Willamette

America's largest meteorite was secretly hauled through a forest by a settler – and is sacred to the people who knew it first.

Key facts

Type

Iron, IIIAB (medium octahedrite)

Fell or found

Found

Year

1902

Country

United States (Oregon)

Mass

about 15.5 tonnes

Official name

Willamette

In the autumn of 1902, Ellis Hughes, a former miner living near the small town of West Linn in Oregon, came across a huge, pitted lump of metal in the woods. He recognised it as something extraordinary. There was a catch: it lay not on his land but on property owned by the Oregon Iron and Steel Company. What happened next has become one of the great stories of meteorite history.

A secret three-month haul

Hughes decided to move the iron to his own land. With the help of his son and a horse, he built a sturdy wooden cart and a winch, and over roughly three months he inched the 15.5-tonne mass about 1.2 kilometres through the forest. He then put it on show and charged visitors to see it. The company soon realised where the meteorite had come from and took him to court. The judges ruled that a meteorite belongs to the owner of the land where it is found, a principle that still shapes meteorite law in many places today, and Hughes lost his prize.

In 1905 the meteorite was bought by Mrs William E. Dodge, a wealthy New York philanthropist, who gave it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where it has been displayed since 1906. Today it sits in the museum's Rose Center for Earth and Space.

Tomanowos

Long before any settler stumbled across it, the meteorite was known to the Clackamas people, whose descendants are now part of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon. They call it Tomanowos, often translated as 'visitor from the sky', and regard it as a spiritual being that unites sky, earth and water. Rainwater that collected in its hollows was traditionally considered to have special power.

In 1999 the Confederated Tribes asked for its return under a United States law protecting Native American sacred objects. The following year the museum and the tribes reached an agreement: the meteorite stays on public display in New York, tribal members may hold a private ceremony with it each year, and if the museum ever stops displaying it, it passes to the tribes. It is often held up as an example of museums and Indigenous communities finding common ground.

What the iron tells us

Willamette is an iron meteorite of the IIIAB group, the most common group of irons, made mostly of iron with around 8 per cent nickel. When a cut face is polished and etched, it shows the Widmanstätten pattern, a lattice of interlocking metal crystals that can only form when molten metal cools extraordinarily slowly, over millions of years, deep inside an asteroid's core.

Its most striking feature is the deep bowls and holes on its upper surface. These formed on Earth, not in space. Over thousands of years, rainwater reacted with iron sulphide minerals in the meteorite, producing acidic water that ate into the metal and hollowed out pits. Its underside, by contrast, is shaped more smoothly by its blazing passage through the atmosphere.

An ice age traveller

Another mystery is that there was no crater where Hughes found it. Most scientists think Willamette did not land in Oregon at all. During the last ice age, huge floods repeatedly burst out of a glacial lake in what is now Montana, sweeping across the north-west of the United States. The favoured explanation is that the meteorite, frozen into a block of ice, rode one of these floods and was dropped in the Willamette Valley when the ice melted, making it a meteorite that was moved twice: once by its fall from space, and once by an ice age deluge.

The largest meteorite ever found in the United States, Willamette has become a symbol of both cosmic history and the long human relationships with the land where such objects come to rest.

Did you know?

See more

Willamette in the catalogue