James Grafton Minano
September 23, 1909, Beaver, Alaska — April 07, 1961, Seldovia, Alaska
Buried in Seldovia City Cemetery Plot #168JAMES GRAFTON MINANO, “Jimmy”, was born in Beaver, Alaska September 23, 1909 to James Minano and Susie SHUKSHALIK (various spellings).
Jimmy’s father, James Minano, Sr. was a Japanese immigrant who was shipwrecked near Point Barrow and spent 67 of his life in Alaska and the United States. He left Japan for the first and last time in 1869 at the age of 11 as a mess boy on a ship. When his boat was wrecked in Siberia in 1880 he managed to walk the coast to a spot where he eventually boarded a ship bound for the United States. He first set foot on American soil at Boston. In 1886 he arrived in Washington Territory where he obtained his naturalization papers. By 1890 his whaling adventures took him to Alaska. In Barrow, he met up with a fellow Japanese immigrant, Frank Yasuda and subsequently married “Susie” Sushalluk, the daughter of a Russian father and Eskimo mother. By this time the whaling industry was waning but the word of gold being discovered on the Koyukuk River led the two families on a prospecting trip to Nolan Creek on the Koyukuk. After a brief stay in Wiseman they moved on In 1905, they and 3 other men staked Discovery Claim on Little Squaw Creek, Chandalar district, Alaska. They moved often during these years, to Carol, to St. Mary’s, to Beaver. The Minanos settled in Coldfoot before 1916, eventually raising nine children there and cultivating an extensive gardening operation which sold vegetables to miners. James was not as interested in mining as in providing services to the miners. He sawed timber into cordwood for miners to use in their boilers to thaw frozen ground.
The Minano Cabin at Slate Creek on the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk River is thought to have been constructed ca. 1915, built of traditional horizontal log construction. The house incorporated an unusual amount of sawn lumber (floor boards, ceiling, root cellar walls), which their daughter Edith describes as being painstakingly sawn by her parents with a two-man whip saw. The roof consisted of sod laid on planks, typical of northern Alaska. By 1924, the Minanos were the only remaining residents in Coldfoot. By 1984, the building was abandoned and in a state of disrepair. It was then one of only two surviving historic buildings in Coldfoot. The cabin has since collapsed.
Jimmy Jr. grew up in Beaver, Coldfoot and Wiseman in a busy era when there was a great deal of mining activity along the Koyukuk. At that time the Territorial Government was responsible for the education of white children: the U.S. Bureau of Education supported schools for Natives. Territorial statutes required a minimum of 10 white children for establishment of a school district. The proposed Wiseman district had only eight, but with the Minano offspring (Japanese/Native mix) there were twelve. When Ben Moses, the teacher at Koyukuk Station heard that Jim and Walter were not going to school, he arranged to have them sent from Coldfoot to Eklutna on the Teddy H. Soon after, James Sr. grew homesick for his sons and, taking Buddy with him, left the rest of the family in Coldfoot and moved to Eklutna.
By the 1930 US Census, Jimmy and Walter had finished school but they were still living in Eklutna, where their father was a cook for the Alaska Railroad. At the same time Jimmy is also listed separately in Anchorage, as a gold miner.
In the spring of 1942, just months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 residents of Japanese ancestry were forcefully evicted by the army from their homes in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona and Alaska, and sent to nearby temporary assembly centers. From there they were sent by trains to American-style concentration camps at remote inland sites where many people spent the remainder of the war. On April 28, 1942 James Sr. was evacuated from Alaska an interned in Camp Harmony near Puyallup, Washington. He died June 5, 1942 at the Camp Harmony hospital. James Minano, Sr. was survived by five sons, four of whom were serving in the United States Army. The fifth, Henry (Hope), was living with the Foode brothers in Area A. The body of the deceased, cremated at Tacoma, was shipped to friends in Anchorage, Alaska. (This is from the Camp Harmony newsletter.)
At the same time that he was being interred, his sons were conscripted into the US Army. Jimmy, Jr. who had been an employee at Libby Cannery, enlisted in the US Army in April 1942, listing his residence as Kenai, Alaska. He was listed as single, Japanese with US citizenship, and having a grammar school education. He was enlisted “for the duration of the War or other emergency, plus six months, subject to the discretion of the President or otherwise according to law”.
Sometime after the war, Jimmy was living on the Kenai Peninsula. U.S. General Land Office records list James G. Minano as owner of a tract of land in Kenai. There he lived alone in a cabin upriver from the cannery. His homesite was near a tidal estuary, which made it a choice location for wildlife and birds. He trapped furs in the winter, commercial fished in the summer and grew ample garden fare to garnish the moose meat.
In January 1948, while living in Kenai, Jimmy was involved in the apprehension of a murder suspect Bill Frank(e). Jim alerted the U. S. Marshall Alan Peterson that there had been a murder, and he was deputized with several others to find the suspect. Despite the possibilities posed by the accumulated manpower and firepower, the conclusion was anticlimactic: The accused, William “Bill” Frank, surrendered to the marshal, was taken into custody, and freely admitted to killing Ethan Cunningham after an argument. There is still speculation as to the cause of the murder and most agreed that it was a jealous husband.
After the murder, Martha Cunningham moved to Anchorage and became a nurse. She was briefly remarried and then divorced, returning to her first married name. Before she died, in 1973, Martha Cunningham made a gift to the City of Kenai that has kept alive her Alaska family name. In August 1971, she offered to donate a two-acre tract of her homestead land on the Kenai River to be used as a public park and to be named Cunningham Memorial Park. Council members unanimously voted to accept the offer.
Jimmy also was the owner of a fishing boat named “Polly” that had been built in Seldovia.
James Grafton Minano died April 7, 1961 Alaska at the age of 51. He is buried in an unmarked grave in the Seldovia City Cemetery, Lot #168.
More about James Minano, Sr
| "Alaskan Pioneer Dies Here." Camp Harmony News-Letter, June 12, 1942. | To many he was just another Japanese evacuee from Alaska. He pioneered in Washington when it was still a territory. He knew the lure of Yukon gold, of the seven seas. He never knew Japan. James Mineno, who died Thursday night at the Camp Harmony hospital in Area D, spent 67 of his 78 years in Alaska and the United States. He left Japan for the first and last time in 1864 at the age of 11 as a mess boy on a ship. When his boat was wrecked in 1880 he had a choice of boarding either a rescue ship for France or the United States. He chose the latter and first set foot on American soil at Boston. In 1886 he came to Washington Territory where he obtained his naturalization papers. In 1890 Mineno headed for Alaska. On April 28 of this year he was evacuated. James Mineno is survived by five sons, four of whom are serving in the United States army. The fifth, Henry, is living with the Foede brothers in Area A. The body of the deceased cremated at Tacoma, is to be shipped to friends in Anchorage, Alaska. Memorial services will be held tomorrow. |
Minano, James (1858-1945 {actually 1942}). James Minano was born in Hiroshima, Japan sometime around 1858. Like his old friend Frank Yasuda, Minano made his way to Alaska by hiring on as a laborer on a whaling ship (around 1900). He was shipwrecked off the coast of Siberia and he made his way to Barrow by foot and by hiring local natives to bring him across the Bering Straits. In Barrow, Minano met and married a woman from Point Hope named Shushalluk (Susie). He also reconnected with his friend Yasuda and when word of gold in the Koyukuk reached them, the two men and their families made their way to Nolan Creek. After a brief stay in Wiseman, the Minanos again moved with Yasuda to Chandalar Lake. During the next few years, the Minanos moved often; to Carol, to St. Mary’s Creek, to Beaver (1908). Minano never became a miner. Instead he cut wood for those too busy to do it themselves, ran a roadhouse and cooked [Warbelow 1993]. Sometime before 1916, Minano moved his family to Coldfoot where he planted a garden and raised vegetables to sell [Will 1981]. Around 1927 Minano left his wife and younger children in Coldfoot and moved to Eklutna where his older sons were living [Warbelow 1993].When the residents of Wiseman and Coldfoot decided to ask for funds to have a school built, they went to Minano and asked him if he would be willing to sign his kids up, even though they were not all really old enough. This he did, triggering something of a debate back in Juneau, because the law stipulated that the children should be white. In the end, the educational bureaucracy was convinced that being half Japanese was close enough and the school was approved. During the 1920s, several of his children attended school in Wiseman [Ulen 1983].Despite the fact that three of his sons fought in the US Army, Minano was sent to an internment camp in Seattle during World War II where he died in April 1945 [Warbelow 1993]