Highwood Cemetery – High River, Alberta
I have been blessed in that I am able to occasionally escape the cacophony of the city to spend a little time in the more sedate surroundings of a small town about fifty miles to the south of me. With a population of less than fifteen thousand, High River has roughly twice the population of my home community in the city, Canyon Meadows, though a mere fraction of the 1.3 million people who now call Calgary home.
High River
The settlement that would later be known as High River was initially a North West Mounted Police outpost called “Fort Spitzee”, after the Blackfoot name for the Highwood River, Ispitsi. It was established at the halfway point between Calgary and Fort MacLeod, in an area that was bristling with bootleggers and other miscreants.
Headstones reveal how the town evolved over time.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, memorial monuments were more reflective of social status than those from the modern day. Obelisks and ornate pillars of granite or marble mark some of the resting places of some of the earliest families to establish themselves in the community, while others are as humble as simply being nothing but a rock with a name carved into it.
On closer examination, these headstones also provide a glimpse into the evolution of modern medicine from the same period of time to the present day. One of the first things that becomes obvious is that childhood mortality rates were definitely higher in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Compared to the modern era, there are significantly more graves of infants and young children. It’s heartwrenching to look at the small headstones, some adorned with lambs, which mark the resting places of newborns. Others are buried in family plots with their parents or other siblings, ranging in age from newborn to mid-teens.
There are also a number of young women, who were predominantly wives in their late teens to late twenties who died in childbirth. Likely as not these women either suffered from blood loss due to hemorrhaging or died from extreme hypertension brought about due to preeclampsia, a condition that was almost always fatal for the mother and sometimes for the baby. Today’s modern techniques in Obstetrics make such fatalities a rarity, making for far fewer young widowers.
Hidden plot.
Well hidden from view, this plot has a gate and is surrounded by shrubbery.
The Field of Honour.
The final resting place for those local boys who served their country, with some killed in various conflicts and others who lived well into their retirements.
The Advocate-Equalizer 