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have filtered into the region since the floods receded, from the breadth of Grand Coulee to a cool cavern just wide enough to slide into, and just right for storing food.

III
T HE L ONGEST J OURNEY
An Intelligent Farmer
    This is a story about a rock that flew. One thread of the tale begins in Oregon with a pioneer farmer namedEllis Hughes, who worked a small parcel of pleasantly rolling land southeast of Portland between the hamlets of West Linn and Willamette, near the border of present-day Clackamas County. On a November day in 1902, Hughes was walking home from cutting firewood for the Willamette grade school when he spotted part of a rusty crosscut saw blade about fifty feet off his path. No one wasted valuable steel in those days, so he ventured into the woods for a closer look. There he found the saw piece resting against a large “metallic-looking rock protruding above the ground.” Nestled within a grove of recently cut stumps, the greater portion of themass was buried in the earth. A thicket of hazel bushes helped to mask its presence from the trail.
    Something about this boulder piqued Hughes’s curiosity, and the next day he brought his neighbor Bill Dale to the spot. “I sat down on the rock,” Hughes recounted. “It was about one and a half feet above the ground and very flat.” Bill Dale quickly realized this was no ordinary stone. “Hughes,” said Dale, “have you seen this rock before?”
    “Yes,” Hughes answered. “I saw it yesterday.” He leaned down to pick up a handy white cobble and hammered on the outcrop. It rang like a bell.
    “Hughes,” Dale said, upon hearing those clear tones, “I’ll bet this is a meteor.”
    Betting on a meteor—or meteorite, because it was definitely on Earth, not in space—was not such a long shot in that time and place. As early as 1856,a geologist exploring in Oregon’s southwest corner sent samples of what he thought might be a large meteorite to a Boston chemist for analysis. Assays confirmed his guess, leading to a succession of searchers who tried unsuccessfully to relocate that find. Another southern Oregon resident caused a buzz when he fisheda fifteen-pound aerolite, or stony meteorite, out of a creek in 1894. That happened to be the same year that Arctic explorer and savvy self-promoter Robert Peary made a visit to Greenland. There, Cape York Inuit guided him to their traditional source of iron for tools, which turned out to be a massive iron meteorite. For the next three years, the explorer’s crew struggled to collect three rough chunks to deliver to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The largest piece of that trio was shaped roughly like a tent and figured prominently in an important Cape York cultural story. Ignoring this age-old connection, Peary dubbedit with the nonsense name of Ahnighito. He declared it to be the largest meteorite ever mounted for exhibition, and in fact, it retains its heavyweight title of more than thirty tons to this day. The museum eventually purchased it from Peary’s widow for $40,000.
    Ellis Hughes and Bill Dale might well have read one of the many popular accounts describing Peary’s profitable adventure, and the Oregon pair certainly held similar ambitious goals. The thirty-seven-year-old Hughes had grown up in Wales, where people seem to inherit a close knowledge of mining, and he had worked in Australian mines along the way to his West Linn farmstead. Bill Dale was a traveling prospector of the same breed, and his relationship with Ellis Hughes was close enough that some contemporary accounts described him as boarding in the Hughes household. One reporter stated that “together they roamed over the hills seeking minerals;” another identified them as “a couple of prospectors who thought at first they had uncovered a big vein of iron.”
    After considerable digging and some preliminary assay work, Hughes and Dale “soon learned that their rocky mass was indeed iron, but also discovered