Boundaries
by Jack Nisbet

Jack Nisbet is the author of The Mapmaker's Eye, Sources of the River, Purple Flat Top, Singing Grass, Burning Sage and Visible Bones. His newest, The Collector, is due out in October.

The Longest Journey
March 2007

Illustration by Emily Nisbet from photographs in Henry Ward's "The Willamette Meteorite," Proceedings of the Rochester Academy of Sciences Vol 4. (March 24, 1904), pp.136-148.

In the fall of 1902, Willamette Valley farmer Ellis Hughes was cutting wood near the present town of West Linn when lunchtime came around. "I sat down on the rock," Hughes later recalled. "It was about 1 1/2 ft 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 story of the Willamette meteorite. In another version it turns out that Hughes, a native Welshman, had spent time working in the Australian mining industry, and Dale was a wandering prospector; together they were on the lookout for mineral wealth. Early on Mr. Hughes figured out that this was no ordinary boulder, and that it would take finesse and skill to capitalize on his find.

The meteor lay on land already claimed by Oregon Iron and Steel Company, so he remained very quiet about his discovery. In the summer of 1903, with only his 15-year-old son and a willing mule to help out, Ellis Hughes began an odyssey of practical engineering. Using heavy ropes, pulley blocks, a simple capstan anchored by chains, a length of wire cable, and "an ingenious car with log body-timbers and sections of tree trunks as wheels," he secretly turned the bell-shaped meteor out of the ground onto his cart. Over the next few weeks he laboriously transported it, a few feet at a time, three-quarters of mile to his own place. Once the capstan and mule had completed their work, Hughes put a roof over his prize and let local curiosity seekers have a look for 25¢ a head.

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. Ward published a very detailed account of what he declared to be the largest meteor recovered 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 the flattened back side. He said that the apex of the cone must have formed the leading edge of the missile as it entered the atmosphere, and described the relentless annealing effects of terrific heat and force as it entered the earth's atmosphere. He measured the length of the meteorite at a little over ten feet, its breadth across the base as seven feet, the vertical height to the summit of the dome as four feet, and the total circumference of the egg-shaped base as 25 feet 4 inches.

Back in New York State, Ward sent samples off to two separate labs for chemical analysis, and wasn't surprised when they came back at over 91% iron and around 8% nickel, with traces of cobalt and phosphorus thrown in. He recognized that the rock had lost a lot of its weight in oxidation over time, and that the acid reaction of iron sulfide with local rain and vegetation had eaten away softer areas of the stone to create "a confusion of kettle-holes; of wash-bowls; of small bath-tubs."

He estimated its weight to be around fifteen and a half tons.

The public viewers around Ellis Hughes's shed, meanwhile, were much more interested in the brouhaha that 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 soon filed suit to reclaim ownership of the space rock, and eventually won it back in court. The new owners christened their rock the Willamette Meteor and moved it to Portland, where it was presented, with much fanfare, at the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition. After the celebrating ended they sold their goods to a wealthy benefactor of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. When the meteorite was paraded through town to assume its place in the grand museum, the wheels on the cart that carried it sank into the street.

At the Museum of Natural History, scientists continued to marvel at the meteor, probing its crystalline structure for clues relating to its history in deep time. A scientific paper published in 1975 theorized that its origins lay with a planet in our primordial solar system, around a billion years before the present. One cataclysmic collision tore the planet apart, scattering pieces of it into new orbits around the sun. A second event caromed the object onto a path that eventually sent it plunging to our Earth.

A shallow depression in the Willamette Valley, where Ellis Hughes first found the meteor, added another layer to the story. When geologist Richard Pugh relocated the sinkhole in 1986, he found several inches of rust that had flaked off the meteor during its sojourn in the soil, as well as traces of nickel in soil samples extending several feet out from the bowl. More importantly, Pugh found a light-colored twelve-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's conclusion, now generally accepted by other geologists, is that the Willamette Meteor originally plunged to earth in southeastern British Columbia or northwestern Montana several hundred million years ago. During the most recent glacial epoch, less than a hundred thousand years ago, a lobe of advancing ice captured the meteor and started it on yet another journey. During one of the Lake Missoula floods at the end of the last ice age, the meteor rode south on an iceberg that was flushed through the crumbling ice dam at Lake Pend Oreille and continued downstream on the Columbia. The iceberg made a left turn at the Willamette Valley and finally came to rest in a back eddy near the mouth of present-day Tualitin Creek.

There it was discovered not by Ellis Hughes at all, but by Clackamas tribal ancestors who also recognized the unique properties of the ringing stone. The Clackamas called the stone Tomonowos, which translates roughly as "heavenly visitor." We know this because Ellis Hughes called in elders at the meteor's ownership trial in 1904. The elders testified that tribal people had dipped their arrowheads in water that gathered in the rock's strange kettles to add power to their hunting efforts, and also used the water for healing and vision quest rituals. The Oregon judge in 1904 did not pay particular attention to tribal usage, or to Hughes's claim of possession, but times have changed.

In the late 1990s, the Museum of Natural History built an entire building around the Willamette Meteorite, casting it as the centerpiece of their new Cullman Hall of the Universe. When the Cultural Board of Oregon's Grand Ronde Reservation discovered accounts of the 1904 Clackamas elder testimony and took them to the museum 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 them seriously. In an agreement with the Grand Ronde, the 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 created an ongoing internship with Native American youth who want to come to the museum to study their extensive collections of artifacts. And as a final stipulation, if the museum ever decides to retire the Willamette Meteorite from public use and study, its ownership would revert back to the tribe. It is possible that at some future date the cone-shaped stone would begin once more to journey across space and time.

Jack Nisbet Homepage