Hello,

I thought I would add some chatter on the topic of York's demise. The book "A Peculiar Paradise" is a good source of Oregon Black history and mentions yet another theory about the final days of York, chapter one includes the following excerpt,

"Various stories survive concerning York's later life. According to one account, after he received his freedom he ran a freight service between Richmond and Nashville. This business failed, and he became a free servant, was abused, and regretted leaving the security of the Clark home. In 1832, he was on his way back to the Clark family and died of cholera in Tennessee. In the same year, a trapper named Zenas Leonard claimed to have met a black man living as a chief among the Crow Indians. This man told the trapper that he had first visited the Crow country with Lewis and Clark and had returned later to settle among the Indians, taking four women as wives. When this chief met the trapper, he claimed he had been living among the Indians for ten years. If this story is true, then this black chief was none other than York. A final clue to York's fate is a theory that he was found frozen to death on a road in Albemarle County, Virginia, at the age of ninety?..."
A Peculiar Paradise
a History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788-1940
McLagan, Elizabeth
http://gesswhoto.com/paradise1.html