With the possible exception of its ice hockey prowess in the Winter Olympics, Canada’s greatest claim to international fame is its tremendous size. Geographically, Canada is the second-largest country in the world, surpassed only by Russia. This distinction, which the country has retained since 1870, when the British Crown transferred ownership of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to the fledgling Dominion of Canada, was made possible by the promise that a great railroad would be built across the continent, bridging the original eastern provinces with westerly British Columbia. This sprawling iron ribbon, the Canadian Pacific Railway, was finally built from 1881 to 1885 in one of the most iconic construction project’s in the country’s history, immortalized in Canadian memory alongside the construction of the Trans-Canada Highway, which parallels it; the storied Rideau Canal, built during the War of 1812; and the CN Tower, once the tallest freestanding structure in the world.
It seems to be a rule of history that great feats, great nations, and great men are thrown into oblivion by the shadows of their successors. The cultural and scientific achievements of Mycenean Athens are eclipsed by the triumphs and tragedies of ancient Rome. The terrible battles fought in the trenches of Ypres, Flanders, and Passchendaele in what was called the War to End All Wars are but flickering memories in the rearview of Stalingrad, Pearl Harbor, and D-Day. So, too, has the construction of the CPR consigned to the junkheap of forgotten history the great surveying expeditions that made it possible – a series of grueling treks through the many mountain ranges of British Columbia and the rugged wilds of the Canadian Shield known collectively as the Canadian Pacific Railway Exploratory Survey.
Throughout the 1870s, ragtag crews composed of illusioned British nationals from Victoria, disturbed veterans of the Crimean War, luckless adventurers from continental Europe, and violent ex-convicts from Australia marched through the Canadian wilderness with levels, tripods, and pickets in a government-sponsored effort to determine the best route for the railroad. The contemporary writings of these labourers, like the posthumously-published memoir of Robert M. Rylatt, or the journal of George Hargreaves, buried in the Archives of British Columbia, paint a grim picture of endless backbreaking labour, deadly natural hazards, periods of near-starvation, and bitter inter-party strife. Amid these anecdotes illustrating the thankless careers of the early CPR surveyors is a scattering of strange tales of interest to enthusiasts of the macabre, aficionados of the unsolved, and students of the unexplained – stories of lost Native legends, medicine man magic, gruesome fates, and mysterious disappearances. In this video, we will dig up some of the forgotten mysteries of the Canadian Pacific Railway Exploratory Survey.
Martin’s Transformation
In a previous piece, we uncovered the extraordinary story of Martin, a German shopkeeper from Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, who is supposed to have joined a CPR survey party as axeman, and to have disappeared into the wilderness of Thompson River Country in 1871, after suffering an apparent psychotic break.
According to an article in the December 4th, 1875 issue of the Ottawa Daily Citizen, Martin somehow managed to survive in the woods for four years, as evidenced by his startling appearance to a shepherd at Stump Lake, just south of the city of Kamloops, in the winter of that year. According to the witness, the German’s body had sprouted a coat of thick hair akin to that of a gorilla – perhaps some sort of mysterious biological adaptation to his harsh environment. After accepting some bread from the shepherd, and declaring that it was the first he had eaten in years, Martin stalked back into the wilderness with his rusted rifle in one hand, apparently oblivious to his host’s many questions.
Lost on the Chilcotin Plateau
Another surveyor who nearly suffered a similar fate was a member of George Hargreaves’ party, which surveyed remote Chilcotin Country southeast of Bella Coola, British Columbia, in 1872. In his journal entry for October 28th, Hargreaves wrote:
“On arriving at camping ground and counting up we are one man short and he the last man that ought to be alone in such a country. Towards the evening we fire off a number of shots so that he may know the direction of the camp if within hearing, but night comes, and a cold cutting wind and frost, and no Charley and pup, making the second night he has spent alone in the bush.
“Tuesday,” he continued in the next day’s entry. “We lay over today at camp and send Indian and men out to look for our missing man whom it may be difficult to find as it has commenced to snow and they will not be able to see far; all return unsuccessful and he does not turn up and Tiedeman says he will go on and leave him tomorrow in spite of the protest of the whole party, who request him to stop another day to seek for him – he says he will go on if half his party are lost, which does not improve the feeling of the men towards him, at all times not very amiable.
“Wednesday,” Hargreaves’ wrote in his October 30th entry, the climax of this wilderness drama and the last entry in his diary. “Tiedeman gives orders for moving camp and leave out lost man to die in the wilderness – he says anyone who gets lost deserves to die; all remonstrate with him and some are determined to go out and let their things be packed on; it is not until he goes to the packers that he gives way, at any rate he goes and gives orders for all to go out on the search; six Indians and nine white men start off after breakfast in different directions in twos and threes, some with mules and some on foot. Two who go on mules after riding about three hours find the man about ten miles from camp wandering about like a drunken man and scarcely knew them – said to one of them when he was told to get on the mule that he would follow them to camp if they would go on and leave him.
“Shortly after the two found him, two others on foot came up who had tracked his footsteps five or six miles. It appears that he could not get away from the Chilcoten [sic] River [whichever] way he started off; in a few hours he would be sure to see the river below him and on the second day he tried to find our old camp to see if he could not pick up some scraps of grub which might have been thrown away, but he could not find it, so he had eaten nothing for two days and nights and [dared] not sleep for he had no matches to make a fire and it was bitter cold and snowing one day; he carried his little dog inside of his shirt the greater part of the time which kept them both warm…”
La Folie du Bois
The state of delirium in which the lost man was found was likely the result of exhaustion and dehydration, perhaps compounded by a mental inability to cope with his desperate situation. Likewise, in light of Hargreave’s statement that his lost colleague was the “last man that ought to be alone in such a country,” it seems likely that Charley’s continuous circling back to the Chilcotin River was due to a poor sense of direction or a lack of backcountry competency. Despite the likelihood of these conventional explanations, Hargreave’s account evokes a strange element of missing person stories which at least one folkloric tradition attributes to preternatural influence.
In her 1884 book Legends of Le Detroit, American folklorist Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin included an old French-Canadian loup-garou or werewolf story set on the shores of Lake St. Claire in the vicinity of Detroit, Michigan. In this tale, Archange, the new bride of a French-Canadian habitant named Pierre, was captured by a werewolf on her wedding night and carried off into the woods. Pierre immediately set out in search of the monster. When he did not return, his concerned compatriots launched a search party.
“He was shortly after found by his friends wandering around and around a swamp,” Hamilin wrote of the bereaved groom, “and clutching a piece of white batiste. When questioned as to how he had obtained this clue to Archange, he returned a maniacal stare and with a blood-curdling shriek, would have jumped into the swamp if he had not been held back by his companions, who with sorrowful accents said, ‘La folie du bois.’”
In a footnote, Hamilin explained, “La foie du bois (the folly of the woods) alludes to the well-known insane tendency which prompts those lost in the woods to go round in a continuous circle, instead of following a direct path which would lead to a clearing.”
This mysterious phenomenon also appears in American folklorist Barbara Rieti’s 1991 book Strange Terrain: The Fairy World in Newfoundland. This folkloric classic expounds the old Anglo-Celtic fairy traditions endemic to the Maritime Canadian province of Newfoundland, fairies being diminutive, mischievous, preternatural beings said to live in the wilderness and on the outskirts of civilization, of whom many Newfoundlanders were once very much afraid.
“An informant from Lumsden in Bonavista Bay,” Rieti wrote, “told a collector how his father once went to look for berries; he was gone for hours, and his friends found him in a valley ‘walking around and around in circles in a trance.’ They shouted and shook him until he snapped out of it:
“‘And soon as he did,’ the informant said, ‘he told his friends that he had been in fairyland, and he couldn’t get out no matter how hard he tried. He said the fairies had been holding him captive. As soon as he came out of this trance he recognized where he was and walked out with his friends.’”
The “fairyland” to which the informant referred is the supposed other-dimensional realm of the fairies, into which the so-called “Good People”, as Newfoundlanders sometimes referred to their little elusive neighbours in an effort to avoid incurring their ire, sometimes lured lost travellers. The fairies are supposed to achieve this trick by inducing optical illusions which prevent travellers from seeing the terrain as it really is.
“In Lewin’s Cove,” Rieti continued, “another collector’s father told how his father once lagged behind as the two of them were returning from the woods. Turning back and calling, he found him ‘walking around and around’:
“‘He called out again,’ the informant said, ‘and this time his father saw him and came. His father said it was like he was in a ring and couldn’t get out. He would walk around and end up in the same place he started. He said then he often heard people talking about fairy rings but it was the first time he got caught in one. When my father called out to him he was able to walk out of the ring.’”
Vanishings in a Forest Fire North of Lake Superior
Although Hargreaves’ survey companion was saved from a hard death in the wilderness, others were not so fortune. Hargreaves mentioned five presumed drownings suffered by members of another survey crew he called “X camp,” from which his own party was separated by a mountain range. Robert Rylatt, in his memoir, described the vanishing of his co-worker Jim Maloney beneath the surface of the Columbia River, which he witnessed himself. In all of these cases, the unfortunates were swept away by the current while attempting to ferry supplies across a river, and were never seen again. Hargreaves also mentioned the gruesome case of a Lillooet native whom the survey had employed as a packer. At night, while he was sleeping, a tree fell on the native’s tent, injuring the occupant so severely that he spent the next few days coughing up blood, and complaining that he was unable to defecate. Hargreaves did not record the Lillooet’s ultimate fate.
The only employee deaths referred to in the Survey’s official 1871 Progress Report were those of seven men from Party H, who vanished without a trace in a forest fire north of Lake Superior. Although railroad veteran Sandford Fleming, the Survey’s Engineer-in-Chief, made a reverential reference to this tragedy in his introduction to the report, the most detailed description of the event appears in James H. Rowan’s contribution to the document, Rowan being the engineer in charge of the survey divisions in Ontario and Quebec.
“It seems desirable,” Rowan wrote, “that at this point I should give an account of the circumstances connected with this event, in order to shew that no blame can attach to any one in this matter, except the unfortunate men themselves: A party of seven men, two whites and five Indians, were detailed from party H to bring forward supplies from one depot to another, (and for this purpose had cut a trail by a shorter route than that followed by the surveyed line) while the main party were proceeding with the exploration: notwithstanding their having been repeatedly urged by Mr. Johnston to push ahead and keep up with the rest of the party, they lagged behind. Their non-appearance, after some days, excited anxiety on the part of Mr. Johnston, who thought they had deserted and returned to Nepigon [sic]; he therefore proceeded there himself in search of them, but found they had not returned; then having fears for their safety, as the whole party had, on several occasions, very narrow escapes from the fires, he immediately returned to the main party and sent his second in command with a number of men to search for the others. After an absence of five days they returned, having made an extensive search and found one Indian in a portion of the woods which had been burned over. He was lying on his face with his shirt, which he had taken off, between it and the ground, placed in that position to exclude the smoke from his lungs; he was not burned, but had evidently died of suffocation caused by the smoke. In a swamp near by were found six holes which had been excavated by the others, in order that by getting into them they might escape the fire, but the smoke becoming too dense had driven them away and no further trace of them could be found. The most extraordinary point in the whole sad event, being that all the supplies, together with their blankets and clothes, were found at the depot untouched by the fire.”
The Courier from Wild Horse Creek
Another death tinged with an air of mystery appears in the memoirs of Robert Rylatt, a Crimean War veteran who served as commissariat for division S, which was charged with exploring the rugged country between the Columbia River and Howse Pass in the Rocky Mountains. At the time of their work in that country in 1871 and ’72, the only settlement in the area was the waning boomtown of Fisherville, a gold camp established on the shores of Wild Horse Creek, in the Columbia Mountains, not far from present-day Fort Steele, BC. The Wild Horse Creek gold rush was last spasm of the ever-westerly succession of gold hunts that had characterized mid-19th Century British Columbia, beginning with the Fraser Canyon rush and culminating in a mad dash for the diggings in Cariboo Country. By the time of the CPR exploratory survey, Fisherville was a dying town populated largely by meticulous Chinese miners, who were happy to rework the claims abandoned by the British, Canadian and American prospectors who went before them.
“We were informed that the white man who undertook to carry down the mail from Wild Horse Creek to Hope last fall,” Rylatt wrote, “did not reach; and that this spring his body was found somewhere on that lonely route, the mailbag beside him. Ah, well; he had gone the way of many others, and all that can be said: ‘He perished in the mountains.’”
At the time of the courier’s death, there were three routes connecting Wild Horse Creek with the westerly town of Hope, in the Fraser Canyon. One was a circuitous southerly route to Fort Colville, in present-day Washington State, which followed Okanagan Lake and the Thompson and Fraser Rivers, used by the Hudson’s Bay Company for decades. Another was a tortuous old northern route which followed the Columbia River, joining the former trail at Kamloops. The shortest, newest, and most rugged of the two roads, which the courier undoubtedly took, was the Dewdney Trail, an improvement and extension of the HBC’s old Hope-Similkameen Trail, built a decade earlier by engineers Edgar Dewdney and Walter Moberly, the latter of whom features later in this piece.
The courier’s mysterious death on the Dewdney Trail is rendered doubly disturbing by a strange accident that befell pioneer John Allison, one of the first settlers of what is now Princeton, BC, on a proximate parallel trail six years later. John’s wife, Susan, described the 1877 event in a later reminiscence, writing:
“That year my husband met with an accident that affected his whole life. He had just taken a drove of cattle to New Westminster. The weather was intensely hot, but he always used a trail he had cut for his own use. He never met anyone on this road. He was rather more than a day late but I thought nothing of that as business often detained him. When he came it was late in the day and he looked very pale. The first thing he asked was what day it was. When I told him, he said he had been three days on the road and must have been insensible for thirty hours or more. He remembered leaving the Similkameen and passing the small lakes, entering the timber- then no more till he felt his horse poking its nose in his face and trying to wake him up. He looked at his watch- it had stopped. He felt stiff and cold but mounted and came home. We never knew what had happened- thrown by the horse or sunstroke. His memory was never the same.”
Medicine Man Magic
Despite the mystery which surrounds them, the deaths and disappearances hitherto described all very possibly have rational explanations. The same cannot be so easily said for an account of alleged medicine man magic which appears in the memoirs of the aforementioned Robert Rylatt.
In January 1873, Rylatt and the men of S division were wintering at Athabasca Depot, a camp in the Rocky Mountains up the Athabasca River from the Hudson Bay Company’s Jasper House. Near the middle of that month, they were visited by a man named Logan, the Scotch-native trader at Jasper House. At night, the trader regaled the surveyors with strange tales, one of which involved an act of black magic practiced by native medicine men.
“We had been speaking of running, and running races,” Rylatt wrote, “when Logan assured us it was very dangerous to run races with these Indians; upon being asked why, he remarked, ‘There are some among them who possess a power known only to themselves, and which power no white man, or any with white blood in their veins has ever possessed, although a few have experienced the effects produced.
“‘Let us suppose an instance,’ he continued. ‘One of your party shall be a remarkable runner, and let it come to the knowledge of the Indians. He would not be long, if they were on friendly terms, ‘ere he would receive a challenge (for the Indians are fleet runners), and he would accept; then the redskin and his friends come trooping to the contest ground, and among them would be one or more of those gifted with supernatural powers; for the white man may not be permitted to outrun the Indian at all hazards. The race is run, and the redskin outstrips his white brother, and all is well, with many ‘Ughs’ and disdainful gestures their white brother is made to understand he is the lesser man, and all ends amicably; but let the reverse be the case, and the white bid fair to outstrip the Indian, and win the race, in that case he will probably not reach his goal; instantly, as quick as the lightnings flash, he will stop, waver for a moment, then fall like a log; this has been the doings of one of the gifted redskins. If however, two of them should work their spell at the same moment, the victim would go into convulsions, and perhaps die.’
“‘And where are these big medicine men when they perform the miracle?’ was asked.
“‘Why, with the crowd of spectators, and not even the Indians can tell who it is. It may have been a buck, or it may have been a squaw, for both sexes have the gift.’
“‘And what,’ asks another of his listeners, ‘becomes of the poor devil?’
“‘Why, those who laid him under the spell can at leisure restore him.’”
Logan went on to relate how some medicine women he knew near Fort Edmonton had the ability to cast love spells on men they fancied. Despite being old and ugly, they somehow managed to coerce both native and white men into doing their bidding. Some of their thralls are supposed to have committed crimes for them while under their spells. “She may leave you to go on a journey,” said Logan of the victims of these enchantresses, “but separation does not break the spell, and so supreme is her power, she can make you find her by instinct as it were, no matter if she be closely hidden in some spot of which you had no previous knowledge.”
Another shamanic trick to which Logan had personally borne witness was the ability to hideously deform enemies. The trader claimed to have met a victim of this spell whose mouth had been temporarily rearranged so that it appeared on the side of her face where her ear should have been.
The Fate of the Snare Tribe
Another Indian tale which Rylatt recounted was a disturbing legend he heard from Metis storytellers at Athabasca Depot. This tale is set on the banks of what is now called Snake Indian River, a tributary of the Athabasca which runs through Jasper National Park, the ‘Snakes’ being an alternative name given to the so-called ‘Snare’ tribe around which the story revolves. The “Assiniboines” to which Rylatt referred are the Stoney or Nakoda, a mountain-dwelling offshoot of the main Assiniboine nation, which itself is one of the three main divisions of the Sioux.
“There exists some six miles beyond this depot,” he wrote, “a mountain stream of considerable size, in fact a good sized river it may be called, and a very difficult crossing for our animals. The Indians in their language give it the name of Snake River… These half breeds inform me that some years back quite a large tribe of Indians made this river and the vicinity their home; and that buffalo used to herd in the valley we are wintering upon in vast numbers. I can well believe this from the many bones and bleached skulls of buffalo I saw through the Valley, and that it must have been a sheltered spot to yard in during the winter…
“These Indians I have mentioned were called the ‘Snare Tribe’ by the Hudson’s Bay Company, in consequence of their favorite method of taking their game being by the snare. I allude more particularly to the smaller kinds of game; fur-bearing animals for instance. The halfbreeds say this section of country is still a favorite summer hunting ground, being well stocked with mountain sheep, rabbits, grouse, bear, and moose, also some [caribou].
“Owing to this fact, the Snare Indians were kept constantly in hot water by other tribes intruding themselves upon their hunting grounds, and frequent fights occurred. Chief among those who most annoyed them were the [Assiniboines], a powerful and warlike people, who finally made war upon the Snares, and in a battle so disastrous to the latter that but a remnant of them remained; these betook themselves to the mountains close at hand, and only came down to the valley to hunt. The [Assiniboines] were not content, however. They wanted the last scalp of their enemy, and secured it. Taking the Snares unawares, they fell upon them in their weak numbers, killed every man and child, and took such of their women as were worth the trouble into slavery. The old and the sickly were likewise butchered. With true Indian ferocity, as many were taken alive were put to the torture; and some few of the most noted were skinned alive; or slowly burned by hot coals being placed upon the stomach of their victims.
“It was a victory, or a massacre complete; not one of the hated Snares remained. And triumphant they betook themselves to their own country, passing in the way the trading posts of the Hudson’s Bay Company, where they not only flourished the scalps of their dead enemies, but flaunted before the eyes of the whites the skins of those they had flayed alive, with hands and feet attached, at the same time jeeringly telling their hearers they were skins they had for sale.”
This grisly tale is echoed in the memoirs of engineer Walter Moberly, an English adventurer who, along with fellow engineers John Trutch and Roderick McLennan, headed the CPR survey crews of British Columbia. In his 1885 book The Rocks and Rivers of British Columbia, Moberly described a similar story told to him by an elderly but active native woman named Marguerite, who, he met at Jasper House. In this tale, the Snake Indian River is referred to as the ‘Snaring River’.
“Many years ago,” Moberly began, “before the introduction of firearms in the mountains, there was a small tribe of Indians, who captured the mountains sheep, the wood buffalo, and the bear by snaring them, and had their principal residence on this river, which gave it the name of ‘Snaring River.’ A part of [Assiniboines], who had obtained firearms from the traders in the east, invaded this little band, and shooting all the Indians, they carried off the women and children, and having skinned the dead Indians took their skins to trade with the whites, but the old lady was unable to inform me if they made a profitable trade with the skins.”
In his 2010 book Maskepetoon, Canadian historian Hugh Dempsey identified the Snare Indians as an offshoot of the Shuswap, an Interior Salish People whose historic homeland sprawls across the middle of British Columbia’s Interior Plateau. He went on to describe an event vaguely reminiscent of the legend above described, in which a party of Rocky Mountain Cree raided Snare camps in the spring of 1811. The victorious warriors later appeared at an HBC trading post at Wabamun Creek, a tributary of the North Saskatchewan near Fort Edmonton, with twelve slaves they had captured, the sole survivors of the five tents of Snare Indians they had found in the mountains.
The Rapids of the Dead
Walter Moberly included one more native legend in his book, namely a ghost story set near present-day Revelstoke, British Columbia, at the western feet of the Columbia Mountains. The tale takes place near the Dalles de Mort, or the Rapids of the Dead, a dangerous chute on the Columbia River near the present townsite which vanished in the 1970s with the construction of the Revelstoke Dam. The rapids themselves, incidentally, owe their gruesome name to a pair of tragedies in which they featured, which we covered in detail in a previous piece. Moberly added his own description of one of those tragedies, which it might not be out of place to include here:
“At the head of [Upper Arrow Lake],” he wrote, “a short distance to the right of the mouth of the river, I saw a large wooden cross. Curiosity induced me to find its origin, and I afterwards learnt the following: One of the Hudson Bay Company’s boats was running the Columbia from ‘Boat Encampment’ to Colville. They were always accustomed to take out the cargoes and passengers, and drop the boats with a line over the bad rapid known as the ‘Dalle de Mort.’ A person in the boat, who did not know the river, accused the crew of cowardice and, seizing the steering oar, forced the boat into the rapid and swamped her, only one man ever being known to have escaped. After long wandering he reached fort Colville in a half insane state, and from his ravings it was feared he had been guilty of cannibalism. The officer in charge sent up a boat, and the few bodies found were buried under the cross I saw. Hence the name of the rapid, ‘Dalle de Mort,’ or ‘Death Rapid.’”
The Vanishing of Elizabeth Pruden
Before we launch into the ghost story, it may be worth our while to take a look at the paragraph which precedes it, which briefly describes the mysterious vanishing of a woman in the Athabasca Pass. The ‘Boat Encampment’ to which Moberly refers was an important station on the transcontinental brigade route of the Hudson’s Bay Company, where furs and goods packed over the Athabasca Pass were loaded into canoes, and freight shipped from the west was packed onto horses or snowshoe-clad pedestrians and carried east over the mountains. This once-essential hub is now a remote and forgotten ghost town located on the northern shores of the Columbia River’s Big Bend, nestled in the Rocky Mountain Trench north of Revelstoke and northwest of Golden, BC.
“A very sad story is connected with the ‘Boat Encampment,’” Moberly wrote. “Many years ago, when a brigade was on its way from Colville, among the passengers by the boats were the present Mrs. Captain H.S. Donaldson, of Winnipeg, Manitoba (then a child), and her mother. Sometime after the brigade of horses had left on their way through the Athabasca Pass, the old lady was missed. A search was made for her, but from that time not the slightest trace of her could be found.”
Online genealogies of the Metis families of Manitoba’s Red River Valley indicate that the wife of Hugh S. Donaldson, a captain in the army of Metis revolutionary Louis Riel, was Margaret Harriott-Rowand, who was two years old at the time of her mother’s disappearance. Margaret’s mother, Margaret Ann ‘Elizabeth’ Pruden, was 32 years old at the time of her vanishing, which one genealogy characterizes as being “shrouded in legend – missing in 1832 as she was crossing Athabasca Pass,” the entry states, “though her baby survived.”
The Wraith of Revelstoke
Let us return to Moberly’s Revelstoke ghost story.
“At one place,” the engineer wrote, “not far from the ‘Dalle de Mort’, seeing an old hut I landed to find out what it was. As my Indians did not like to land I asked the reason why, and one of them told me that several years before, a Columbia River Indian, his wife and two children were staying in the hut. The Indian went in his canoe to visit his traps, but night came on, the woman watching for her husband’s return. At last she heard the dip of his paddle in the water, and saw him step carefully out of his canoe at the usual landing place and begin to unload his canoe, when she laid down again in her blankets. After a time, surprised at his not coming in, she got up, but could see no sign of the Indian or canoe, and went to the landing place to examine the newly—fallen snow to see, as she expected, his footsteps, but was dreadfully frightened to find there were not any marks. A day or two afterwards, two Indians of her tribe came and told her they had found her husband’s broken canoe at the foot of a bad rapid, but could find to trace of him. His body was never found, and the wrecked canoe told the poor woman the mournful tale. The Indians, believing the hut to be haunted by the spirit of the drowned Indian, do not like to go to it.”
This frontier ghost story is a classic wraith tale, one of the most common types of ghost stories, in which the apparition of a dying person appears to his friend or loved one at the moment of his death. English novelist Catherine Ann Crowe wrote extensively on this phenomenon in her 1866 book The Night Side of Nature. “There must be few persons,” she wrote, “who have not heard amongst their friends and [acquaintances] instances of what is called a Wraith – that is, that in the moment of death, a person is seen in a place where bodily he is not.” Later in her book, Crowe made the observation that in most wraith stories, it seems likely that the people to whom the apparition appears are those whom the dying man most strongly desired to be near at the moment of his death, implying some connection between the phenomenon and the ardent will of the dying person.
There are many more wraith stories in the forgotten literature of Canadian history, which we will hopefully explore more thoroughly in a future piece.
Sources
Surveying the Canadian Pacific: Memoir of a Railroad Pioneer (1991), by R. M. Rylatt (Foreword by William Kittredge)
“Startling Story: A Former Victorian Running Naked and Wild on the Mainland,” in the December 4th, 1875 issue of the Ottawa Daily Citizen
Progress Report on the Canadian Pacific Railway Exploratory Survey (1872), by Sandford Fleming
The Rocks and Rivers of British Columbia (1885), by Walter Moberly
Diary of a Surveyor Engaged on the C.P.R. Survey – Homathko River, Etc. Route 1872, by George Hargreaves, from the British Columbia Archives (Fonds PF-0857 – George Hargreaves fonds; Series MS-0443 – Diary)
Legends of Le Detroit (1884), by Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin
Strange Terrain: The Fairy World in Newfoundland (1991), by Barbara Rieti
A Pioneer Gentlewoman in British Columbia: The Recollections of Susan Allison (posthumously published in 1976), edited by Margaret A. Ormsby
Maskepetoon: Leader, Warrior, Peacemaker (2010), by Hugh Dempsey
The Night Side of Nature (1866), by Catherine Crowe
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