[meteorite-list] The Willamette Meteorite Story

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:22:54 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <200710270022.RAA13456_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.inlander.com/topstory/289061378211793.php

METEOR RIGHTS
by JACK NESBET
The Pacific Northwest Inlander
June 6, 2007

In the fall of 1902, Willamette Valley farmer Ellis Hughes, "a humble,
intelligent Welshman," (according to Scientific American), was cutting
wood near the present town of West Linn when lunchtime came. "I sat down
on the rock," Hughes later recalled. "It was about 1 1/2 feet above the
ground and very flat." His work partner, Bill Dale, stared at the picnic
bench and realized it was no ordinary stone.

"Hughes," asked Dale, "Have you seen this rock before?"

"Yes," answered Hughes. "I saw it yesterday." Then he picked up a large
white stone and began to hammer on the rock. It rang like a bell.

"Hughes," Dale said. "I'll bet it is a meteor."

Thus begins one version of the Willamette Meteorite story. In another it
turns out that Hughes had spent time working in the Australian mining
industry and Dale was a wandering prospector; together they had been
combing the Willamette Valley for mineral wealth. One day Hughes had
noticed the flat rough stone, deeply buried in the ground and obviously
different from any rocks around it. The next day he specifically brought
his partner out to have a look. After ringing it with the white stone,
the pair realized they had found something out of the ordinary and
retired to Hughes's farmhouse to parlay about its possibilities. Local
lore says that it was Mrs. Hughes who insisted that the only way to
capitalize on the find was to bring it home in one piece.

The meteor lay on rugged, forested land already claimed by a business
named in various accounts as the Oregon Iron and Steel Company, Oregon
Steel and Wire, or the Portland Land Company. Bill Dale mysteriously
disappeared from the scene, and Ellis Hughes remained very quiet about
his discovery, but his plans went deep. After blazing a road about 800
feet in a blind direction so that no neighbors would catch on to his
game, he spent several months cutting a direct path between his house
and the rock. Next the resourceful Hughes constructed "an ingenious car
with log body-timbers and sections of tree trunks as wheels."

In the summer of 1903, with only his 15-year-old son and a horse for
assistants, Ellis Hughes began an odyssey of practical engineering.
After clearing away considerable brush from around the meteor, he jacked
and blocked and jacked it some more until he raised a dome-shaped space
rock roughly the size of a squashed Volkswagen Bug out of its depression
and rolled it onto the cart. Then with heavy ropes, pulley blocks, a
simple capstan anchored by chains and a hundred feet of wire cable,
Hughes laboriously began to inch the meteor down his hacked-out road. It
was three-quarters of a mile to the Hughes homestead and many hours were
spent locked motionless behind stumps; the greatest distance they gained
in any one day was 150 feet. When hard rains fell before the journey was
completed, father and son laid a track of rough planks in the mud and
carried on. Three months after the meteor was moved from its original
landing spot, they finally got it to the farm.

Hughes quickly announced a price of 25? a head for local curiosity
seekers to have a look. In those days an electric streetcar ran from
Oregon City to the settlement of Willamette, but after that people had
to walk the final two miles for their special viewing. They came in
droves anyway, and it didn't take long for word of the oddity to spread
to Portland and beyond.

In February 1904, a geologist named Henry Ward spent four days riding a
train from New York state to Portland, then another two examining Mr.
Hughes's odd rock in the pouring rain. Large meteors have long stood as
objects of wonder, but the public was particularly interested at the
turn of the 20th century. Arctic explorer Robert Peary, an early master
of media control, had spent three years in the 1890s recovering pieces
of the massive Cape York Meteorite from Greenland and landing them in
New York City with much fanfare. So it came as no surprise when Henry
Ward's colorfully detailed account of his journey to the Pacific
Northwest - published with copious illustrations in March 1904's
Proceedings of the Rochester Academy of Science and reprinted in the
widely-read Scientific American Supplement in July - caused its own
small sensation.

In the article, Ward declared that Ellis Hughes had discovered the
largest meteor ever recorded in North America and the third-largest ever
measured on our planet. He described the rock as a stubby cone, and
recognized that Hughes had eaten his lunch on its flattened back side.
Ward theorized that the apex of the cone must have formed the leading
edge of the missile as it entered the atmosphere, and he described the
relentless annealing effects of terrific heat and force as it plunged to
Earth. He measured the length of the meteorite at a little more than 10
feet, its breadth across the base as 7 feet, the vertical height to the
summit of the dome as 4 feet, and the total circumference of the
egg-shaped base as 25 feet, 4 inches.

What struck Ward and other observers most about the meteorite was its
extremely varied surface. He noted a large border area stretching
entirely around the meteor covered with small "pittings" that he had
seen on other iron meteorites. He measured round bore-holes, sprinkled
irregularly across the lower half, at 1 to 3 inches in diameter and 3 or
4 inches deep. Such bore holes had also been recorded on other
meteorites. But neither Ward nor anyone else had ever seen the next
level of holes.

"The third feature of this upper face of the Willamette iron is one
which now makes it the most remarkable meteorite known to science," he
wrote. "This is the existence of deep, broadly open basins and broad
furrows or channels cutting down deeply into the mass ... they cross the
mass from side to side and end to end ... They make a confusion of
kettle-holes; of wash-bowls; of small bath-tubs!" Hughes had taken
advantage of these holes to chain the meteorite to his cart for travel.
After he put the rock on display many visitors naturally let their
children curl up in the oval bathtubs, or laid their infants in little
niches so they could have their pictures taken there. Other onlookers,
just as naturally, hammered at the warped edges in attempts to break off
chunks for souvenirs to take home with them.

Back in New York state, Ward sent off samples from two of his own
souvenir chunks to two separate labs for chemical analysis. Both agreed
that the meteorite was composed of around 91 percent iron and 8 percent
nickel - hence the ringing tones - along with traces of cobalt and
phosphorus. All these findings were consistent with analyses of other
examples of the iron meteorite group. Ward estimated the weight of
Hughes's stone to be around 15 and a half tons, but recognized that
because iron rusts, the rock had lost a considerable portion of its mass
through oxidation over time. He also guessed that the acid reaction of
iron sulfide with local rain and vegetation had eaten away softer areas
of the stone to create its Swiss cheese appearance.

While Professor Ward made the rounds of Eastern scientific societies
with his findings, local viewers around Ellis Hughes's attraction were
much more interested in the brouhaha that had bubbled up when a lawyer
for the Oregon Iron and Steel Company paid his 25? to view the meteor.
Noticing the deeply rutted trail leading from the display to his
company's land, the lawyer decided to offer Hughes $50 cash on the spot
for what he said was the company's property. It wasn't long after Hughes
refused to accept the lawyer's gracious offer before Oregon Iron and
Steel filed suit to reclaim ownership of the rock.

When the case came before a jury in November 1903, the company claimed
that meteors from space were part of the property they landed on. Hughes
countered with the argument that the meteor was an abandoned Indian
relic, no longer in use, that he had simply picked up as his own. To
prove his claim, the Hughes defense team called on a 70-year-old
Klickitat man named Susap, who testified that he remembered the
meteorite from his childhood days.

Susap recalled hearing Wochimo, a Clackamas elder, refer to the
meteorite as Tomonowos, which he said translates as "Visitor from the
Moon." Wochimo had said that in former days, Clackamas people had washed
their faces in water that collected in the pits and kettles of the rock,
and that young men would dip their arrowheads in the water before
setting off on raids. A 47-year-old Wasco named Sol Clark took the stand
as a second tribal witness. Clark testified that he had heard that
Clackamas medicine men performed rituals around Tomanowos until tribal
numbers began to dwindle away in the face of white settlement. As far as
he knew, the practice had ceased around 1870.

In the American West of that era, several legal cases had established a
strong precedent for Hughes's disused tribal relic argument - if it
belonged to the Indians and they no longer used it, whoever picked it up
became the new owner. But in this case the jury did not accept the
testimony of Susap and Sol Clark. The members ruled in favor of Oregon
Iron and Steel, then, as part of their instructions, set a value of $150
on the disputed property.

While Hughes immediately appealed the case to the state Supreme Court,
the company set out to move the rock to its own viewing station. Neither
party was deterred when the owner of the land between the Hughes
homestead and the Oregon Iron and Steel land led authorities to a hole
in the ground and argued that was the original impact crater of the
meteorite. If the rock had landed there, the owner argued, it belonged
to him; he filed a second suit for ownership.

The second trial dragged on until January 1905, when the jury (perhaps
swayed by local rumors that the supposed original crater had been
created very recently with dynamite) again ruled for Oregon Iron and
Steel. Obviously moved by the contending claims, the new jury valued the
meteorite at a staggering $10,000. Now everyone knew the space rock was
more than a mere curiosity. The company started to move the meteorite
again, and again Ellis Hughes halted progress, this time with a circuit
court stay that placed the object under the protection of the Clackamas
County sheriff.

By now it was spring and people were flocking to nearby Portland for the
centennial celebration of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. An article in
the Oregon City Courier announced that both parties had agreed that the
rock could be carted to Oregon City and displayed on the courthouse
square, daring to hope that the many visitors "brought to Oregon City to
see the big meteorite will spend thousands of dollars here and the
business men will reap the benefit."

In keeping with the stuttered progress of Hughes's find, however, the
meteorite was moved only a little way down the road to the Johnson
property. In later years Harold Johnson, then a young boy, recalled with
pride how his father was deputized to stand guard beside the rock.
Harold also remembered how, over the next few months, their sleep was
often interrupted by souvenir hunters who would sneak up to the Johnson
house with hammers in hand and attempt to crack off pieces of the stone.
At the first ring, Mr. Johnson would dash outside, gun in hand, to run
them off. Young Harold even ended up with his own fragment of the
meteorite, obtained, he insisted, from one thief who had been caught in
the act.

In July 1905, the Oregon State Supreme Court finally ruled in favor of
Oregon Iron and Steel. The rock, by now dubbed the Willamette Meteorite,
was loaded onto a boat at the mouth of the Tualatin River and
transported through the Willamette Locks (an event now annually
reenacted at the Lock Fest celebration in West Linn). The boat steamed
down the Willamette to Portland, where the meteorite was unloaded,
dragged to a railroad scale, and its weight tallied as 31,107 pounds. On
August 23 the Willamette Meteorite was unveiled as the main attraction
inside the Mining Building at the great Lewis and Clark Exposition, and
plans were soon made for a permanent display, with both Oregon City and
Portland contending for the prize.

Before either site was settled on, however, a third bidder emerged.
Well-known mining heiress and American Museum of Natural History patron
Mrs. William E. Dodge offered the mining company an astonishing $20,600
for sole possession of the meteorite. Oregon Iron and Steel accepted,
and the rock was soon on the move again, this time to New York City.
When the meteorite was paraded through the Big Apple to assume its place
in the grand museum, the wheels on the cart that carried it sank into
the street.

In her donation to the museum, Mrs. Dodge stipulated that the Willamette
Meteorite was to be kept as a single piece by the museum. In 1936, when
it moved to an even grander display at the museum's new Hayden
Planetarium, the pride of West Linn was placed in an exhibit with 569
other meteorites collected from around the globe. It stood second in
size only to a piece of Peary's Cape York Meteorite, dubbed "Abnighito,"
which remains the largest meteorite ever recovered. Visitors to the
Hayden could plainly see that neither rock could leave the building
without a wall being torn down.

Back in Oregon, Ellis Hughes, still farming and still bitter about being
cheated out of what was surely his, gave interviews about the Willamette
Meteorite's epic journey along his ragged road.

Almost from the moment Hughes showed his meteorite to Professor Henry
Ward, professional scientists and amateur fans have argued about its
internal structure, odd exterior pits and basins, and long-term geologic
history. Sleuths who relocated its original depression near West Linn
found that a shard of oxidized iron crust, heavy with nickel, lined the
pit, and determined that when the meteor originally landed, it probably
weighed more than 20 tons. The origin of the "kettle-holes" appears to
be not some kind of space effect but simple terrestrial weathering, much
as Ward theorized in his original report - a combination of the mineral
troilite with coastal Oregon's heavy annual rainfall and acidic forest
environment. Decomposing troilite on the surface of the stone released
dilute, aerated sulfuric acid, which was further activated by
precipitation; over a long period of time the puddles of acid ate down
into the body of the meteorite.

The molecular structure of the Willamette has a more complex story to
tell. For this a sample of the rock is needed and Mrs. Dodge's 1906
order that the stone remain in one piece might seem to be a deterrent to
further study. But it turns out that in the course of its stays at Ellis
Hughes's farm and Harold Johnson's front yard, at the Lewis and Clark
Exposition and even in the august Museum of Natural History, more than a
few nighttime raiders were successful in breaking off souvenirs. Today,
in descending order of size by weight, the list of museums and private
collections around the world that claim a shard of the Willamette Meteor
includes Washington D.C. (around 5 pounds), Chicago, Tempe (Ariz.),
Ottawa, Budapest, Berlin, London, Prague, Helsinki, Ann Arbor (Mich.),
Los Angeles, Paris, the University of Oregon, Copenhagen, and the
Vatican (15 grams). Almost all of these pieces have a distinct leggy
shape that recalls a stretched animal hide. This is because the easiest
place to hammer a piece off the meteorite is where corrosion had
undercut the surface and left an hourglass form, tapering from the top
down and the bottom up.

Spectrographs and photochromographs of thin sections cut from these
various shards have allowed geochemists and structural geologists to
assemble a biography of the Willamette Meteorite that spans the life
history of our entire Universe, and winds its way 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 phase of the Willamette's existence, deduced from an internal
structure that looks very similar to the makeup of the Cape York
Meteorite from Greenland, consisted of an initial slow cooling period.
This would correspond to clouds of matter cooling into the original
planets our solar system, something like 4 billion years ago.

At some point after that, the Willamette Meteorite's crystalline
structure recorded a terrific shock and subsequent reheating, then
cooling into a very different form. Some scientists interpret this as an
event similar to the explosion of the planet that created the asteroid
belt between Mars and Jupiter. Other much smaller meteors have been
analyzed that show a similar pattern.

Stage three consisted of a second, lesser shock - perhaps a glancing
collision with another asteroid that flung the Willamette out of a
stable orbit into a more eccentric path that eventually allowed it to be
captured by the Earth's gravitational pull. The associated reheating and
annealing of this event left a new chemical fingerprint on the internal
structure of the stone.

The fourth leg of Willamette's journey came when it penetrated our
atmosphere and descended in a fiery arc to solid ground. The heat would
have sculpted the dome shape, which recalls the original manned Mercury
capsules launched by NASA in the 1960s. When the Willamette Meteorite
landed, it probably featured stress grooves caused by this reentry
similar to the Morito Meteorite from Mexico.

Finally, long-term exposure to the Earth's elements erased most of those
grooves and scooped the honeycombed complex of basins and bowls into the
rock itself. Some scientists believe that the distinct shape of the
troilite filaments, shocked and annealed in two separate incidents,
contributed to this pattern.

More recently, Oregon geologist Richard Pugh has added several other
layers to this story.

In 1986, when Pugh visited the shallow depression in the Willamette
Valley where Ellis Hughes first found the meteor, he found a
light-colored 12-inch boulder of granitic origin nearby. Recalling Ellis
Hughes's "white rock," he 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
compared the simple depression in the soft ground with the impact
craters made by other large meteorites. Something did not fit.

Pugh's conclusion, now generally accepted by other geologists, is that
the Willamette Meteor 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 bulldozed its way south through the Rocky Mountain
trench and captured the meteorite, tractoring it up into its body like a
kid plowing through a sandbox with one hand. Instead of hurtling through
space the meteorite was on a new journey, encased in ice and moving only
a few inches a year.

The pace would pick up again, however. Pugh believes that during one of
the Lake Missoula floods at the end of the last Ice Age, the meteor rode
south in an iceberg that was flushed through the crumbling ice dam at
Lake Pend Oreille. Its path would have taken it across Rathdrum Prairie
and through what is now downtown Spokane, following the main flow of the
torrent. A random eddy, a glancing blow from another renegade ice chunk,
could have sent the iceberg careening up Latah Creek and laid it to rest
in Spokane County. Almost any likely scenario would have left it buried
beneath untold tons of flood gravel.

By chance, however, the iceberg that held the meteorite remained intact
and bobbed downstream through the Columbia Basin. It was still large
enough to hold the meteorite and stay on top of the torrent when it
turned the corner at Wallula Gap and squeezed through the Columbia
Gorge. Riding with the portion of the flood waters that branched south
into the Willamette Valley, the iceberg and its cargo finally came to
rest in a back eddy near the mouth of the present-day Tualatin River -
only one of many glacial flood erratics that settled down along the high
water mark of the Ice Age floods in the Willamette Hills, around 380
feet above sea level.

There our meteorite - ours now because, according to Pugh's theory, it
belongs not just to the Willamette, but to the entire route of the Ice
Age Floods - was discovered by Clackamas tribal ancestors who recognized
the unique properties of the ringing stone. The Clackamas called the
stone Tomonowos, which modern linguists translate roughly as "heavenly
visitor." And, although in 1904, two Oregon juries and one state Supreme
Court judge did not pay particular attention to tribal usage, or to one
Welsh farmer's claim of possession, times have changed.

In the late 1990s, the Museum of Natural History moved the Willamette
Meteorite yet again, mounting it as a centerpiece of their new Cullman
Hall of the Universe. At about that time the Cultural Board of Oregon's
Grand Ronde Reservation - a consortium of native peoples assembled from
all the displaced Columbia Gorge and Coastal tribes who had been pushed
into the Willamette backwaters by white settlers - discovered accounts
of the 1904 Clackamas elder testimony at Ellis Hughes's trial. They took
the stories of Wochimo and Susap and Sol Clark to New York City as part
of a new effort to restore the meteor to the Willamette Valley. The
Native American Graves and Repatriation Act forced the museum to take
the native accounts seriously, and an agreement was forged.

Through the permission of the Grand Ronde, the Willamette Meteor can
remain at the Natural History Museum in New York as long as the tribe
has access to it for cultural and religious purposes. In a separate
agreement, the museum has created an ongoing internship for any Native
American youth who come to the museum to study the museum's extensive
collections of tribal artifacts. And as a final stipulation, if the
Museum of Natural History ever decides to retire the Willamette
Meteorite from public use and study, its ownership would revert back to
the tribe. It is possible, therefore, that at some future date the
wonderful cone-shaped stone would begin once more to journey across
space and time, perhaps passing through Spokane again as it makes one
more orbit of our Earth.

Jack Nisbet will present "The Longest Journey: Tracking the Willamette
Meteorite" on Wednesday, June 27, at 7 pm at the MAC's Eric A. Johnston
Auditorium. Admission: $7; $5 for MAC members. (Admission fee gets you
in to all exhibits, including "A T. rex Named Sue.") Call 325-SEAT.
Received on Fri 26 Oct 2007 08:22:54 PM PDT