Hallowed Ground

This book makes it easy with its compelling collection of stories about the people who are buried at the Yale Pioneer Cemetery, an antique burial ground “at a stopping point between Fort Langley and Fort Kamloops,” BC. Established in 1858, the Yale offers final refuge to some 300 souls, many of them among British Columbia’s earliest pioneers, including immigrant railroad labourers who toiled and died building the Canadian Pacific and Canadian Northern Railways. Here lies Dr. Maximilian Fifer, murdered in 1861 at the hands of a patient who felt the physician has mistreated him; Ned Stout, who, when he died in 1924, included Yale’s 1858 gold rush and the 1880 construction of the CPR among the memories of his 100-year lifetime; and the Elley brothers, three of at least eight children taken by scarlet fever as an epidemic tore through the town in the 1880s. As for the more than 200 unmarked graves in the Yale Cemetery, Hallowed Ground unearths their stories, too. “Yale is the focal point of our realistic and romantic history,” a passerby wrote the Yale and District Historical Society in 1980.