Ancient Places (6 page)

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 possess 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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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 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.