Ellis Hughes
The Oregon settler who secretly dragged the 15-tonne Willamette iron onto his own land in 1902, and lost it in court.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Welsh-born American
- Field
- Miner and farmer
Ellis Hughes was a Welsh-born miner who settled near the town of West Linn, in the Willamette valley of Oregon. In the autumn of 1902, while exploring wooded land nearby with a neighbour, he came across a huge, pitted mass of iron partly buried in the ground.
The land did not belong to Hughes but to the Oregon Iron and Steel Company. Hoping to keep the meteorite, Hughes decided to move it to his own property, about 1.2 kilometres away. With his teenage son and a horse turning a capstan, he dragged the iron, about 15.5 tonnes, on a wooden cart over rough ground. The job took about three months.
Hughes then charged visitors to see it. When the steel company learned where it had come from, they took him to court. In 1905 the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that the meteorite belonged to the owner of the land where it was found. The iron was later bought and given to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where it is still the largest meteorite in the United States.
The case is still cited as a lesson about meteorites and land ownership. The iron also had a much older history: the Clackamas people, now part of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, knew it as Tomanowos and held it sacred. Since 2000 an agreement has let tribal members hold a ceremony with it each year.
On the timeline
- Autumn 1902Ellis Hughes moves the Willamette meteorite