The Red River, Texas, iron is still another famous meteorite. It was originally discovered by Pawnee and Hietan Indians, and a group of them took a party of traders, in 1808, to the site. Two years later, two rival parties, each led by a man who had been a member of the 1808 trading expedition, began a search for the meteorite. The members of one of the two parties were from Nacogodoches, Texas. They reached the meteorite first but had left home so hurriedly on their eager hunt that they were not properly prepared to move so large a mass. They went away from the site to get horses and a wagon, after they had laboriously hidden the meteorite under a huge flat stone, to prevent the other party from finding it. The members of the other party, hailing from Natchitoches, Louisiana, set out better prepared. After a lengthy hunt, they finally found the hidden meteorite. Using tools they had the foresight to bring, they built a truck wagon and drove away with their prize. Eventually, the Red River meteorite, weighing 1,635 pounds, became a part of the collection at Yale University. But two other, smaller, masses of the same metal, known in the early days to the Pawnees and a few traders, remain still undiscovered in the Red River area. 4. WHEN IS A CRATER A METEORITE CRATER? Not all meteorites form craters at impact, as the larger Ussuri fragments did. Even the largest mass of the Norton meteorite merely buried itself in a funnel-like hole only about 10 feet deep. And the Russian investigators found a number of the lighter Ussuri fragments at the bottom of small penetration funnels. Cosmic missiles that are large enough to blast out craters in the ground are of particular interest to science, however, not only because of the extraordinarily intense light, sound, and other effects that accompany their fall, but also because they produce characteristic and long-lasting basin-like features in the outer shell of the earth. Natural processes that change the surface features of the earth have long been the subjects of field studies by scientists. Geologists have carefully investigated the major folds formed in the earth’s crust by mountain-building forces, the clefts and depressions resulting from earthquake activity and erosion, and the vast plains leveled off by the scouring action of great ice-sheets. All of these different natural processes, though, have one thing in common: their source is the earth-body itself. They take place either _within_ the earth’s crust as a result of local shifts or changes in pressure (like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions), or _on_ the surface of the earth as a result of the action of water or of changes in temperature (like erosion and glaciation).