COURTESY OF JIM FABER

The pole at Belvedere Viewpoint in West Seattle replaced a rotting original in 1966. The original is shown in the "then" photo, which dates from about 1958. Like the original, the present pole is 25 feet tall. When it is replaced, the totem will most likely get a more protected life at the Southwest Seattle Historical Society's Log House Museum.

	PAUL DORPAT

The totem originally was a "commercial" creation, carved for sale in 1901 by Bella Coola Indians on the coast of British Columbia. It stacks four figures, from top to bottom a beaver, frog, whale and bear. The "then" photo here shows it standing in about the year 1958. When the pole fell victim to dry rot, it was replaced by a duplicate cedar pole in 1966. Two Boeing engineers, Michael Morgan and Robert Fleishman, carved it for free.

Another totem — this one with a true ancestral story — was put up miles away in Pioneer Square after a "goodwill committee of Seattle's leading citizens" stole the pole in 1899 from a village on Tongass Island in Alaska. The party, which had been on a giddy celebratory cruise of southeast Alaska during the Gold Rush, later paid a small fine for stealing it. That pole, too, suffered from rot and then was torched by an arsonist in 1938. In 1940, it was also replaced.

Now the West Seattle pole is again being eaten away, this time by carpenter ants, and needs replacing. However, it has yet to be determined if the funds reserved for it by the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department will create a pole that is a copy of its two predecessors or a totem of a different design.