Who hasn’t experienced the momentary, magical thrill of seeing a meteor flash across the night sky in the corner of your eye? It vanishes almost instantly yet its vapor trail lingers longer in your imagination.
In Bowbells, a fellow named Isaac “Ike” Ross witnessed a real meteor, close-up, on a summer’s night. What may have started as a romantic, peripheral vision turned into a blazing meteorite that scared the living daylights out of Ike because it nearly hit him squarely.
It was a July night. Ike Ross was sitting alone at the back door of his farm home, located four miles south of Bowbells, when he saw a brilliant ball of fire descending from the heavens. Ike heard the fearful swish of the shooting star as it passed through space on its downward course. He just about jumped out of his chair when the meteorite struck the earth within twenty feet of where he was sitting.
Aghast, Ike watched as the meteorite pierced the old sod-construction building that served as his seed barn. The force of its descent drove it through several feet of the shack’s wall before it embedded itself in the earth to a depth of at least two feet.
There was nothing magical about this trauma. Ike later said he was “skeered nigh to death.”
After calming himself, Ike went to bed but slept fitfully, full of fright. The next morning, he warily investigated the hole in his sod building. Taking a spade, Ike “set to work to dig the thing out,” and “after considerable hard work,” he unearthed an interstellar stone.
It was burnt perfectly black, with a peculiar sulfuric odor. Ike reckoned it weighed about four pounds. He brought the meteorite into Bowbells right away, and it was the center of attraction all day, clearly no ordinary stone. The blackened rock emitted a strong smell of sulfur. Some townspeople offered to buy it, but Ike “refused to part with the rock.”
It was on this date, back in 1910, that the Grand Forks Herald printed a story of Ike Ross’s close encounter with a blazing meteorite. No one knows what happened afterward to Ike Ross’s “shooting star.” Geology experts in North Dakota later termed it an “unconfirmed” sighting.
Nonetheless, Bowbells’ Ike Ross, who lived from 1853 to 1923, gave a fearful description of what it felt like to have a meteorite smash into the earth nearby.
Dakota Datebook written by Steve Hoffbeck
Sources:
- “Meteor Fell,” Grand Forks Herald, August 6, 1910, p. 2.
- “He Saw The Meteor Fall,” Bowbells Tribune, July 22, 1910, p. 3.
- “Meteorite Falls Near Bowbells,” Fargo Forum, July 25, 1910, p. 2.
- “Nubs of News,” Grand Forks Herald, August 13, 1910, p. 4.
- Edward C. Murphy and Nels F. Forsman, “Meteorites In North Dakota,” Educational Series No. 23, N.D. Geological Survey, 1998, p. 4, 12.
