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A
long time ago in a land not very far away a large rock fell out of
the sky and landed just a little shy of present-day Albany,
Texas. The rock stayed there for untold centuries, an object of
reverence for generations of Native Americans. The Comanche name for
it translates into Medicine Rock.
Anglos called it Texas Iron.
Indian trader Anthony Glass and his band of like-minded comrades were
the first white men to lay eyes on Texas Iron. Indian agent John Sibley,
at the invitation of Taovaya chief Awahakei, sent a trade expedition
to the Taovaya-Wichita villages along the Red River in 1809.
Glass and his men were motivated by tales of wild horse prairies and
vast quantities of silver ore deposits on the Southern Plains. Glass
paid attention when he was told by a native Spaniard named Tatesuck,
who had been captured by the Wichita as a small boy and was now a
distinguished warrior, of a large rock that was like iron, yet it
did not rust. Glass immediately thought the rock might be platinum,
its value priceless.
In late October, Glass and his men, after a two week journey, first
laid eyes on Texas Iron. “We approached the place where the metal
was; the Indians observing considerable ceremony as they approached,”
Glass wrote in his journal. “We found it resting on its heaviest end
and leaning towards one side and under it were some Pipes and Trinkets
which had been placed there by some Indians who had been healed by
visiting it. The mass was very little embedded in the place where
we found it. There is no reason to think it had ever been moved by
man.”
That was about to change. All the starry-eyed traders had to do was
move the rock from where it was to a place where it could be sold
to the highest bidder. A year after the initial foray into the Red
River country, two factions of Glass’s original expedition set out
independently to retrieve the rock.
The group that got there first also got there with the least; they
had no way of transporting a ton of rock to the Red River, much less
floating it on the river to Natchitoches. They managed to roll it
under a “flat stone” and cover it with some grass before setting out
to get some horeses and tools.
A second group, led by George Schamp, Ezra McCall and some other traders,
convinced the Taovaya and Comanche to sell them the big iron that
would not rust. Schamp’s group eventually found the rock where the
first group had hidden it and made a truck wagon to which they harnessed
six horses. In such a manner, they began the laborious process of
hauling it to the Red River for transport downstream.
As if moving an almost immovable object (it later weighed out at just
over a ton) wasn’t hard enough the men found themselves afoot after
all their horses were stolen en route to the Red River. They secured
more horses, possibly from the same Indians who stole theirs to begin
with, and made their way to the Spanish
Fort crossing on the Red River.
The traders constructed a sturdy raft from a large walnut tree and
floated Texas Iron down the Red River to Natchitoches. There it stayed
for the better part of a year, a marvel and a mystery. Sibley sent
it to New Orleans for an appraisal but no one there could say for
sure what it was or wasn’t. Sibley then sent it to New York for a
proper assessment by experts.
Texas Iron’s arrival in New York corresponded with a notion that these
rocks people were finding but no one could identify were not of this
world, that they came from outer space: meteorites. Benjamin Silliman
confirmed that this was one of those rocks, mostly iron and nickel,
and practically worthless.
The disappointed traders never truly believed it, even as they sold
it for a pittance to mineralogist George C. Gibbs, who loaned it to
the New York Historical Society. The collection was given to the Lyceum
of Natural History in New York, where Gibbs was also a member, in
1829.
Gibbs died in 1833. His meteorite came close to being put in the ground
at the same time. His widow happened to be passing through Central
Park one day when she saw some Irish laborers digging a huge hole.
She asked what they were doing and was shocked and dismayed to find
that the Lyceum, vacating its headquarters on the edge of the park,
was preparing to bury her husband’s meteorite; they didn’t know what
else to do with it. She rescued it and presented it to Yale University
in memory of her husband. It’s still there today, where it’s known
as the Red River Meteorite.
Back in Texas, it’s still called Texas Iron.
© Clay Coppedge
July 8, 2014 Column
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