Ceremony honors agent who died in 1925

Joseph Riley was the first U.S. Border Patrol inspector to die in the line of duty along the Canadian border

Joseph Riley sort of fell between the cracks of time.

He died in 1925 - barely remembered, and not much else.

But the U.S. Border Patrol and his family in Nebraska began hunting for something more than a name and date on him.

And Aug. 25, they held a memorial ceremony north of Eureka for the first U.S. Border Patrol inspector to die in the line of duty along the Canadian border.

"We'll never forget him, and we'll never forget you," Robert Harris, chief patrol agent for the Border Patrol's Spokane Sector, told Riley's niece and nephew, Mary and Joe Riley, both of Omaha, Neb.

Riley, 30, had been with the patrol for six months when he and another agent - at that time they were called "inspectors" - left Eureka to patrol in a car on April 4, 1925.

About 3 1/2 miles west of Eureka, a tie rod broke, causing the car to leave the road, go over a high bank and into a ditch. The car flipped and pinned Riley beneath the steering wheel, fracturing his back. The other agent was not seriously hurt.

Riley was taken to a hospital in Eureka, where the doctor said he needed to go to Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane to get proper treatment.

A train took Riley to Spokane on April 5 , but he died at 6 a.m. April 6 from respiratory paralysis.

His body went to Nebraska for burial. He was survived by his mother, three brothers and two sisters.

The Border Patrol later developed a tradition of keeping in touch with the families of its officers who died on duty - no matter how long ago.

The patrol traces its history back to 1904 as "mounted watchmen" for the U.S. Immigration Service. The mounted watchmen formally became the U.S. Border Patrol in 1924. The first patrol agent - or inspector - was killed in 1919. Riley was the sixth of 96 agents to die on duty.

When Harris became head of the Border Patrol's Spokane Sector - which includes Northwest Montana - in 2005, he toured the stations under his command. One of his standard questions was whether any agents had died in a station's history.

Agent Shane Baker of the Eureka station gave the only "yes" answer. When he moved to Eureka in 1993, he heard about Riley's 1925 death.

But the patrol didn't have a photo of Riley in Eureka or at a Washington, D.C. memorial center for agents who died on duty. The patrol also had no contact with Riley's family.

This went against Harris' interpretation of the patrol's "never forgotten" code. So Baker began to hunt for Riley's burial site and family.

Microfiched newspapers in Eureka and Spokane mentioned that the body was shipped to Lincoln, Neb. Then the University of Nebraska found Riley's death certificate, tracing his burial to Courtland, about 30 miles south of Lincoln.

Then the trail dead-ended on finding family members.

Baker sometimes did Google searches on the Internet, eventually running across an obituary for a Courtland woman that listed a survivor by the name of Larry Riley. He located Riley, is a cousin of Mary, 67, and Joe, 72.

"I was dumbfounded," Joe Riley said about Larry Riley telling him about the patrol's search. "I wanted to find out a little more."

Joe and Mary Riley vaguely knew they had an uncle who died while in the Border Patrol, but that was about it. Their parents were married a few months after Joseph Riley's death.

Neither initially could find a photo of Joseph Riley until eventually locating two in a box in a basement.

The Border Patrol plans to put a granite marker - the same type found on the U.S.-Canadian border - in front of its new Eureka station, with Joseph Riley's name on it. The patrol is still nailing down a site for its new station to replace its current one in back of a business building.

Meanwhile, it decided to fly Joe and his wife, plus Mary and another family friend, to Eureka for a ceremony honoring Joseph Riley at the Riverstone Lodge north of Eureka. Larry Riley could not make the trip.

Roughly 20 patrol agents - with black bands on their badges - and about 30 people in civilian clothes attended. The Nebraska family members wore lapel badges marked with black tape. Bagpipes played "Amazing Grace" at the ceremony.

Mary Riley said keeping track of long-past family members becomes more important as people get older. There are at least 15 people in the extended Riley family who are grandnieces and grandnephews of Joseph Riley.

Harris said: "We'll keep in contact with them."

Reporter John Stang may be reached at 758-4429 or by e-mail at jstang@dailyinterlake.com