Tomanowos & The Ice Age Flood: How North America’s Largest Meteorite Landed in West Linn

1. Tomanowos & The Missoula Floods

The 31,000-pound iron-nickel meteorite was not formed in Oregon; it floated into West Linn embedded within a massive glacial iceberg during the Ice Age. Over 13,000 years ago, as the glacial Lake Missoula ice dam ruptured across modern Montana, cataclysmic floodwaters surged down the Columbia River gorge. Backed up into the Willamette Valley, the temporary lake deposited the space rock on what is now a tranquil hillside above the Tualatin River basin near Rosemont Road.

For countless generations before white settlers entered Clackamas County, the Clackamas people held the celestial rock in deep spiritual veneration. Known as Tomanowos ("Heavenly Visitor"), tribal warriors washed their faces in the rainwater pooled in its hollow basins before hunting expeditions and dipped their arrow points into the sacred water for spiritual potency.

2. The 90-Day Wooden Heist of 1902

In the autumn of 1902, Welsh immigrant and miner Ellis Hughes discovered the meteorite on property owned by the Oregon Iron and Steel Company. Realizing its immense scientific and monetary value, Hughes devised an audacious plan to haul the 15.5-ton behemoth onto his own adjoining homestead three-quarters of a mile away.

Working in secretive silence with his 15-year-old son and an old horse, Hughes constructed a rugged 24-foot wooden capstan and a heavy timber carriage. Moving inch by grueling inch over hand-hewn logs, Hughes advanced the stone roughly 50 feet per day through dense Douglas fir timber. After 90 days of relentless physical labor, he enclosed the meteorite on his property and began charging tourists 25 cents per view.

3. The Supreme Court Showdown (1905)

The secret unravelled when an Oregon Iron and Steel Company forester noticed the freshly cleared skid road leading directly off their timber claim. The company immediately sued Hughes in Clackamas County Circuit Court for return of the meteorite. Hughes argued under mining "finder's law" that the stone was unowned abandoned chattel.

In the precedent-setting case Oregon Iron Co. v. Hughes (1905), the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that because the meteorite had rested naturally in the earth for millennia since the Ice Age, it constituted real property (real estate) belonging to the landowner rather than movable lost personal property. The stone was awarded to the corporation, subsequently purchased by philanthropist Mrs. William E. Dodge, and donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where it remains on permanent display.