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Erasing the Maps
for Barbara Lambert, who suggested
the title
"Two kilometers from Coalmont,"
I said, reading the information in a travel guide we carried
on the trip. Coalmont is on the Tulameen Stage Road, leading
from Princeton to Aspen Grove through grasslands and ponderosa
pines, cliffs of red ochre, the Tulameen River a pretty sight
from the heights the road climbs to beyond Princeton.
We’d just finished a beer at the Coalmont
Hotel, the only other customer a man called Bert Sharkey
who gave us his business card — Key Shar Horse Motel:
A rustic vacation spot for you & your horse. When you
see it you’ll wonder why you came. When you leave you’ll
wonder why you left. — and encouraged us to drop
in the next time we were in the wilderness near the Otter
Valley. He had no power and no phone but promised hot showers
and two Standardbred horses. When I asked him about Granite
Creek he said he’d chased cattle through there in years
past but hadn’t been near the place in ages. On our way
out of the hotel, I stopped to look at photographs on the
wall by the bathrooms. Several showed motorcycle gangs outside
the hotel and one was a calendar from 1915, with Coalmont
Hotel printed prominently on the top, but the photograph was
captioned Scotland by the Sea, with gambolling sheep
on a cliff above a turbulent ocean. An old newspaper clipping
reported the opening of the hotel in 1912 with a High Mass
to celebrate. A lovely old dog, grey-faced and smelly, was
sleeping on the verandah as we left and wagged its tail as
we leaned over to pat it. Crossing the road to our car, I
heard violent and tubercular coughing and spitting which I
assumed was the dog until I turned and saw a second-story
door closing on the hotel’s narrow balcony. We had wondered
about permanent residents. Now we had our answer.
We wanted to see what might be left of
Granite Creek, founded in 1885 when Johnny Chance struck it
rich by finding gold in its waters; by 1887 it was the third
largest community in British Columbia. So we drove over the
bridge across the Tulameen River, turned left, and made our
way along the gravel road. There was a grassy open area where
the road began to climb up towards Blakeburn, a single ruined
cabin calm in its centre, but the distance was well short
of two kilometers so we kept driving. Up the road, past the
sign for the Granite Creek Cemetery which we intended to explore
after we’d found Granite Creek itself, a sign announced
the presence of logging trucks on the gravel road and offered
a radio frequency for those with the equipment to monitor
such things. We were in our small silver Toyota and the road
was narrow. Well past two kilometers we decided that Granite
Creek didn’t want to be found so we went back to the
Cemetery and explored the high shelf where pickets, bare and
some newly painted, corralled the dead for eternity.
I knew from reading whatever I could find
on the area that Foxcrowle
Percival Cook had been a storekeeper at Granite Creek
and was I intrigued to find his grave, alongside the grave
of his four-year old daughter Frances
Mary Cook. I was to find later that his wife Emma
was buried at Princeton almost forty years later. The ground
was strangely uneven, the shapes of graves sunk into soil
but no markers, no border of neat pebbles. There were recent
burials, some in the 1990s, so it was still a place alive
enough in memory for people to want to be put into its earth,
among the pine trees and wild roses. Rhodes, McBride, Lucas;
and William D. Morrison, with his poignant inscription, No
More Trials or Pain. So many of the markers had worn past
legibility with age and weather but among the few still clear
enough to read was the one for Charlie and Nellie Blank, their
names on a simple picket stake with a heart etched into the
old wood.
When we got to the bottom of the road,
we noticed the sign which we’d thought had pointed up
the road but in fact indicated the open area with the cabin.
We quickly realized that the travel book had been overly generous
in its estimate of distance and that this was Granite Creek,
where the smooth-rocked tributary met the Tulameen River.
There was a cabin tarped in blue with a sign saying that it
was being restored by a heritage group and that the work would
be completed in 2001. It was now June of 2003. A few other
foundations had gone to ground, one holding two walls which
were nearly completely collapsed. There were two apple trees
which didn’t look particularly old but then I read somewhere
that the last four residents of Granite Creek stayed until
the mid 1950s; these might have been later plantings. The
trees were heavy with pale pink bloom and I could also see
lots of gooseberry bushes. There were old lilacs around areas
that might have been entrances to houses or one of the 13
saloons which supplied miners with refreshment and consolation.
There had been a fire in 1907 which had pretty much destroyed
most of the town but even after gold fever had died down,
people continued to make a living, supporting a store for
a time, and no doubt some sort of drinking establishment.
In a pit lined with river stones which we thought might be
a well or a grey water area a mouse huddled on the dry bottom,
shaking in fear. When we left to get a rough shake for it
to use as a plank to escape, it disappeared into some tunnels
among the rocks.
Where had Foxcrowle Percival Cook’s
store been located? (In one account of the community, I read
that the fire began there. But the store was rebuilt and later
relocated to Coalmont in 1912.) And where had his children
played? Adelaine,
Emily,
Frances (the poor one sharing her father’s enclosure,
though twenty years before him alone in the earth), Eda,
Agnes,
and Edward:
children growing like young trees on the banks of the Tulameen
River. I like to think that they brightened the lives of miners
long absent from their own families, provided charming details
for letters written to remote corners of the earth. What did
they think about the shooting, of which I’ve read there
was plenty. The knives, the horses, the "temples of Bacchus"?
Their father died in 1918, in Vancouver, and I wonder whether
it was the Spanish influenza that took him, and whether he
returned to Granite Creek by train, a sad passenger in a coffin,
placed among the freight and sacks of mail.
There are almost no clear echoes in Granite
Creek — no voices of children, no clamour of stories
in the tall grass. It is a place of deep absence, absence
in the hand-hewn remnants of logs fitting together in the
corners like lovers. The trees contain nothing, not even nests
of magpies whose great-parents might have greeted the morning
like a raucous gang. And yet we linger for a time, walking
the perimeter where cars have stopped, rings of stones created
for campfires, where beer cans have been shot at, then left
to glint like silver in the grass. I stand still and close
my eyes briefly, hoping to hear something, anything, but there
are only bees humming in wild roses and yarrow. A grasshopper
clicks in the grass. But I am discovering there are echoes,
and echoes. Some, not clear nor immediate, insinuate themselves
into the imagination, the heart, and make their small noise
long after the sound has stopped. A resonance, a whisper —
voices or a phrase of music carrying on after silence.
I dream of the storekeeper’s
children a week later, wondering if there had been a school
in Granite Creek for them. I can find no record of one though
Coalmont had one later on. No church in the early years either
though services were held once a month by the Reverend George
Murray in private homes or else in one of the hotels. I dream
of the children in sunlight, eyes full of weather, the knowledge
of specific pines, hands stained with dandelions. Vital Statistics
holds records of their births, deaths, marriages. Foxcrowle
and Emma were married in Lower Nicola, I discover, one of
my favourite places on earth; somewhere there would be records
of land grants and holdings. I could make family trees, and
even map out the townsite, perhaps, make a grid of its physical
appearance. But what is lost here, at least to me, is the
shape of a place, known and held in memory, loved well enough
that those dying a century later would desire its earth. The
echo of these children will sound itself in odd ways —
a name, pondered like a wishing stone; a website of a family,
listing antecedents; a photograph found in the Provincial
Archives showing a clearing with some cabins, snow, a declaration
of trails on the mountain above.
On my desk, a fragment of embossed tin
ceiling tile, found in the grass where it was rusting away.
I thought twice about taking it home with me, wondered if
the act would be considered theft or grave-robbing, but the
fragment was flaky and not long for this world and I knew
I’d look at it daily on my desk, feeling a shiver as
I thought of its provenance. Had it been painted? Had it graced
the ceiling of a hotel or saloon? Objects wait all over the
landscape with their fading narratives of settlement and loss.
I hunted down maps from various sources to look at how Granite
Creek was represented during its heyday and long decline —
the bold type, or faint. I found it on the CPR
map of 1893 and a Rand McNally map of 1896; but by 1914, the
CNR map (released a year before
the trains were actually running on its tracks) showed only
the geographical feature of the creek and didn’t indicate
a town. I run a search on the Provincial Archives site and
get some photographs, citations for Provincial Police correspondence,
government agent records, but no cartographic references.
At what point is a place simply erased
from a map in its very literal sense? All over British Columbia
there are significant townsites which hold only ghosts of
their former selves. As a young woman I hiked to Leechtown
on Vancouver Island and remember the decaying cabins, the
occasional iron pot, a trailing run of fence. Recently I was
told there is almost nothing left there now. Cemeteries can
anchor a name but what of those who lie outside? Addresses
on old envelopes call to mind a residence. And of course plants
last far longer than buildings sometimes, the buildings easily
taken apart and reconstructed elsewhere, but roots and seeds
have a lingering affinity with their earth. I think of the
delphiniums at Barkerville, the common lilacs, even in the
fenced-off areas around the few remaining buildings still
in private hands, and thus not tended by park contractors
or teams of volunteers. Not far from Barkerville, old buildings
sit in clearings at Stanley, Lightning Creek, Beaver Pass.
There is the faint impression of a race track at nearby Antler
where horse races were held and where Governor Douglas attended
a meet prior to the construction of the Cariboo Road, hot
blooded horses having been imported from England in 1861 and
then brought up what was then the Cariboo Trail. And yet where
is Antler on the maps? I suppose ghosts (those unmarked graves),
the remnants of a race track, the standing chimney of a house
long abandoned, are not solid enough evidence of occupation
and industry for cartographers to keep penciling in the names
on new maps. Still they have their own resilience.
Later, I read in Don Blake’s book
on Blakeburn — the coal mining camp on the mountain above
Granite Creek which flourished from the 1920s until the 40s
— that following the mine explosion on August 13, 1930,
a day known as Black Wednesday for the 45 men who perished,
graves were dug at the Granite Creek cemetery for the bodies
recovered after the explosion. A few men were buried there
but most were transferred to Princeton or even Vancouver;
the depressions in the ground are memories of those temporarily
laid in the earth, the men who perished as well as the Chinese
workers who were buried temporarily until their bones could
be sent back to China. It is hard to know, walking over uneven
ground, whether one walks on a natural depression or a place
which still holds the shape of a man taken away.
Bert Sharkey remembered chasing cattle through
Granite Creek, suggesting it had been part of a range, a wilderness.
Photographs from the 1950s reveal a few cabins still inhabited
(smoke in the chimneys, a window opened to the morning). Photographs
from the early 1960s focus on detritus, fallen walls, yet
earlier photographs offer panoramas of cabins, the two streets
(Miners and Government), a house with a garden plot neatly
weeded. And in books about ghost towns, side roads and forgotten
camps, a map will show the place itself, in bold type, as
worthy of our attention as Paris or Vancouver. A road will
be described, contours and elevations indicated, and for a
moment, what comes alive is nearly everything that ever was
— buildings lit by oil lamps, gardens ablaze with flowers,
children running from one door to another with smaller children
tailing them, and mothers hanging out wash and gathering enough
gooseberries for a fool, wood being chopped, a storekeeper
wiping a counter with a cloth cut from a worn flannel shirt.
In a saloon, sawdust is being spread on the floor while whiskey
is downed in the blink of an eye. Everything that has happened
is happening again. The old dog leaps from the verandah to
run the scant kilometer to a clearing where familiar voices
have summoned him to sit down, shake a paw. And I wonder if
that’s why someone still lives in the Coalmont Hotel,
waiting for the moment when every ache might vanish, the breathing
come easy, the river hasten over rocks as it once did when
he was young and found his footing among wild roses and tall
grass, when the dead will turn in their graves above Granite
Creek and smile to hear magpies again.
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