Only the Names Remain

Have you ever walked through a cemetery and looked at the headstones? Each one tells a short story of a life – with dates of birth and death, sometimes where the person was born, and perhaps a short phrase that gives an insight into their lives.

Revelstoke’s Mountain View Cemetery holds many such headstones, but among them is one marker with 33 names and nothing more. The marker is a memorial stone to the Mount Cartier Cemetery, which was active from 1913 to 1966 when the site was closed and covered in preparation for the Arrow Lakes reservoir.

Cathy English Interview – Mount Cartier Cemetery (captions available in both French and English). Enjoy this video with an English transcript.

Two coloured photographs edited side by side of a cemetery plaque titled “Mount Cartier Cemetery 1913 to 1966” with a list of names. The photo on the left is a close-up of the names, and the photo on the right is zoomed out to show the scenery around the headstone. The plaque/headstone is surrounded by flowers at the base.

Mount Cartier cemetery plaque that sits at the cemetery in Revelstoke, 2022. Photographer: Cathy English.

Those 33 names represent real people who were part of the Mount Cartier community, which was made up of settlers mostly from Poland and Ukraine. There is Damian Hulyd, one of the first settlers in 1908, who died in 1942, at the age of 42, and his wife Pistema, who died in 1925. There is Artym Ozero, and his wife Polly, who came to Mount Cartier from Galicia, Poland, in 1913 with their seven children.

Black-and-white family portrait of eight individuals in dress-attire (suits and skirts). Six men stand in the back, and 5 women sit in the front with a man sitting in the centre. The photograph was taken in a room with curtains on both sides and a small framed picture in the centre.

Polly and Artym Ozero and family, ca. 1920. RMA photo 1880.

Only a few families had the means to disinter and rebury the remains of their loved ones. Most were left behind in the closed cemetery, and left with a single marker on which only their names remain.

The Mount Cartier cemetery is not the first thing that we think about when we calculate the losses caused by the dam construction, but it was one more sadness experienced by those displaced from their homes and their community.

An aerial view black-and-white photograph showing farmland and the Mt. Cartier settlement. A river is visible in the background of the photo.

Mount Cartier Settlement, ca. 1950. RMA photo 5313.

We Were Lucky – Mount Cartier Community All the Way to Revelstoke