Ancient Places (5 page)

Something about this boulder piqued Hughes’s curiosity, and the next day he brought his neighbor Bill Dale to the spot. “I sat down on the rock,” Hughes recounted. “It was about one and a half feet above the ground and very flat.” Bill Dale quickly realized this was no ordinary stone. “Hughes,” said Dale, “have you seen this rock before?”

“Yes,” Hughes answered. “I saw it yesterday.” He leaned down to pick up a handy white cobble and hammered on the outcrop. It rang like a bell.

“Hughes,” Dale said, upon hearing those clear tones, “I’ll bet this is a meteor.”

Betting on a meteor—or meteorite, because it was definitely on Earth, not in space—was not such a long shot in that time and place. As early as 1856,
a geologist exploring in Oregon’s southwest corner sent samples of what he thought might be a large meteorite to a Boston chemist for analysis. Assays confirmed his guess, leading to a succession of searchers who tried unsuccessfully to relocate that find. Another southern Oregon resident caused a buzz when he fished
a fifteen-pound aerolite, or stony meteorite, out of a creek in 1894. That happened to be the same year that Arctic explorer and savvy self-promoter Robert Peary made a visit to Greenland. There, Cape York Inuit guided him to their traditional source of iron for tools, which turned out to be a massive iron meteorite. For the next three years, the explorer’s crew struggled to collect three rough chunks to deliver to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The largest piece of that trio was shaped roughly like a tent and figured prominently in an important Cape York cultural story. Ignoring this age-old connection, Peary dubbed
it with the nonsense name of Ahnighito. He declared it to be the largest meteorite ever mounted for exhibition, and in fact, it retains its heavyweight title of more than thirty tons to this day. The museum eventually purchased it from Peary’s widow for $40,000.

Ellis Hughes and Bill Dale might well have read one of the many popular accounts describing Peary’s profitable adventure, and the Oregon pair certainly held similar ambitious goals. The thirty-seven-year-old Hughes had grown up in Wales, where people seem to inherit a close knowledge of mining, and he had worked in Australian mines along the way to his West Linn farmstead. Bill Dale was a traveling prospector of the same breed, and his relationship with Ellis Hughes was close enough that some contemporary accounts described him as boarding in the Hughes household. One reporter stated that “together they roamed over the hills seeking minerals;” another identified them as “a couple of prospectors who thought at first they had uncovered a big vein of iron.”

After considerable digging and some preliminary assay work, Hughes and Dale “soon learned that their rocky mass was indeed iron, but also discovered that it was an isolated block and a meteorite instead of a ‘reef’ upon which could be located a great mine, as they supposed at first.” They also determined that the land surrounding
their lodestone was owned by the Oregon Iron and Steel company.

This local company had a checkered history that stretched back to the 1860s, when investors constructed the first iron smelting furnace west of the Mississippi to process a brown hematite ore quarried at nearby Lake Oswego. To fuel its smelter, Oregon Iron and Steel had acquired timbered properties that could supply cordwood for making charcoal. Although by 1902 their furnace
had lain cold for several years, Hughes and Dale had no wish to generate any excitement, and so moved cautiously. They covered the meteorite with dirt and brush, then attempted to purchase the acreage from the company as common farmland. To finance the deal, Bill Dale traveled to eastern Oregon, where he hoped to sell the rights to one of his mining claims near Baker City. Although his name appeared as the meteorite’s discoverer in a few subsequent newspaper articles, he apparently never returned to Clackamas County.

Hughes remained on the farm with his family. After a few weeks, they gave up on Dale but not on the stone. “My wife had ideas,” Hughes later said. “She was afraid somebody would go up and get it the next day.” Although sharing the concern of his wife, Phebe, the Welshman crafted a plan that required a bit more patience, and waited for the winter rains to ease before setting his scheme into motion.

To begin, he blazed a road about eight hundred feet in the wrong direction, so that his neighbors would not catch on to his game. He then spent several months in the spring and summer of 1903 cutting a direct path between his house and the meteorite. Next, the resourceful ex-miner constructed “an ingenious car with log body-timbers and sections of tree trunks as wheels.” In late summer, relying only upon Phebe, their fifteen-year-old son, and a horse for assistance, he embarked on an odyssey of practical engineering.

After clearing away his brushy camouflage from the previous fall, Hughes positioned his cart downhill, set up a series of jackscrews, and began, inch by inch, to raise the stone. As the meteorite slowly emerged from its hole, he blocked the tilted side progressively higher until it overbalanced and flopped onto his makeshift truck. “It couldn’t have been done better if you’d
laid it there with your own hands,” he recounted years later, still savoring the moment.

Hughes and son secured their cargo to the cart, then used more chains to anchor a capstan into position about a hundred feet down their rough-hewn road. Known to local loggers as a “Spanish windlass,” this contraption consisted of a stout section of log mounted upright and fixed with perpendicular spokes to turn it. According to Hughes, it was all constructed out of whatever “hash” he found lying around the house. He rigged a system of heavy ropes, pulley blocks, and a hundred feet of wire cable between cart and capstan, then encouraged his horse to plod around in circles, drawing the heavily burdened cart forward. Each length of the cable lurched around the capstan inch by torturous inch, and many hours were spent locked motionless behind the myriad stumps of the smelter company’s woodlot. With more than half a mile of open ground between their starting point and the safety of home, Hughes estimated that the greatest distance gained in any one day never exceeded seventy-five feet. When autumn rains turned the rough path into mud, the team laid down a track of sawn planks and carried on. It was mid-October before they had the finish line in sight.

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
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.