In the woods above the Willamette near what is now West Linn there was a rock that rang like a bell when you hit it. It weighs about fifteen and a half tons, mostly iron with some eight percent nickel, and it is the largest meteorite ever found in North America. The Clackamas people, who lived along this stretch of the river, knew it long before any settler did, and they called it Tomanowos.
Sky, earth and water
The iron is older than the Earth as we know it. It formed in the core of a small early planet that broke up billions of years ago, and at some point a piece of it fell to Earth. It did not land here. Geologists think it came down in the north, in what is now Canada or Montana, and rode the ice of the glacial dam that held back Lake Missoula. When the dam failed, again and again near the end of the last ice age, the floods carried ice and everything frozen in it down the Columbia and up into the Willamette Valley, and one block of ice dropped the meteorite in the hills above the river.
For the Clackamas it was a sacred thing that united the sky, the earth and the water. Its surface is pitted with deep hollows, and rain gathered in them. People came to it for spiritual purposes for generations, until settlement and removal sent the Clackamas to the Grand Ronde reservation in the 1850s.
The ninety-day heist
In the fall of 1902 a Welsh immigrant named Ellis Hughes came on it while cutting firewood. Hughes struck it with a stone, heard it ring, and decided it was a meteorite worth money. It lay on land belonging to the Oregon Iron and Steel Company. Hughes and his neighbor had planned to buy the land, but Hughes moved the rock instead. With his stepson, a horse, a capstan and a heavy wooden cart, he hauled it three-quarters of a mile onto his own property, a few feet at a time, over about ninety days, and built a shed over it and charged admission to see the Willamette Meteorite.
People who came noticed the long track through the woods. The company sued, and in 1905 the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that the meteorite belonged to the owner of the land it had fallen on. Oregon Iron and Steel displayed it at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland that year, then sold it for $26,000 to Mrs. William E. Dodge Jr. of New York, who gave it to the American Museum of Natural History. It has been on display there ever since.
Back in the hands of its people, in New York
In 1999, under the federal law that lets tribes reclaim sacred objects from museums, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde asked for Tomanowos back, and the claim went to court. In June 2000 the tribes and the museum settled. The meteorite stays in New York, displayed alongside an account of what it means to the Clackamas and their descendants; Grand Ronde members can hold a private ceremony with it once a year; and if the museum ever stops displaying it, ownership goes to the tribes.
The ceremony is held. Every year people from Grand Ronde travel across the country to stand with the rock their ancestors knew in the hills above the Willamette. In Oregon, a plaster cast stands outside the University of Oregon's natural history museum in Eugene, and another replica stands in West Linn, near where the bell-ringing rock once lay.