 In 1903, mining engineer and businessman Daniel M. Barringer suggested that the crater had been produced by the impact of a large iron-metallic meteorite.Barringer's company, the Standard Iron Company, staked a mining claim to the land and received a land patent signed by Theodore Roosevelt for around the center of the crater in 1903.The claim was divided into four quadrants coming from the center clockwise from north-west named Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.