(I added citations to the story and rearranged my poor chronology!)

I’ve been looking up stories about meteorites and impact craters in Iowa. (Mostly.) There are two very ancient and very large impact structures, one 74 millions years old near Manson, Iowa and the second near Decorah, from 458 million years ago. Both structures were ultimately recognized because they were causing anomalies in the local water sources. https://www.thegazette.com/outdoors/tales-of-iowas-rarest-stone/

Iowa water is notoriously hard, as is a lot of the midwest. Mom used to comment on this, because all that calcium from limestone produces better teeth than water from granitic rock sources. However, in Manson, the water was naturally soft. The Manson structure is deeply buried but the theory is that, where the rest of the state water runs through limestone, in Manson the limestone was vaporized at the site of the impact, and presumably mixed with whatever fell. 

In Decorah, the problem is slightly different. The impact created an impermeable layer  of shale beneath the city, such that local wells are shallower than in other areas and their locations are more limited. When Decorah wants more water, the wells have to be drilled outside of the invisible-on-the-surface crater boundaries. 

The crater I heard about all my life is Meteor Crater in Arizona; I actually know nothing about it and didn’t look it up because I’m working on a plot point in a story that takes place in Iowa. The two craters in Iowa are not visible on the surface although in both cases the geology was known to be odd by the late 1800’s. Another crater in Indiana, Kentland Crater (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentland_crater) recognized in the 1880’s as odd, but not as a crater, is supposed to be the place where shattercones and coesite were first described. Coesite is shocked quartz and evidence of trauma, while shatter cones are cones (duh) that point in the direction of the blast that created the shape. 

No meteorite samples from any of these craters have ever been found. The rule seems to be that the bigger the meteorite, the more likely it vaporized in an explosion, as it hit the earth.

Iowa also has seven meteorite locations, places where meteorites have been found. For comparison, South Dakota has eleven. However, four of the meteorites that fell in Iowa were observed, falling and then breaking up. This is true of only one place in South Dakota.  Such falls are actually more properly described as meteorite showers, because hundreds of fragments can be retrieved.

The four observed falls in Iowa were near Marion, Iowa in 1847, near Amana in 1875 (sometimes called the Homestead fall), near Estherville in 1879, and near Forest City, in Winnebago County, in 1890. 1929JRASC..23..402W

A complication in the general discussion of dates is that many pieces from the 1879 Estherville fall were found in 1890. That meteorite was seen to split into three pieces as it fell. Two of the large pieces were quickly found (I almost said swiftly but this is already going to sound like the Hardy boys…) and ended up being fought over, both physically and in court. The various articles I have read all simply say that by the light of a single lantern one of the large specimens passed into the possession of someone from Minnesota (possibly the University).

A meteorite hunter, named Charles Birge, bought the farm where the second piece of the Estherville meteorite had fallen. It belonged to a family who had fallen behind on their payments to the railroad. They lost physical possession of the meteorite to some boys, who first tried to interest them in the rock and then tried to dig it up themselves. The boys eventually paid a professional well-digger to retrieve the meteorite. Birge sued the boys, took possession of the meteorite, sold it to a British museum, and in a remarkable twist, paid off the farm and handed the deed back to the original owners.

The third piece of the Estherville meteorite was found in 1890. It had fallen in a slough and sunk five feet down. Two trappers found it during the winter and as the story goes, in the spring there was been a prairie fire which left the ground bare for many miles. This piece did not go to court. People went out on picnics, and hunted for meteorite bits. Some 5000 pieces of the iron meteorite were found (shiny pieces!). Many of them were made into heirlooms of various kinds. 

Oddly, one reason that so many pieces were preserved in this instance is that people knew they were hunting meteorites. When an iron meteorite falls, the shiny bits are often believed to be silver and the meteorite gets ground down in an effort to release the silver. No silver, and no rock left. 

The meteorite shower in Forest City in 1890 caused a stampede of rock hunters. A geologist from Minnesota reached the farm where one part of the meteorite had fallen just ahead of geologists from the University of Iowa. He outbid them only to find out that he had paid money to a tenant on the farm rather than the owner. The owner got the sheriff to repossess the meteorite and then displayed it at a state fair.

The story can be found here https://ouriowaheritage.com/romancing-the-meteorite/ and discusses one of the lawyers who worked on one of the cases. It has a lot of entertaining detail.

Briefly, our Minnesota hero managed to get the law back on his side for a day and took possession of his seventy pound rock from the bank where it had been kept. He knew his triumph would be brief so he ran down the street clutching his specimen and dodging in and out of a crowd that had showed up to stop him from taking the meteorite out of Iowa. He jumped into a waiting carriage and drove off. As soon as he was out of sight he paid off that carriage, and got a farmer to drive him over the line into Minnesota. The Supreme Court of Iowa eventually ruled that Mr. Minnesota had no right to the rock. However, by that time the University of Minnesota had the rock in its collection and took no notice of the Iowa court. 

One of the questions that was eventually settled in court, was whether a rock from the heavens was the property of the landowner where it fell or whether it was just treasure that anyone who found it could have. The outright indifference of some people to the rocks that had fallen on their property encouraged the second idea. But when the rocks had been retrieved and other people were making bucks, the property owners got a lot more interested.

Ultimately, the point was made law. The rock belonged to the person on whose property it fell, and it’s not a good idea to spend your money digging on someone else’s property. 

(The new image at the top is of Saint Elizabeth of Portugal’s tomb. It’s pixelated because it was taken on someone’s private phone when they visited Portugal but it is so beautiful I had to put it up briefly.See https://wordpress.com/post/catholicfictioncatholicscience.com/1378)