[meteorite-list] Largest single Pallasite?

[Robert Warren]

Geetings and salutations,

I am in agreement with Al Mitterling, concerning the Port Orford Meteorite.  
If anyone would read carefully Plotkins book put out by the Smithsonian, 
check all of his references, and then look at the information he does not 
quote from, or refer to, they would get a completely different picture.  
Plotkin refers to a series of letters, or correspondence from two gentlemen, 
who were on a steamboat with Evans going up the Missouri river, towards a 
point that they intended to get off and proceed to the Bad Lands.  Before 
they got on the boat, in the correspondence that Plotkin does not quote or 
refer to, they say how Evans loaned them money so that they could buy the 
supplies they needed for their trip.  They were on a fixed budget, with no 
idea as to how much anything would cost, in the then frontier state of 
Missouri.  They didn't know about the cost of mules, horses, food, camping 
gear, or even the fees for getting on board the steamboat.  But Plotkin, 
leads us to believe that Evans could not manage money.  That is a recurring 
theme throughout his work.  But that theme is unfounded.  He says that Evans 
concocted the hoax so as to pay off debts incurred sometime between 1856 and 
1858.  However, he does not mention how in 1858, there was a world wide 
economic panic, or what we would call today, a depression.  He does not 
mention how one gentleman in California, at the same time, was asked by his 
superiors in St. Louis, as to what he thought should be done with the bank 
they owned, a branch that he was the manager of, in San Francisco?  His 
response was to close it, which they did.  They transferred him to New York 
City, where the same thing happened.  That gentlemans name was William 
Tecumseh Sherman, of Sherman's march to the sea fame during the civil war.  
Plotkin  makes it sound as if Evans was the only one in financial trouble.  
Yet if anyone reads through a history of Geology in the United States, he 
would find instance after instance, where almost everyone contracted by the 
U. S. Government for a period of over one hundred years, starting in the 
1830's and going into the 1940's, has been short changed, by not being paid 
enough for their efforts, and in some cases they never recieved payment at 
all, even though they had a contract for doing the work and being paid for 
it.  One such case is of a gentleman, who was contracted to survey the State 
of Michigan, in the 1830's.  He hired a couple of men to help him.  They 
were at work, when one of those men decided he knew more about what was 
going on, and he told both his boss, as well as the government.  The 
goverment decided to listen to that man, and did not pay the man in charge.  
He quit in disqust, and always held a grudge against the government until he 
died.  That man was C. T. Jackson, the very same chemist that Evans sent the 
samples to around 1858-1859.  It was he who found the sample that he said 
was a meteorite.  By the way, why in 1860, when he wrote the first paper 
about the Port Orford meteorite, why did he use the word "specimens", 
plural, not singular.  This would imply that he had more than one piece.  
Why is it that he himself had been collecting meteorites since the 1830's 
and nobody mentions that in relation to the suppossed hoax.  He himself put 
out a 3-6 page catalogue of meteorites in his own collection.  How do we not 
know that he kept the original Port Orford specimen (s), and substituted a 
piece of Imilac, which has made it down to us today, and history.  This 
would explain why Lincoln La Paz back in the 1930's during the course of his 
searches for the Port Orford, he was told by the Museum in Boston that they 
still had the Port Orford in their collection, which by that time, the 
SMithsonian claims to have already purchased it from them.

The long and the short of it, is simply this.  There are too many questions 
about Plotkin's work that does not correlate with the historical record.  I 
suggest everyone should get out and research it, and not take the word of 
Plotkin, just because he has the Smithsonian behind them.

Bob Warren

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