By James Rubec
I took a hike and found a project.
Halloween is coming and I need to find some ghosts. Graveyards are interesting places, the older the better. Yellowknife, NWT, only has two. On Oct.16, I checked out one of them.
A friend of mine and I hiked from the Yellowknife Cross Country Ski Club’s parking lot, over some Canadian shield into Back Bay’s Old Cemetery.
Yellowknife was first settled about 75 years ago. Sparsely populated by prospectors and bush pilots, many died young because of the work environment that is the North. Some who died were buried in a valley between what is now a highway, and Back Bay. The terrain of the Northwest Territories is unforgiving, with little in the way of flat ground, and much in the way of cliffs, crags and mossy stone.
In the cemetery there are no more than 30 graves, tombstones or crosses, many of which are broken, or partially grown over. The sign identifying the space as a graveyard has been shattered and left in pieces rotting.
Many of the graves are marked by white crosses, the smallest, saddest crosses I’ve ever seen, some aren’t standing, others aren’t there at all. The tombstones are few, but ornate. A pair marked the graves of newborns that didn’t make it to eight weeks old, another had a defaced picture of a 25-year-old (Peter Gene Hendrick).
Peter’s grave has an etching on its top right-hand corner, and down its side. It almost seems like the etching was done at some point after the epitaph.
Graveyards are full of stories waiting to be unearthed… who were these people? How did they die? What were their lives like? The graveyard was small, unkempt and forgotten. The most recent addition was a bridge that crossed over a small stream.
The bridge wobbled. Winter is tough in Yellowknife, and this was not considered in the bridge’s design. Evidence of previous bridges was rotting and broken under and beside the current bridge, a graveyard of shoddy planning.
One of the graves was marked for a man from Grand Prairie, Alberta. Clayton Merrit McAusland, born June 30, 1911. He died in Yellowknife, on October 4, 1939. I’m going to call Grand Prairie and try to figure out who this guy was.
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