100 years ago in the Northwest: Reason for death of Ansel B. Siler remains unclear

Montana authorities were still baffled about the motive behind the death of Ansel B. Siler of Spokane.

Authorities were still holding his wife, Lulu Siler, on charges of cutting his throat and leaving him on a railroad siding near Thompson Falls, Montana.

Yet the case against her was weakened somewhat when they discovered that she was not the beneficiary of a $5,000 life insurance policy, as they had believed.

It turned out to be an $800 policy that would be paid to Ansel Siler were something to accidentally happen to his wife.

Authorities interviewed numerous Siler acquaintances and received mixed messages. Some believed Lulu Siler was “mentally deranged at times.” Others maintained that, despite the fact she was uneducated and “uses poor grammar,” she was incapable of committing such a crime.

Both were working as cooks at a Western Union linemen’s camp near Thompson Falls.

From the immigration beat: A Spokane reporter interviewed Mah Yung and Pun Loi, both 77, chronicling the end of an era.

Yung and Loi were 17 when they arrived in Portland from China in 1863 to work the gold fields near Pierce City, Idaho. They walked 500 miles to Idaho and joined hundreds of other Chinese workers in the gold fields. The two soon “dropped out of the affairs of the world,” and would never stray from Pierce City for the next 60 years.

Now, they were headed back to Canton, China. They were leaving “as they came, in poverty,” the Spokane Daily Chronicle wrote. For the past two years, they had been “county charges.”

“Friends and fellow countrymen” supplemented their county funds to help them return to the land of their birth. They said they were looking forward to the trip, “for we shall be among our own people.”

The Chinese community in Pierce City was nearly gone, with only two other Chinese residents remaining, both of whom were 72.