boot hill
We are walking in the near-forgotten cemetery of the former British Columbia Penitentiary. The penitentiary closed in 1980, officially declared “surplus” following a tumultuous one-hundred and two year history. The twenty-nine hectares it once occupied lay fallow for nearly a decade, the deserted buildings a source of refuge and recreation for local teenagers. Throughout the 1980s, newspaper articles pondered the future of the site, though few mentioned the existence of a cemetery within its borders. Ultimately, the land was purchased by a private developer. Two former penitentiary buildings were renovated as heritage properties, and the rest were razed, replaced by condominiums. Unbeknownst to most local residents, included in a parcel carved from the penitentiary lands and donated by the developer to the City of New Westminster was the BC Penitentiary cemetery, destined to become part of Glenbrook Ravine Park. The cemetery – known to some as “Boot Hill” – thereby became the penitentiary’s third surviving feature. Most people who lived in the Lower Mainland before 1980 remember the BC Penitentiary. Throughout most of the twentieth century, its structures were prominent along a major commuter route between Vancouver, New Westminster and the nearby suburbs of Coquitlam and North Burnaby. I was a back seat passenger during many childhood car trips past the Pen, and its guard towers and smoke-blackened walls are imprinted in my memory. Back then I had a child’s understanding of good and bad – the hard-earned awareness that a lot turned on one’s ability to tell one from the other. But even then, my regard for “goodness” -- and my prurient fascination with its opposite -- was complicated by the realization that assessments of each could be strangely subjective. I therefore regarded the BC Penitentiary with a mixture of dread and curiosity. Who had been so bad as to require confinement in such a place? And how should such people be regarded?
Myself, I’m possessed by the sense that there is something to erasures of this kind -- some message contained in our unwillingness to memorialize certain times and places. The park and the condominiums are fresh, and clean, and good for the local economy. But what of what existed here before? Curious about what I would find, I approached the former Penitentiary site as an archaeologist might, mindful that every layer a culture lays down traps something underneath. And what I found – hidden from view, overgrown with blackberries, and all but inaccessible – was the cemetery. The BC Penitentiary cemetery was a “pauper’s cemetery” – a burial place for prisoners whose families were too poor, too far away, or too estranged to claim their bodies. Here are buried at least fifty-two men, interred between 1912 and 1968. Forty-eight headstones; four – maybe more – unmarked graves. Once having discovered it last spring, this place has become my project, my obsession, my intellectual lodestar. I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching the site and the men interred here, and I come here a lot. I come here to look at the river, and to listen to the trains whistle past. I come here to satisfy my curiosity, to snoop around, to hang out with mortality, and to pray. I come here to think about the stories from our past which don’t get told, and the heritage which doesn’t get preserved. And -- because I don’t think it was ever intended this cemetery should survive -- I come here to keep an eye on the place.
Many pieces of our collective history are buried here. The impact of white settlement on First Nations. Tuberculosis and residential schools. The 1918 flu pandemic. Treatment of Chinese labourers. 1930s Criminal Code amendments that made public nudity an offence punishable with a penitentiary term. A 1950s amendment to the same Code which turned ordinary addicts into “habitual criminals”, subject to indefinite prison terms. Inmate violence against guards, and guard violence against inmates. Here is buried a boy of eighteen, who entered the penitentiary in 1948 at 5 feet 4 inches and 123 pounds, to serve two years for the theft of $70. He died in prison of a brain abscess so advanced it perforated the roof of his mouth. Here is a man who died of exposure in his own prison cell. Today my father has come to the cemetery with me. We walk the ragged rows of the cemetery, careful not to lose our footing in the holes dug by animals, careful not to step on a misplaced headstone. 991. 1548. 4214. 7299. The stones are poured concrete, and some numbers are so worn they are discernible only by touch. I have a small map, given to me last summer by a former penitentiary employee, and we locate each numbered stone on the map, tracing our gritty fingers along the paper. I now recognize individual stones, and I know some names by heart. That’s Moses Paul, I tell my father. That’s Kee Kwong. These are the five Doukhobor protestors. That is Sook Sias.
Stooped over, gently brushing leaves from a stone, my father wants to know which ones were the Bad Guys. I struggle to find words for what I’ve been thinking since I found this place. That the bad guys are everywhere, and nowhere. That life is wickedly complicated. I avoid the question. Canada geese fly by, and another train whistles past. The smell of cedar wafts up from a barge in the river. It’s getting cold out. I point out the remnants of some old fences bordering this place. There is the rotting wood and wire from the 1950s, the rusting iron pipe from the 60s, the stylish cedar of the early 1990s and the chain link erected last summer. It’s hard not to notice that these fences, erected at the border between this place and everywhere else, keep falling down. There’s probably a lesson in that. We head back to the car. Copyright © 2003 Deborah McIntosh |
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