Gravestones may mark the burial places of the dead, but they have a lot to say about a community's past. That's why Heritage Moose Jaw, like so many heritage groups across Canada, offers guided tours of old Moose JawCemetery, a municipal heritage site, on Saturday mornings starting at 10:30.
Before the land became a cemetery, and before Tom Healy claimed it as his original homestead site, aboriginal peoples had constructed a medicine wheel or ceremonial circle with a large central cairn on this very spot.
It was an ideal location: the land sloped away on all sides leaving a good field of vision, and there was running water (Moose Jaw River) close by. Old timers who actually saw the aboriginal circle said it was about 150 feet in diameter and the stones which made up the circle and cairn measured from six to eight inches.
A regulation Mounted Police marker in today's cemetery is a reminder of Cpl. Patrick (Paddy) Doyle who came to Canada from Ireland in 1883 and joined the North-West Mounted Police. His first posting brought him to Regina; he was on guard duty the day Louis Riel was hanged.
Paddy was stationed at Moose Jaw in 1891, at a time when it was illegal to import alcohol into the North-West Territories (present day Alberta and Saskatchewan) without a permit.
While searching a boxcar sidetracked in the CPR yards to unload freight, he noticed several barrels labelled "sugar" alongside two barrels of alcohol which were covered by permit.
To make sure the barrels of sugar contained that commodity, he broke open one and found that it did indeed contain sugar — but covering a keg of whiskey.
Out of the sugar barrels he took 36 bottles of Irish whiskey, three kegs of another illegal thirst-quencher, and 40 gallons of ale, all consigned to Gleichen, Alberta.
At the time of his death in 1958 at the age of 95, Paddy was the last surviving member of the old North-West Mounted Police
At the west end of the cemetery, a headstone with one-third of its top broken off and replaced with a cement cap, belongs to Mrs. William Heath.
But Mrs. Heath is not there — she was buried along a fence line on her homestead several miles northwest of Moose Jaw in August 1888.
A stone was eventually purchased but by then the fence had been removed, the land plowed, and the grave's precise location lost. The stone sat around for years and had its top broken off before the family erected it on an empty plot in Moose Jaw Cemetery.
About a century ago, with the development of pneumatic tools capable of cutting hard stone, polished granite became the preferred monumental material.
Alderman Harry Green, his wife Christina and two infant children have one of the more impressive monuments in the cemetery: a tall, polished column of brown granite topped with a granite urn, asymbol of sorrow.
Christina was only eight in 1882 when she and her widowed father George Ross, along with other family members, left their Ontario; home to settle at Moose Jaw, then a cluster of tents in the middle of an unsettled wilderness. Since the rail line ended at Broadview, the last leg of their westward journey was made by wagon and oxen.
Christina was the second white child to call Moose Jaw home. Around the age of 20, she married Harry Green, a member of a prominent homestead family of the Boharm area.
Having babies in an age before antibiotics, medicines and modern hospitals was risky, and after producing three sons, Christina's luck ran out and she died in 1904 after giving birth to a daughter Elizabeth who lived only two months.
Less than two years later, Harry Green contracted typhoid fever, a curse of a community without running water and sewer, and died at the age of 38.
Harry was a member of city council and civic-minded to the core. His funeral service was held in the civic auditorium on the upper floor of the old red-brick city hall which stood on Fairford Street across from the present-day Yvette Moore Gallery. Nearly 200 of his fellow lodge members marched in procession to Moose Jaw Cemetery ahead of 75 buggies loaded with mourners.
Little Jessie Mariettta Rutherford who died in 1906 at the age of 17 months, has one of the loveliest memorials in the cemetery.
It is of white marble, symbolic of childhood and innocence. Carved in the marble are sprigs of ivy and evergreen, symbols of immortality because these plants are always green. Standing beside the headstone is a beautifully sculpted figure of a child, also in white marble.
Jessie's father, John Rutherford, was a CPR dispatcher who came to Moose Jaw in 1885. He was mayor of the town in 1891 and again in 1901, and later served as sheriff for this district.
