Belated comment on "Re: Mystery Language Identified/SSILA Bulletin #89 (fwd)

[Mike Cleven]

At 02:28 PM 7/25/99 -0700, Lisa Peppan wrote:
>On Sat, 24 Jul 1999, it was said that:
>
>>>The second word list turns out to be Hawaiian.  The missionary
>evidently
>>>misunderstood the English name for the Hawaiian Islands to be "San
>>>Luis" instead of "Sandwich."
>
>And just a quick side note on Hawaiians.  In the older census records for
>Western Washington, and parts of southern BC and Vancouver Island, I've
>seen a number of folks enumerated who listed their birth places as the
>Sandwich Islands, many of whom had "no last name"s.

What were the stats, by the way, say in 1846, 1858, etc.  i.e. totals,
concentrations?  Or do the census records go that old?  Are they formal
census (I don't think one was taken in BC until much later) or just
compilations of official records forming census data?

Near Kanaka Bar in the Fraser Canyon, by the way, is the site of the
long-disappeared community of "Black Canyon"; I'd always assumed it was
from the colour of the rocks and the depth of the canyon, but given the
segregated nature of the canyon's goldfields (which is why China Bar and
Kanaka Bar were separate from Boston Bar and Texas Bar) it suggest an
interesting possibility - that this fascinating collection of rambling
catwalks and cabins on the canyonside was part of the the local
African-Northwestern experience...it's quite spectacular; I've got a
picture it somewhere in my photo files downloaded from the BC Archives
which I'll dig out of the computer when I get home.  If I ever get a
chance, I was going to inquire among the Canyon communities concerning the
black grave-figures and who they might have been; maybe I'll find out
something unusual about Black Canyon as well.  What I do know is that
there's usually a pretty interesting story behind a lot of BC place names,
no matter how obvious they sound.....