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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24, 2018
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND
Editor
Founded in 1873
JEREMY FELDMAN
Circulation Manager
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Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN
Production Manager
CARL EARL
Systems Manager
Water
under
the bridge
Compiled by Bob Duke
From the pages of Astoria’s daily newspapers
10 years ago this week —
2008
“Buildable lands” sounds like jargon, but a group of Asto-
ria leaders believes those two words signal the future of the
community.
Astoria has room for more than 1,600 new homes within
its existing urban growth boundary, a land-use consultant told
a joint work session of the Astoria City Council and Planning
Commission earlier this month. More than 600 would be sec-
ond homes.
Matt Hastie, of Portland-based Cogan Owens Cogan
LLC, presented the results of the buildable lands inventory
and needs assessment he had been working on since May,
with input from the commission. His inventory also showed
that more vacant land in Astoria is zoned for multiple family
dwelling and that there is a surplus of commercial land.
The National Marine Fisheries Service wants the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to deny a critical per-
mit for the Bradwood landing liquefied natural gas
project.
A five-foot bronze statue of Sacagawea and her baby was
stolen from Fort Clatsop Saturday night.
The statue — which stood at the Netul landing area —
disappeared sometime between 5:20 p.m. Saturday and 8:45
a.m. Sunday, according to Clatsop County Sheriff’s office Sgt.
Kristen Hanthorn. It had been cut from its mounting bolts.
Vandals who wrecked a fiber-optic phone line are
being blamed for causing the outage that left some
20,000 North Coast customers without phone ser-
vice for much of Friday and part of Saturday.
The phone service was back on track today, with
businesses lamenting disrupted operations and law
agencies seeking the vandals who broke the line in
the greater Kelso, Wash., area.
Clatsop County commissioners have a message for the
public: Stay out of the forests. They’re dangerous right now.
So, they are trying to move quickly to hire a forester. They
said they want a forester to assess the timber and get it har-
vested, to make the forests safer and to generate revenue from
timber before markets get flooded with blow-down.
The Daily Astorian
Dave Cook, of Bigby’s Tree Service, watches after a final cut from his chainsaw brings down the second of a pair
of cypress trees that had threatened the Flavel House in 2008.
50 years ago — 1968
Treasure hunter Tony Mareno will resume
drilling on the beach at Manzanita this weekend
just outside the steel casing sunk 40 feet into the
sand.
The Salem father of 11 said there is a possibil-
ity the big steel tube is about three feet off center
from where he believes a multi-million dollar Span-
ish treasure is buried.
Astoria wore a white snow blanket Friday morning for the
first time this winter.
The fall was about an inch deep on higher hills in town,
thinning out to only a trace reported at the Clatsop Airport sta-
tion of U.S. Weather bureau.
A truck-trailer rig loaded with lumber and an
SP&S freight train collided early Monday at a grade
crossing in downtown Warrenton, spewing two by
fours over the road.
Ray Garlock was driving a Warrenton Lumber
company truck towing two lumber-laden trailers
in tandem. Driving slowly on snow-covered Harbor
Drive, he apparently failed to see the approaching
train on a little used track along Harbor Drive, until
it was almost upon him.
75 years ago — 1943
The coffee situation in Astoria is becoming crit-
ical, D.J. Lewis, ration board chief, warned today
and it may become necessary to curtail the quo-
tas alloted to fraternal organizations, churches and
clubs.
There have been a number of complaints turned
into the board, Lewis said, of abuses in the ration
program on the part of institutional users and that
all the calls for coffee are not justifiable.
No more applications for coffee will be taken
from institutions.
Six Astorians are hospitalized and 32 are homeless as a
result of the fire that gutted the Astoria rooming and apartment
house 527 Exchange Sunday afternoon and brought death
close to a score of people. At 12:45 the fire was discovered by
John “Bimmy” Elfving, who with his wife occupied an apart-
ment on the ground floor of the building. The back porch of
the structure was in flames, apparently resulting from a care-
lessly thrown cigarette in a pile of refuse.
John Niemi, 25, former Clatskanie and Astoria
resident and now a member of the United States
merchant marine, figures that he’s just been lucky
so far in his journeys through the sub-infested
waters of the seven seas. Three ships on which he
has served as steward have been wrecked but so far
he has not been subjected to either a bombing or tor-
pedoing and he has no thrill-packed story of weeks
adrift in a lifeboat to reveal.
Home for a short visit with relatives and friends,
Niemi told briefly of how the last ship on which he
served went aground on a coral reef in the south seas.
The ship hit the reef near midnight but remained
afloat for nearly 24 hours. All of the crew were res-
cued by a U.S. Navy cruiser, badly battered from the
Guadalcanal battle, which answered the cargo ves-
sel’s SOS.
GUEST COLUMN
York’s saga an underreported
chapter of Lewis & Clark story
Y
ork is not a household name, except
perhaps to Pacific Northwest history
buffs.
He was the black slave who accom-
panied his master, William Clark, on the
28-month trek to explore the Louisiana
Territory and find a direct water route
across the American landmass.
We know of him in fragments, through
the writings of Clark and others, but we
have nothing of York’s
first-person account.
(He, like several Corps
of Discovery members,
was illiterate.) What
did the Lewis and Clark
Expedition look like to
ERICK
him? We cannot know for
BENGEL
sure, but we can put forth
an educated guess.
That’s the focus of a one-man show
written and performed by Gideon For-
mukwai, a local author and storyteller orig-
inally from Cameroon, a French-speaking
country in Central Africa. For-mukwai
recently premiered his dramatized inter-
pretation of the overland journey — as
seen through York’s eyes — at Manzanita’s
Hoffman Center for the Arts.
By telling York’s underreported story,
what he calls a “well-kept American
secret,” For-mukwai hopes the show will
inspire viewers to spotlight the “unsung
heroes” in our midst — the people whose
work, done diligently and with quiet dig-
nity, makes our society possible, but whose
contributions are often ignored.
York is a fascinating figure, and not just
because he was the only African-American
on the trip. He was allowed to hunt with
a firearm and savor a certain measure of
freedom across the Continental Divide and
back, even while technically enslaved. He
was a man at the center of sweeping his-
torical events, yet denied his due glory and
largely consigned to a footnote. (In this, of
course, York is far from unique.)
We know York had a wife and was
newly married when he set off with Lewis
and Clark. We know he helped the expedi-
tion engage peacefully with native tribes.
AP Photo/Stephanie S. Cordle
A painting of York, the only African-American member of the Lewis & Clark expedition,
on display in 2003 at the Gateway Arch Museum of Westward Expansion in St. Louis.
When the time came to decide whether
the Corps would winter on the Columbia
River’s north or south side, York’s opin-
ion was noted (along with that of their
Shoshone guide, Sacajawea).
We also know that, when the troop
returned from the Columbia-Pacific, York
was not given the honors, acreage and
double pay awarded to his Corps comrades.
Instead, he remained Clark’s property, his
name — a one-word identifier like that
of “a dog or a pony” — ranked near the
bottom of the team members, For-mukwai
said.
Clark later told the writer Washington
Irving (in a disputed account) that he even-
tually freed York about a decade after they
returned. York allegedly went into business
for himself, failed at it, then tried to reunite
with Clark before dying of cholera. There
is no evidence that he ever found his wife.
Between the lines of this secondhand
sketch, a private drama is playing out in
the soul of someone whose inner character
is lost to us. So we are left with questions.
What did pride, self-respect and heroism
mean to York, who could only experience
them in a state of bondage?
The data is sparse; we are forced to
read into the narrative gaps. But we can
certainly surmise what York felt.
When his master did not free him after
the expedition, York apparently became
self-destructive. Clark would allow York to
leave for a few days, and the slave would
be gone much longer, For-mukwai said.
Clark wrote to his brother that he punished
York for his behavior.
The York who came home is “not the
same York who went on the expedition,”
For-mukwai observed. Some scholars
believe that, after York spent more than
two years feeling liberated, the idea
of remaining subjugated was simply
intolerable.
The history of westward expansion is
shot through with casual inhumanity, dark-
ening even the celebrated Lewis and Clark
story. Between the adventurous highlights
— in the undocumented silence where we
can infer the screams — lies pain unvoiced
and persecution unatoned.
For-mukwai said we should find a way
to acknowledge what each of us brings
to the world, including and especially the
people low in the social strata. For though
institutional slavery is over, there are mod-
ern-day Yorks, living somewhere between
freedom and captivity, waiting for their
stories to be told.
Erick Bengel is the editor of Coast Weekend.