In One Ear: Local brevities

Elleda Wilson, The Daily Astorian, Ore.
·2 min read

Tidbits from The Daily Astorian, Sunday, May 4, 1879:

• The whole afterpart of the Great Republic went to pieces yesterday. There is nothing of her stern left aft of the wheel houses.

Note: The steamship wrecked when s it ran aground on Sand Island in the Columbia River two weeks earlier, on April 19. There were 11 fatalities out of more than 1,000 passengers and crew.

• Baggage, lost on the Great Republic: ... Photographs with the initials E. M. L., medical notes and verses in manuscript. A medical compendium, surgeon’s instruments ... etc.

Note: Not only was there looting in the hours after the wreck, much of the cargo drifted away as the ship broke apart.

• Dr. Warner’s Health Corset can only be purchased in Astoria at Mrs. Derby’s, Main Street, between Squemoqua (Commercial Street) and Jefferson (Duane Street).

Note: Doctors finally realized in the late 1800s that corsets were crushing women’s lungs and other internal organs in a deadly way. Drs. Ira and Lucien Warner were the pioneer creators of a “health corset” made of flexible fabric instead of whalebone and steel.

• Industrious tinsmith Henry Sindlinger’s fastidious, well-thought-out suicide by pistol was as puzzling as his solitary life. “As regular in his habits as clockwork,” and “scrupulously temperate,” he took “special pains to destroy any evidences of the whereabouts of his family and friends.”

His grand creation was a contraption to heat “100 gallons of water to make blood heat in one minute” for William Uhlenart’s Occident Bath rooms that wound up not being used because “Mr. Uhlenart was not insured against an explosion.”

• Some remarkable shooting a la William Tell, was indulged in at the Third Street Shooting Gallery in this city yesterday. A man by the name of John Reynolds, who will be remembered as the person who saved a child from the wreck of the Industry in 1865, permitted John Gorman to shoot at the bowl of a pipe in his mouth. Gorman hit the bowl with the cartridge, but it seems to us to have been a venturesome piece of business.