Two little-known Boundary deaths

This is a story of two deaths in the Boundary. All that links them is that both occurred in the first decade of the 20th century and both involved men of Asian descent about whom little is known.

In one case we know the exact circumstances of the death but not where the burial occurred. In the other case, we know the place of burial but not the cause of death.

Let’s start with Uhachi Kihara, a Japanese Canadian who has a marked grave in Grand Forks’ Evergreen Cemetery, in Block 22, Plot 1. The headstone reads:

In Memory of

UHACHI KIHARA

Died Oct 6 1907

Aged 39 years

Erected by his friends

Given the date of his death and his age, we can extrapolate that he was born in 1868 or 1869, and we know he had friends who thought highly enough of him to pay for his headstone.

His death was not registered. Of the seven registered deaths that occurred in BC on the day he died, none were in Grand Forks and none had a name remotely similar to Kihara’s. There was no obituary for him in the Grand Forks Gazette, Grand Forks Sun, or any other newspaper that I can find.

Thanks to a passenger list on ancestry.com, we do know that Kihara arrived in Vancouver on Aug. 3, 1907 aboard the Kumeric. The date appears to be off by a few days, but the name of the ship tells us something very significant. Kihara would have been one of more than 1,100 Japanese who arrived in Vancouver on July 25, 1907 from Honolulu, setting the stage for the city’s anti-Asian riots.

On the passenger manifest, Kihara gave his age as 39. He indicated he could read and write and that he was married. Like all of the others on board, he was listed as a labourer.

Passengers disembark in Vancouver from the Kumeric in 1907. Maybe Uhachi Kihara is somewhere in this crowd. (UBC Rare Books and Special Collections/Japanese Canadian Photograph Collection)

I’m always curious what drew early Japanese immigrants to the interior of BC prior to the internment years. The answer is usually employment in the lumber industry. The Yale-Columbia sawmill at Cascade employed Japanese workers, but I don’t know if Kihara was among them.

In any case, he died barely two months after his arrival in Canada. Was he killed on the job? We’ll probably never know. But for his headstone, it is as though he never existed. Did his wife learn of his death? Or was she left wondering what happened to him?   

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The other death in question was due to a railway accident. The particulars were briefly described in the Spokane Spokesman-Review of Sept. 21, 1909:

Chesaw, Wash., Sept. 17 — This afternoon the local freight in the yards at Myncaster, BC, four miles north of Chesaw, struck a Japanese railroad laborer, breaking several bones and crushing him to such an extent that he lived but a short time.

Myncaster was a railway community on the international border, southwest of Rock Creek.   

No Canadian newspaper reported on this incident, which was not that unusual. I can point to other instances where American papers had a better handle on the goings-on in Canadian border towns than their Canadian counterparts.

The newspaper didn’t give the victim’s name, but in this case the death was registered, revealing the unfortunate man was Yet Sue. He was 59 and therefore born in 1849 or 1850. The registration also reveals he was not Japanese, but from Canton (Guanzhou), China, which is where most Chinese immigrants to BC came from.

Coroner A.S. Black of Greenwood reiterated the details of the tragedy under the “remarks” section: “He came to his death on Friday the 17th September from injuries received by being struck by Train 707 near Myncaster, BC, about 2:30 p.m. … That the death was accidental.”

In those days, death registrations didn’t have a field to list the place of burial. There is no record of Yet Sue’s grave, which could have been in Rock Creek, Chesaw, or somewhere else.