invasive sampling. Even so, geochemists and structural geologists have assembled a rough biography of the Willamette Meteorite that winds through at least five distinct stages. It is a story that continues to be modified as new evidence and new lab techniques appear.
The first chapter of the celestial stone’s existence was set in outer space, and consisted of a primary slow-cooling period. This would correspond to clouds of matter cooling into the original planets of our solar system, in a time frame often estimated as four billion years ago.
At some point while still embedded in deep time, the meteorite’s crystalline structure recorded a terrific shock and subsequent reheating. After that episode, it cooled again into a very different form. Other meteorites that have been analyzed show a similar pattern, and some scientists interpret this as an event similar to the catastrophic collision that created the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Stage three was marked by a second, lesser shock—perhaps a glancing blow from another space object that flung the Willamette fragment out of a stable orbit into a more eccentric path that eventually brought it within range of Earth’s gravitational pull. The associated annealing of this event left a new chemical fingerprint on its internal structure.
The fourth leg of its journey occurred when the meteor penetrated our atmosphere and fell to Earth in a fiery arc. This descent sculpted the classic dome shape, surface features, and unique boreholes.
Finally, long-term exposure to the earth’s elements eroded the porous complex of basins and bowls into the rock. It is possible that the distinct shape of its troilite filaments, shocked and annealed in two separate incidents, contributed to this pattern.
While the meteor’s tenure in space acquired ever more detailed interpretations, the earthly chapters of its story remained stuck on a slope above the Tualatin River. From the beginning of the Ellis Hughes saga, there had been speculation that the iron mass might have been transported to the Oregon woodlot during the glacial period. At the conclusion of his 1905 decision denying Hughes’s final appeal, Judge Wolverton had veered from the legal to the geological: “The whole mass being corroded, rusty, and moss-grown,” he reflected, combined with “the fact that granite boulders were lying in proximity to where it was found, would indicate that it might have been deposited there through the instrumentality of an ice floe.” Three years later, geologist W. Hampton Smith, who had studied glacial erratics at the mouth of the Columbia River, expressed a similar viewpoint in a letter to the Oregonian. The Willamette Meteorite “did not fall where found,” Smith insisted. “It is a glacial drift, and there dropped with drift not at all belonging to this region of the country.… Where or when it fell is not known as to time, but certainly prior to our last glacial period.”
Sixty-seven years later, in 1975, the standard reference book for world meteorites, which covered a raft of subtleties exposed in recent geochemical and molecular studies, dismissed any idea that Ellis Hughes’s stone might not have come to Earth near the hamlet of Willamette with one terse sentence: “The many suggestions that the meteorite had been moved from a different place appear to be unfounded.”
Yet as some previous investigators had noted, the hollowed pit in the soft ground of the Willamette forest did not correlate with the craters made by other large meteorites upon impact. In 1986, Portland high school science teacher Richard Pugh revisited the shallow depression near West Linn where Ellis Hughes had first noticed the meteorite. There he picked up a light-colored twelve-inch boulder of granitic origin. Recalling Hughes’s “white rock,” Pugh searched through the poison oak that had grown up in the depression and found many similar pebbles of granodiorite, which does not occur in the bedrock of the Willamette Valley. Pugh postulated that the Willamette Meteorite originally plunged to Earth in southeastern British Columbia or northwestern Montana millions of years ago. During the most recent glacial epoch, less than a hundred thousand years ago, a lobe of advancing ice captured the meteorite. The stone, which had hurtled through space for so achingly long, then began a new journey, moving only a few inches a year, encased in ice alongside white granites of earthly origin.
The pace would pick up again, however. During the last ice age, the meteorite’s icy crypt was caught up in one of the Lake Missoula floods that surged downstream across the Columbia Basin. The berg remained large enough to support the meteorite as the torrent turned the corner at Wallula Gap and squeezed through the Columbia River Gorge. Riding with the portion of the floodwaters that branched south into the Willamette Valley, the ice floe and its cargo finally came to rest in a back eddy near the mouth of the Tualatin River, surrounded by other flood erratics dropped along the flood’s high-water mark in the Willamette hills, around 380 feet above sea level.
Back in New York in the late 1990s, the Willamette Meteorite was on the move yet again, to a position as the centerpiece of the American Museum of Natural History’s new Cullman Hall of the Universe. At about the same time, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde—a consortium of native peoples assembled from several displaced Columbia River Gorge and Coastal tribes who had been pushed into the Willamette Valley by white settlers—carried the depositions that Joseph Susap and Sol Clark made at Ellis Hughes’s original trial to New York City as part of a new effort to restore the meteorite to Oregon. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act forced the museum to take their claims seriously, and an agreement was forged.
Through the permission of the Gra
nd Ronde people, the Willamette Meteorite is to remain at the American Museum of Natural History as long as the tribe has access to it for cultural and religious purposes. The museum also created an internship for any Native American youth who comes to New York to study the institution’s extensive collections of tribal artifacts.
Ellis Hughes did not live long enough to see his legal argument based upon tribal relics bear fruit. Nor did he ever reap any profit from the meteorite, beyond the quarters he collected at his viewing shed during a few months in 1903. But among his contemporaries, there were many who felt he had performed a great public service by dragging the Willamette Meteorite out of the forest. In the words of Northwest geologist W. Hampton Smith:
Science owes a debt of gratitude to the discoverer, Mr. Hughes. He erred in thinking that the meteor was his by right of discovery, and laboriously took it from the ground on which it was found to his own home. Had he not accidentally discovered it, however, it might have never been known.… I am informed that he has never been rewarded for his discovery and all the work he put upon it. From my point of view that is wrong. It is perhaps the most interesting sample of metal that ever came to earth from the starry depths that has been recovered.… It should have been kept here.
As a final stipulation of the agreement between the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde and the American Museum of Natural History, if the Willamette Meteorite is ever retired from public display, its ownership will revert to the tribes. It is possible, therefore, that at some future date the turtle-shaped stone will once more journey across space and time, echoing one brief chapter of its long life history. If it should travel by rail, it will retrace its climactic Ice Age voyage across Lake Pend Oreille, through Spokane, and down the Columbia as it makes one more partial orbit of our small planet.
