# The Ground Beneath Them Was Dry Published: October 30, 2026 {{< caption >}} Electric storm, midnight, July 9, 1906, Edmonton. {{< /caption >}} *From the files of the Department of Secret Histories, City of Calgary* There's a bench in Union Cemetery in Calgary, and if you sit on it your feet rest on two people. I don't mean that the way people mean it when they say a whole city is built on graves. I mean it the way a surveyor would. The bench is at the north edge of Section D, on the grass, with its back to the slope and its face to nothing in particular, and if you sit on it in the ordinary way, knees bent, heels down, your heels are on Block 12, Lots 1 and 2, which the City of Calgary's [burial register](https://data.calgary.ca/resource/tcwg-fcae.json) assigns to Charles Tawse and May Swindells, both interred in May 1915. I know this because I went with the register open on my phone and a copy of the section plan, and I paced it, and then I sat down, and then I got up and paced it again, because it seemed too exact to be an accident. It isn't an accident. It took me most of a year to find out whose decision it was. I'll go through it in the order I found it. There's no headstone on either lot. There's no stone on either side of them for several feet. The grass is the same grass as everywhere else in Section D, cut on the same schedule by the same City mower, and the only thing that distinguishes the place is the bench, black, powder coated, the standard Parks Division pattern, which somebody put there, at some point, on purpose. They were killed by lightning. That much everyone agrees on, and almost nothing else. {{< asterism >}} The weather first. The Environment Canada station for Calgary has daily data going back to 1881, and you can pull April 1915 as a CSV from the [climate archive](https://climate.weather.gc.ca/climate_data/bulk_data_e.html?format=csv&stationID=2205&Year=1915&Month=4&Day=1&timeframe=2) and open it in a spreadsheet and look at it, which I did, more than once, at hours I'm not proud of. April 1915 was dry. In the whole month before the 29th there was one day with rain, the 21st, 5.3 millimetres, and the monthly total came to 11.7, which on the prairie is a month of dust. The 18th had been warm, 25.6 degrees. Then it cooled off, and then on Thursday the 29th the minimum at dawn was 0.6 degrees, about freezing, and the maximum in the afternoon was 25.0, which is a swing of nearly twenty-five degrees in the course of a day, the kind of day that makes a prairie city feel briefly and stupidly optimistic. People would have left their coats at home. They'd have been wrong about that by nine o'clock. The archive files the whole series under the name of the airport, which is an anachronism; there was no airport in 1915, or for twenty years after, and the early readings were taken in town. Wherever the thermometer stood, its 25.0 for the 29th is a little lower than its 25.6 for the 18th, so by the instrument the 29th wasn't quite the hottest day of the year. By the people on the street it was. The Edmonton Daily Bulletin, which was the nearest thing Alberta had to a paper of record, ran a Calgary item on [its front page](https://archive.org/details/EDH_1915043001) the next morning, Friday, April 30, filed the evening of the storm, lower left, under the headline HEAVY RAIN AT CALGARY. Here it is entire. It's short. ![Newspaper crop headed HEAVY RAIN AT CALGARY](heavy-rain-1915.jpg) {{< caption >}} HEAVY RAIN AT CALGARY. Edmonton Daily Bulletin, April 30, 1915, page one. {{< /caption >}} > "A thunderstorm accompanied by violent rains broke over Calgary district this evening following the hottest day of the year. Officials of the Farmers' Union estimated it to be of priceless value to the newly sown wheat, which is already showing itself in the southern part of the province." Nobody had found them yet. They were already lying in the street when the correspondent wired that, and they'd go on lying there for most of a night, and the first thing the province learned about the storm that killed them was that it was good for the crop. The fuller account ran the next day, Saturday, May 1, on [page 18 of the same paper](https://archive.org/details/EDH_1915050101), with a Calgary dateline of April 30. The headline runs to three decks and reads like a list someone made while they were still standing over the scene: {{< img src="killed-by-bolt-1915.jpg" alt="Newspaper headline: Killed by bolt of lighting in Calgary street" width="65%" >}} {{< caption >}} Edmonton Daily Bulletin, May 1, 1915, page eighteen. The compositor's spelling is retained. {{< /caption >}} > BODIES BADLY CHARRED > BOOTS TORN OFF FEET According to the Bulletin, the couple had been "hastening home, arm in arm, through the storm Thursday evening on Prospect avenue, near Tenth street west." They were heading for the house where she worked and lived, the residence of A.M. Peters at 1031 Prospect Avenue, and they were "but a block or two from the house." They were struck, and they fell, and they "lay all night where they had fallen in the midst of the rain and the storm." They were found early Friday morning "lying in the center of the street." Both were face down. "The earth in the immediate vicinity," the paper says, "was torn up and shattered." And the ground beneath them was dry. ![Newspaper crop of the dry-ground sentence](ground-beneath-1915.jpg) The Bulletin uses this, very sensibly, as a clock. If the ground under them was dry and the ground around them was wet, then they fell before the rain started, and the rain started about half past nine, and so the lightning came "about 9.30." That's sound and I don't doubt it. A storm came over the mountains and broke on the city and rained for hours, on the roofs of American Hill and the torn earth of the street and the boots that had come off, and the two bodies lay on the only dry ground in Calgary, and in the morning the dry ground was still dry, because they were still on it. The injuries weren't written so much as copied, out of a constable's notes or the coroner's, and the Bulletin didn't dress them. "The body of Miss Swindell was burned in several places, her arm and waist being badly scorched." Charles's "face was discolored and his hair badly singed. His tie was completely charred and his boots were torn from his feet." Under a subhead that just says "Death Instantaneous," the paper adds that "it is stated by Coroner Costello that death was instantaneous and it is impossible that any inquest will be held." That's the word as printed. I've looked at the page image, and I've zoomed in until the halftone comes apart. *Impossible.* You'd assume he meant improbable, or unnecessary. But the paper says impossible, and it's the only word we have from the only official who looked at them. Lets spend some time on said official. The coroner was Dr. Thos. J. Costello, and [Henderson's Calgary City Directory for 1914](https://archive.org/details/P002961-9) gives his office as the Provincial Coroner's Office, 2 Costello Block, so the coroner named Costello worked in a building named Costello. I haven't found who the block was named for. The mayor of Calgary, sworn in that January, was [Michael Copps Costello](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Copps_Costello), and he was a doctor too, or nearly: a medical graduate of Queen's, with further training in London and Dublin, who never practiced a day in his life and worked instead as a printer at the Herald before he stood for Council. He wasn't born Michael, either. He was born William, in Montreal, and came into Calgary on the first train ever to arrive in it, in 1883, a boy of eight riding in ahead of the whole city to come. {{< img src="mayor-costello-1915.jpg" alt="Studio portrait of Mayor Michael C. Costello, 1915" width="40%" >}} {{< caption >}} M.C. Costello, Mayor of Calgary, 1915. Photograph by E.B. Curlette. {{< /caption >}} {{< img src="coroner-costello-1914.jpg" alt="Directory line for the Provincial Coroner's Office in the Costello Block" width="62%" >}} {{< caption >}} Provincial Coroner's Office, 2 Costello Block. Henderson's, 1914. {{< /caption >}} I've spent more evenings than I'll admit trying to relate the two of them, the doctor who wouldn't doctor running the city and the doctor examining its dead, and I can't do it. The directories keep them in separate houses, the obituaries don't cross, and the mayor lies in Saint Mary's Pioneer Cemetery with no Thomas near him. They may be nothing to each other. What's left once you give up is just the spring of 1915 as it stood: a city run by one Costello while another Costello, from an office inside a third, declared that two of its dead could not be asked any questions. It was impossible. {{< asterism >}} Now, who were they? The papers can't even agree on their names. The Bulletin calls her Miss Swindell. The Calgary Daily Herald, in a transcription of its April 30 coverage preserved on [her WikiTree profile](https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Swindells-384), calls her Miss Swindells, with the s, which is also how the cemetery register and the city directory have her. The Vulcan Advocate, on May 12, calls her "Miss May Windell," which loses her a whole syllable. He's Tawse in the Herald and the register and the 1912 and 1913 directories, and Towse in the Bulletin, the Advocate and the 1914 directory, where he's "Towse Chas W," the only document in existence that gives him a middle initial. Her age is worse. The Bulletin says 25. The Herald's news story says "about 24." The Herald's own death notice, the next day, says 31, and the person who transcribed it added a bracketed note that it could be 34, because the microfilm was bad. Four documents, four ages, and the spread is ten years. The genealogists make a consistent case for a fifth. A May Swindells was born in Macclesfield, Cheshire, in the first quarter of 1880, the daughter of Edwin Swindells, an engine fitter, and Martha Maria Rowbotham, and was baptised on the eleventh of April at St John's. She grew up in a houseful of brothers and sisters, something like eleven of them, among them a Clara, an Ada, a Beatrice, a Blanche, an Emma, a Gladys and a Marjorie. In 1881 she's "Mary," at 11 Hatton Street. In 1891 the family is at 101 High Street in Sutton. In 1901 she's a silk hemmer at 99 High Street. In 1911 she's "Mary," 30, single, a silk neckwear worker, still at 99 High Street, living with her father, who was a widower by then; her mother had died in 1908. Macclesfield was the silk town of England. She spent her twenties hemming it. And then, sometime between the census of 1911 and the Calgary directory of 1914, she crossed an ocean and most of a continent, and went into service for a bank manager on a hill in a city that had been a fort within living memory, and told the people there that she was twenty-four. I don't know why. I can think of reasons. A housemaid's position is easier to get at twenty-four than at thirty-two. A fiancé is easier to get at twenty-four. It may have been nothing more than a habit she picked up on the boat. But I notice that the one time anyone in Calgary wrote her age down carefully, in the death notice, it came out as 31 or 34, which is close to the truth, and I notice that the person who placed that notice was almost certainly Alfred Peters, who had cabled her people in Macclesfield and gotten an answer. So he knew by then. He'd found out from a cable, after she was dead, because she hadn't told him. [Henderson's 1914](https://archive.org/details/P002961-9) has her in a single line: "Swindells May maid lvs 1031 Prospect Ave." {{< img src="swindells-1914.jpg" alt="Directory line for Swindells May, maid, 1031 Prospect Ave" width="78%" >}} {{< caption >}} Swindells May, maid, lives 1031 Prospect Ave. Henderson's, 1914. {{< /caption >}} The directory's "lvs" is "lives," and in the convention of the time it means she lived in. The Herald said she'd been housemaid to Peters for about a year and a half, that she had "an attractive personality and was of a very refined nature," and that "Miss Swindells left the house early yesterday afternoon," which is the last thing anyone on record knows about her alive. It was her afternoon off. Her father outlived her by three and a half years and died in October 1918, and I have no way of knowing whether anyone in Calgary learned of it. {{< asterism >}} Charles is harder to see. Working men in that city came and went, and the directory caught them once a year, and the papers only if something happened to them. He was born in Aberdeen, or at any rate was "a native of Scotland," and both the Bulletin and the Herald say he'd been about eight years in Canada, nearly two of them in Calgary. A modern retelling, in [a seniors' monthly called Unison](https://unisonalberta.com/news/lightning-struck), found the one border record anyone has: he came up from Spokane, Washington, and entered Canada at Kingsgate, British Columbia, in May 1912, with fifty dollars, listed in the Port of Admissions log as a labourer. That doesn't square with eight years in Canada unless he'd been in and out, which men like him often were. I leave both versions standing. You can follow him through the directories. In 1912 he's "Tawse C lab r 1622 1st Ave S W," a labourer, rooming on the west side. In 1913 he's Charles Tawse, teamster, for J.D. McMillan, which means he drove horses. By 1914 he's "Towse Chas W shipper Robin Hood Mills Ltd lvs 1102 1st St E," boarding with Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Nicholson. Robin Hood had [bought the Calgary Milling Company in 1912](https://hermis.alberta.ca/ARHP/Details.aspx?DeptID=1&ObjectID=4664-0009) and ran the mill at 4th Street and 9th Avenue West, with offices in the Canada Life Building, and Samuel Nicholson was himself a labourer at Robin Hood Mills as early as 1912, so it isn't hard to work out who got Charles the job. The Bulletin says he'd been at the mill eighteen months and was "very popular." His only known relative was a brother, J. Towse, believed to be in Winnipeg, and the police were trying to find him. {{< img src="tawse-1912.jpg" alt="1912 directory line for Tawse C, labourer" width="78%" >}} {{< caption >}} Labourer, 1912. Tawse C, 1622 1st Ave S.W. Henderson's. {{< /caption >}} {{< img src="tawse-1913.jpg" alt="1913 directory line for Charles Tawse, teamster" width="78%" >}} {{< caption >}} Teamster for J.D. McMillan, 1913. Henderson's. {{< /caption >}} {{< img src="towse-1914.jpg" alt="1914 directory line for Towse Chas W, shipper, Robin Hood Mills" width="78%" >}} {{< caption >}} Shipper, Robin Hood Mills, 1914. Henderson's. {{< /caption >}} The Herald says one more thing about him, in a sentence that stumped me for months. He "used to visit the houses in the ordinary way and was looked upon as a worthy and respectable man." I read it as a misprint for a while, then as some Edwardian idiom I didn't have. I think now it means exactly what it says: he called at the house on Prospect Avenue by the front path, in daylight, on her afternoons off, and the neighbours on that hill, who would have noticed a shipper from the mills coming up the street, saw that he did it properly, and thought the better of him. He wasn't a man who came to the kitchen door after dark. It's the only description of his character that survives, and it's a decent one to be left with. There's one more line in [the 1915 directory](https://archive.org/details/P002961-10) that I can't get out of my head. Henderson's lists the residents of 1st Street East house by house, walking north. 1102 Nicolson Samuel. 1106 Morgan James. A few more. Hunt Edgar. Then the words "12th Ave intersects." Then 1202 Herron. Then: "1206 Armstrong B H undertaker." In the 1914 edition the same address is "1206-1210 Shaver Armstrong & McPherson undertakers." B.H. Armstrong is the undertaker whose parlours held May's funeral. Charles Tawse spent the last year of his life sleeping across 12th Avenue from the man who was going to bury his fiancée, and probably passed the window of the place every morning on his way to the mill. ![1915 directory lines from Nicolson to Armstrong, undertaker](nicolson-1915.jpg) {{< caption >}} 1st Street East, walking north. Henderson's, 1915. {{< /caption >}} {{< asterism >}} The funeral was on Monday, May 3, at half past two in the afternoon. The Herald's notice says the services would be at Armstrong's parlours, "after which interment will take place in Union cemetery." [The cemetery tour guides](https://dianacranstoun.com/2014/09/10/union-cemetery-calgary-part-four/) add a joint service at the Pro-Cathedral of the Redeemer, which stood at 7th Avenue and 1st Street East under the Very Rev. Edward C. Paget, and I've no reason to think the two accounts exclude each other. A single plot in [Union Cemetery](https://www.calgary.ca/parks/cemeteries/union-cemetery.html) cost five dollars in those years, a double ten, plus two dollars for the digging. They went into [Lots 1 and 2 of Block 12 in Section D](https://www.interment.net/canada/alberta/calgary/union-cemetery/transcription/298.php?alpha=T), side by side, touching, the first two graves in a block that had just been opened. Lot 3 got a Mrs. Emily Hunt before the month was out. Lot 4 got a Schlotthauer in June. And May and Charles got no stones. The retellings have two guesses about why. One is that nobody paid. The other is that burying an unmarried couple side by side was improper enough that marking it would have been worse. Neither guess has a document behind it. Alfred Peters, who had cabled Macclesfield, had the means and seems to have had the inclination, and I'll come to what happened when he tried. But first the house. Without the house, all of this is only a sad and ordinary little tragedy. {{< img src="pro-cathedral-1910.jpg" alt="Postcard of the Pro-Cathedral, Church of the Redeemer, Calgary" width="75%" >}} {{< caption >}} Pro-Cathedral, Church of the Redeemer. Valentine & Sons, about 1910. {{< /caption >}} They were engaged. The Bulletin says that "Towse had bought a home in Highbury," and that the couple were believed to be "just returning from a visit to the little house" when the storm caught them. Then, on May 12, thirteen days after the storm, the [Vulcan Advocate](https://archive.org/details/VA_19150512), a weekly from a wheat town an hour south of the city, ran this, which I quote in full because I have never read anything like it in a regional newspaper: ![Vulcan Advocate clipping about Charles Towse and Miss May Windell](vulcan-advocate-1915.jpg) {{< caption >}} Vulcan Advocate, May 12, 1915. {{< /caption >}} > "During the recent thunderstorm in Calgary Charles Towse and Miss May Windell were struck by lightning and killed. It is well known they were shortly to be married, and had bought a house in some part of the city, paying some hundreds of dollars on it. A curious fact in connection with this, however, is that no one knows where the house is. Neither of the young couple had shown anyone the house, and no memorandum of the transaction can be located among the effects of either of them." No one knows where the house is. Somebody had to go and look before anyone could write that. Somebody went through his tin trunk at the Nicholsons' and her box at the Peters house, and found a passbook, and letters, and whatever else a shipper and a housemaid own, and did not find a deed, or an agreement for sale, or a receipt, or a letter from a vendor, or a scrap of paper with an address on it. And then somebody told the Advocate's correspondent, who put it in the paper with the one word "curious," which is the whole of the editorial comment the matter ever received from anyone who was there. Highbury did exist, at least on paper. [Henderson's 1915](https://archive.org/details/P002961-10) locates it on page 227 as "North of Pleasant Heights and E of Hill Division," which puts it on the far side of the Bow, in what's now Mount Pleasant, somewhere between 9th and 14th Streets Northwest and north of 25th Avenue, with part of it under Confederation Park. It was surveyed in 1907 as a planned community in the first boom, when the Herald was running advertisements telling people that property was about to move across the river, and in the words of the [Calgary Heritage Initiative](https://calgaryheritage.org/wp/celebrating-calgary-150-oil-town-part-two/) it "never took off." [A heritage columnist](https://calgaryheritage.org/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=805), looking at a 1950 map that still showed the name, supposed it had been laid out by an Arsenal supporter. It's several kilometres from Prospect Avenue, across a river, and I've walked it, and it's a long way to walk home arm in arm in a thunderstorm at half past nine. The Bulletin's reporter may have been guessing about where they'd been. The Advocate's reporter, thirteen days later, with the effects gone through, said nobody knew, and I trust the one who waited. {{< img src="calgary-from-mount-pleasant-1911.jpg" alt="Wide postcard view of Calgary from Mount Pleasant, 1911" >}} {{< caption >}} Calgary from Mount Pleasant. Fold-out card, 1911. {{< /caption >}} "Some hundreds of dollars." He had fifty when he crossed at Kingsgate. A shipper at a flour mill in 1914 might clear eighteen dollars a week. A housemaid who lived in might clear twenty-five a month. Some hundreds of dollars was two years of everything either of them had, and it was in a house that nobody could find. {{< asterism >}} The city that buried them was not in a good way that week. Exactly one week before the storm, on the night of April 22, 1915, Calgary's 10th Battalion had made the [counter-attack on Kitcheners' Wood](https://calgaryhighlanders.com/about-the-regiment/detailed-history/10th-battalion-1914-19/st-julien-apr-1915/) at Second Ypres, in the first large German chlorine attack on the Western Front. About sixty percent of the original battalion had been recruited at the old City Hall. Of the 816 men who set out across the field that night, 193 were on their feet at the morning roll call. The commanding officer, Russell Boyle, a rancher from Crossfield, was mortally wounded. The casualty lists were coming in by the day, and the May 1 issue of the Bulletin, the one that told Alberta about the boots and the tie and the scorched waist, carried the lists for the Tenth Battalion on its front page. It was a city of people opening telegrams, and in the middle of it two people were killed by the weather, and the weather was good news for the wheat. The [Lusitania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Lusitania) went down four days after the funeral. ![Illustration of a night infantry attack at Kitcheners Wood, 1915](kitcheners-wood-1915.jpg) {{< caption >}} "The Canadians' Night Attack." Illustrated London News, May 8, 1915. {{< /caption >}} {{< img src="roll-of-honor-1915.jpg" alt="Canada's Roll of Honor, Edmonton Daily Bulletin, May 1, 1915, page one" width="85%" >}} {{< caption >}} Canada's Roll of Honor. Edmonton Daily Bulletin, May 1, 1915, page one. {{< /caption >}} This is the only explanation I have for the first thing that puzzled me, which is why nobody made a fuss. Two young people killed by God in the street in the richest district in the city, found in the morning with the ground dry under them, and the whole thing got a column in Edmonton, a paragraph in Lacombe and Vulcan, and no inquest. The city had other dead to count that week. It would get around to May and Charles later, when it had the time, and when it did it wouldn't be kind. {{< asterism >}} Lightning, I've learned, is much stranger than I had assumed. The study of what it does to bodies has a name, keraunopathology, and [the forensic literature](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6474460/) lists the things a pathologist is supposed to look for. There's a blow-out at the soles of the feet that the textbooks call a "tip-toe" sign, sometimes in the shoe rather than the foot. Watches stop. Metal objects come out magnetized. Survivors sometimes carry fern-shaped marks on the skin called Lichtenberg figures, which fade in a day or two and are almost never seen on the dead, because the dead don't have the circulation to make them. The British research group [TORRO](https://www.torro.org.uk/research/lightning/impacts) explains the boots. Current follows lines of sweat, and I'll quote them exactly: "If such sudden explosive vapourisation takes place on sweaty feet in the confined space of tight-fitting footwear then socks may be ripped and footwear torn apart." It was the hottest day of the year. He'd walked up the hill from the mill, or from wherever they'd been, in his good boots, sweating into them, and the sweat turned to steam all at once and blew the boots off his feet. Burns don't kill you. The literature is clear on this. Only the heart or the breathing stopping kills you, and the burns are marks left by the path the current took on its way to stopping them. So the scorch across her waist and down her arm was a map, not a cause. It showed where it had gone in and where it had gone out. Where it went in took me a year to find, and when I found it, it was in [a two page article in a seniors' monthly](https://unisonalberta.com/news/lightning-struck), with no source given, and I believe it anyway, partly because of the injuries and partly because nobody would invent it. "Charles was struck by a bolt of lightning that travelled through his arm to May's. Both were killed instantly." He was the one who was hit. She received it from him. They were arm in arm, and the arm was the conductor, and it went through him into her. He delivered it. The forensic literature lists [five mechanisms by which lightning kills](https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-struck), direct strike, side flash, ground current, conduction and streamers, and if you look up conduction it says that lightning will travel through anything that will carry it, wire, plumbing, a wet rope, and two people holding on to each other are a wet rope. The literature has nothing to say about what a strange way that is to die with someone. His face was discoloured and his hair singed and his boots were blown off; that's a direct hit. Her arm and her waist were scorched, where his arm was and where his hand was; that's what came through him. The Bulletin's reporter stood over them in the morning and wrote the injuries down in the order he saw them and didn't notice that he'd written down a diagram. {{< asterism >}} I went up there on a night in August, late, when the forecast promised storms and the storms stayed south. I should account for this and I can't, any more than I can account for the spreadsheet at two in the morning or the months of evenings that came after it. Prospect Avenue is still there, and still Prospect Avenue, which in Calgary is its own small miracle. The [1904 scheme](https://mrca.ca/about/community-history/) that turned the city's streets into numbers made it 23rd Avenue on paper, and the paper lost; the district was called American Hill, for the rich Americans on it, until William Toole and R.B. Bennett lobbied the CPR into renaming it for Montreal's mountain, and the avenue kept its name through that too. The tour guides still point at the corner of Prospect and 10th Street SW. The houses have only gotten bigger, and the trees, which in the photographs from 1915 are saplings on a bald hill, are now enormous. Charles's end of town did worse. His 1st Street East is 1st Street SE now, and the neighbourhood around it, Victoria Park, was [folded into the Beltline in 2003 and the name retired](https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/where-did-victoria-park-go-community-ceased-to-exist-well-ahead-of-arena-agreement-1.4779685); only a scattering of the old houses survive anywhere in it, and I walked the block where 1102 should be and found towers and surface parking and no door to stand in front of. {{< img src="american-hill-1911.jpg" alt="American Hill and Mount Royal, Calgary, 1911" width="75%" >}} {{< caption >}} American Hill and Mount Royal, Calgary, 1911. Published by The Fair. {{< /caption >}} {{< img src="mount-royal-1911.jpg" alt="Postcard of houses in the residential section of Mount Royal, Calgary, 1911" width="75%" >}} {{< caption >}} Residential Section, Mount Royal, Calgary. Valentine & Sons, 1911. {{< /caption >}} At the corner of Prospect and 10th I waited until the street was empty, which at one in the morning in Upper Mount Royal is immediately, and then I lay down on the centreline, face down, arms at my sides, the way they were found. The asphalt still held some of the day's heat. I lasted about four minutes, and I learned one small thing, which I'll give you for whatever it's worth: a street is a trough. Lying in the middle of it you can't see into any of the houses, only rooflines and upper windows against the glow, which means that nobody standing at a ground-floor window that night, watching the rain, could have seen more of them than a darkness lying on the road. They were there from half past nine until first light, two hundred feet from houses full of sleeping people, and no one failed them. The city couldn't see them. In the morning it could, and it has been looking at them, one way and another, ever since. A car's lights came around from Morrison Street eventually and I got up, a bit faster then a brave man would, and stood on the Peters side of the road while it passed, and then I went home. ![1914 directory lines for Prospect Avenue at Morrison Street](prospect-avenue-1914.jpg) {{< caption >}} Prospect Avenue, walking west. Henderson's, 1914. {{< /caption >}} {{< asterism >}} Calgary has one other lightning death in Union Cemetery that I know of. Staff Sergeant George Henry Leopold Bossange of the Royal North-West Mounted Police, regimental number 979, was fifty-six years old and had been in the Force since 1883 when, on June 21, 1919, he rode away from a farm near Spirit River after an interview, in pouring rain, and was found dead with his horse. The strike hit the right side of his saddle near his revolver and burned through the saddle blanket into the horse. It melted his pocket watch and stopped it at 5:40. It melted the butt and the tip of the revolver and burned a hole through his boot at the spur, into the sock and the heel. He's the only member of the Force ever killed by lightning. He was born in France. He left a wife and three daughters. And he was brought down to Calgary and buried in Union Cemetery, in his wife's family's plot, the Jaquish plot, with fourteen of her relatives, and lay there without a stone for ninety years, until the Force put a marker on him in 2009. [The RCMP veterans' association](https://rcmpveteransvancouver.com/larry-burdens-this-day-in-the-rcmp/), which keeps these things, observes in its entry for him that "oddly, Mrs. Bossange is not one of them." So that's three people killed by lightning within four years, and all three went into Union Cemetery without a stone. {{< img src="first-street-east-1915.jpg" alt="Postcard of 1st Street East at 8th Avenue, Calgary, 1915" width="75%" >}} {{< caption >}} 1st Street East at 8th Avenue, 1915. Valentine & Sons. {{< /caption >}} {{< asterism >}} The trouble with a house nobody can find is that somebody still has to look for it, because a dead man's money has to go somewhere, and the looking started at the Nicholson house. On May 5 the Public Administrator took an inventory of Charles's effects, in the presence of Samuel Nicholson: a tin trunk of clothing, working and Sunday; a blue serge suit, the trousers wanting a button; a pair of boots, new, unworn; a razor, strop and brush; eleven letters in a woman's hand, tied, which were returned unread; a Bank of Montreal passbook showing forty-one dollars and fifteen cents; a cabinet photograph of a seated woman, no studio mark, inscribed on the back "M." Item 9 is "one dog, bitch, brown, of no particular kind, about two years, answering to the name 'Nakhla,' kept in the yard, the joint property of the deceased and Miss Swindells, who could not keep her at the Peters house. Valued at $2.50." Item 10 is the last: "No deed, memorandum, agreement for sale, receipt, or paper of any kind relating to real property." Item 10 is why Alfred Peters picked up his pen. The Land Titles file is in the provincial archives in a folder: "Tawse, C., house of (not located)." The first item is a letter on Bank of Montreal letterhead, dated June 9, 1915, from Peters to the Registrar of the South Alberta Land Registration District, asking, on behalf of the two estates, whether any title, agreement for sale or caveat in the name of Tawse or Towse had been registered against any lot in the subdivision of Highbury since January 1913. He adds a sentence that isn't a banker's sentence. "The late Miss Swindells had told my wife on several occasions that the house was 'as good as theirs,' and that she had chosen the paper for the front room." The Deputy Registrar was a man named Herbert J. Lusk. {{< img src="land-titles-1912.jpg" alt="Postcard of the Land Titles Office and the old courthouse, Calgary, about 1912" width="75%" >}} {{< caption >}} Land Titles Office, about 1912. The old courthouse is at right. {{< /caption >}} He answered on July 2 that there was no such registration. Then, on July 9, in a second letter that nobody had asked him to write, he said that he had "taken the liberty of examining the plan of Highbury against the ground." The 1907 plan of the subdivision showed 412 lots. Lusk's count on the ground found 411. "I do not suggest," he wrote, "that the missing parcel is the property of the late Mr. Tawse. I suggest only that it is missing, and that he is the only person in the District known to have bought land which cannot be found." Lusk didn't leave it there. He's the first person in this story to lose his footing, and I have some sympathy; I've lost mine over the same folder. He had the district surveyor, a Percival Oakes, walk Highbury twice that autumn, in October and again in November with the leaves off, and Oakes's field book, which is in the Glenbow's Oakes fonds, records on its last leaf a sentence I've started writing in the front of every notebook I own: "The deficiency is not upon the ground but in the Plan, or else it is upon the ground and the Plan is correct and I am mistaken, and I am not mistaken." On the strength of that sentence Lusk registered, on December 14, 1915, a caveat against the entire subdivision of Highbury, pending location of the Tawse parcel. A caveat under the Land Titles Act stops any dealing with the land. Nobody can sell, nobody can buy, nobody can mortgage, until the caveat is lifted, and nobody ever lifted it. Highbury, which the heritage people tell us never took off, never took off because from December 1915 it was legally impossible to buy a lot there until somebody found the little house, and nobody ever did. In 1955 the city surveyor noted in a memo that the subdivision still showed 411 lots on the ground "and one in dispute." Part of it is under Confederation Park now. You can walk across the lot that isn't there. {{< asterism >}} In August 1915 Peters wrote again, this time to the superintendent of Union Cemetery, Robert Haig, offering to pay for two plain stones for Lots 1 and 2, "of the same pattern, and set the same distance apart as the graves, that is to say touching." Haig forwarded the letter to the Parks and Cemeteries Committee of City Council with a covering note of one line, "I would rather the Committee said," which is the kind of thing a superintendent writes when he'd like someone else to say no. The committee met on September 7. The minutes are typed on onionskin and they're short. {{< img src="city-hall-1910.jpg" alt="The old frame City Hall in front of the new sandstone City Hall, Calgary, 1910" width="75%" >}} {{< caption >}} City Hall, Calgary, 1910. The old frame hall stands in front of the new one. {{< /caption >}} > "Moved by Ald. Crouch, seconded by Ald. Whitlock, that the request of Mr. A.M. Peters respecting markers for Lots 1 and 2, Block 12, Section D, be laid on the table, the Committee not being satisfied that the parties have suffered sufficiently to warrant a memorial." Carried, four to one. The one was a widower named Fergus Tait, who asked that his dissent be recorded "on the ground that I do not know what the Alderman means." Walter Crouch, according to the minutes, told him that he did. He did, too. Everyone did. *Not satisfied that the parties have suffered sufficiently.* Four married men, sitting as a committee of the City of Calgary, made a finding of fact that two people killed in the street at half past nine on the best night of their lives had been let off something. {{< asterism >}} The city argued about it all summer, and the argument is in the Albertan, in the letters column, under the heading the editor gave it on June 14: THE PROSPECT AVENUE MATTER. The early letters are puzzled. By August they are something else. The first letter is signed "A Wife of Twenty-Two Years," and it says, in full: "Sir, I read that they were arm in arm. I have been married twenty-two years and I would like to know how that was arranged." A man signing himself "Mill Hand" wrote three days later that Tawse had been a decent fellow and that he didn't begrudge him, but that he "never had to hear her on the subject of the stove." By July the column was running most days. "Ratepayer, Sunnyside" wrote that the sky had "made an exception, and the city ought to know on what terms, as the rest of us were not consulted." An unsigned letter in early August asked why God had seen fit to take two people "before either had found the other out." And on August 19 a Mrs. Agnes Pettibone of Elbow Park wrote the sentence that the whole city was quoting by September: "They will never be disappointed, and I do not see why I should pay for their stone." It would be easy to read these people as cruel, but read wrongly about the kind of cruelty. Nobody in the column says that May and Charles deserved what they got. The grievance runs the other way. Nobody deserves it. Nobody deserves to be taken at the top of the hill with their arm through someone's arm and the house as good as theirs and the paper chosen for the front room, before the money runs short and the first winter in the house and the first long silence across the table. Everybody else in Calgary had to walk the whole road, and these two had been lifted off it at the first mile, and the city had been asked to pay for a stone to say so. The Reverend Lachlan Moir preached on it at Knox Presbyterian on Sunday, May 9, six days after the funeral, and the sermon was printed at the author's expense as a sixteen-page pamphlet under the title *The Envy of Heaven: Being Some Remarks Upon the Late Calamity in Prospect Avenue, and Upon the Duty of Christians Toward Those Who Have Been Spared the Common Lot.* Moir's argument, which takes him the full sixteen pages, is that marriage is the penance God sets for the fallen, that a couple killed at the moment of their greatest happiness has been excused the penance, and that this is a scandal against the rest of the congregation, who have not been. {{< img src="knox-church-1914.jpg" alt="Postcard of New Knox Church, Calgary, 1914" width="75%" >}} {{< caption >}} New Knox Church, 1914. Linton Bros. {{< /caption >}} The passage that was read aloud in kitchens is on page eleven: > "The rest of us must walk the whole road, through the dry years and the wet, through the debts and the cold suppers and the long silences across the table, and we are told it is for our good. And then the Lord reaches down upon Prospect Avenue and lifts two of His children off the road before they have gone a mile, and they lie in the street with the ground dry beneath them, as if the very rain had been told to keep off. I do not ask you to hate them. I ask you only to notice that you were not chosen." The pamphlet went through three printings. The Central Library's copy, in Local History, has a note in pencil on the inside cover, in a woman's hand: "Quite right." {{< asterism >}} In February 1916 the Parks and Cemeteries Committee, having tabled the stones, asked the City Assessor to establish "what the parties were spared, for the purpose of determining whether they have been favoured." The Assessor was a careful man named Dunlop, and he took the request literally. His report is nine typed pages with tables, titled "The Tawse Household: A Projection," and it's built the way assessors build everything, from the City's own data on households of equivalent income and origin, adjusted for the war. It's the only account that exists anywhere of May and Charles Tawse's married life, and the Committee read it, and nothing the Committee did afterward makes sense unless you have too. The little house is finished in the spring of 1916. It's in Highbury, on a lot that for the purposes of the projection is assumed to exist. It has four rooms and a porch he builds himself over two Sundays in May. She has chosen the paper for the front room, a green with a small gold figure, and he hangs it crooked, a quarter inch out at the ceiling, and she sees it the moment she walks in and doesn't say so, and the quarter inch is there every morning for eighteen years. The first year is good. Dunlop allows for it; his Table I shows the household in surplus through 1916 and he annotates the column "cordial." By 1918 Robin Hood has let men go and Charles is teaming again, for McMillan or someone like him, for less, and there's a child, a girl, and the household's disposable income falls to a figure in Table II that Dunlop underlines twice. She writes to Macclesfield less often, and then in December 1918 a letter from her sister Emma tells her that their father died in October, and she reads it at the kitchen table and does not go, because there's no money to go and no one to leave the child with, and she folds it up and puts it in the drawer with the other letters and goes on with the potatoes. The projection dates the first real disagreement about money to a Tuesday in February 1919, and notes, with an assessor's restraint, that "the matter was not resolved but allowed to lapse." Table IV is headed "Conversation." It has two columns, 1916 and 1926. The 1916 column is full: the house, the war, the mill, her father, the paper for the front room, the dog. The 1926 column is empty. Under it Dunlop has typed: "Nil, or as to the weather." The house is paid off in 1931. By then he's forty-six, heavy, slow to get up in the mornings, a man who has stopped visiting anything in the ordinary way and goes to the Legion on Fridays and comes home late and quiet. She's fifty-one. Their daughter marries in 1933 and moves to Lethbridge. The projection ends in 1934, with this: "At which point the household may be assumed to have arrived at the condition of all households, and the exception to have been extinguished by ordinary means." None of it, of course, had happened. The porch, the quarter inch, the girl, the letter from Emma in the drawer, the Fridays at the Legion, the empty column, none of it. The lightning came first, on the hottest day of the year, when the house was as good as theirs and he'd walked up the hill to meet her in his good boots. Dunlop had been asked to establish what they'd been spared, and he'd done it, nine pages of it, and he'd handed it to four married men, and they read it, every page, and that was the Committee's complaint. That they'd been spared that. That nobody had spared the Committee. {{< asterism >}} You can see where this goes. Once a city has decided that two dead people got away with something, it can't stop checking whether anyone else is getting away with it too. The first by-law came in 1916. By-law No. 1873, "A By-law Respecting the Perambulation of Persons During Electrical Weather," made it an offence, five dollars or ten days, for "any two persons not being married to one another" to walk "arm in arm, or in any manner of linked conveyance," on a public street within the city limits "while thunder is audible." The by-law was necessary, according to the Police Court docket, because of the Lightning Walks. Through the summer of 1916, engaged couples had been turning out on Prospect Avenue every time a storm came over the mountains, walking up and down between 10th Street and Morrison Street with their arms linked, hoping. Nobody was struck. The police made nineteen arrests in July alone. The Herald reported on one young woman, a stenographer at the Hudson's Bay store, who told the magistrate that she "only wanted the same as Miss Swindells," and was asked from the bench, "Which part?" {{< img src="hudsons-bay-1913.jpg" alt="Postcard of the Hudson's Bay store and the Herald Building, Calgary" width="75%" >}} {{< caption >}} Hudson's Bay store and Herald Building, First Street West. After 1913. {{< /caption >}} The married couples, meanwhile, were buying lightning rods. Between 1916 and 1919 the City's building permits show applications for lightning conductors on 2,340 private dwellings, nearly all of them from married householders, which in a city of sixty thousand is a great many roofs. The Committee's correspondence file has a letter from Walter Crouch to the City Electrician, dated March 2, 1917, that says what everyone understood: "If it is to be had for nothing then nobody shall have it. Rod the lot." In 1918 the City passed By-law No. 1940, which required a conductor on every dwelling in Calgary occupied by two or more adults, at the owner's expense, and set a fine for any house that let the sky in. It stayed on the books until 1961. The Peters house at 1031 Prospect Avenue has one still, a copper rod on the chimney that nobody has had the heart to take down, and if you stand on the sidewalk where the earth was torn up you can see it against the sky. {{< asterism >}} When Staff Sergeant Bossange died at Spirit River in June 1919, his widow, Jessie, applied to have him buried in Union Cemetery under a stone, with a space beside him for herself. The Committee refused both. There's a typed memorandum in the file, initialled W.F.C.: > "Persons killed by electrical action of the atmosphere are not to be marked, it having been established by this Committee in the matter of Lots 1 and 2, Block 12, Section D, that such persons are favoured above others. Nor is the Committee prepared to inter beside him any person who may claim to have been happy with him." So he went into the Jaquish plot with fourteen of his wife's relatives, and that is why, oddly, Mrs. Bossange is not one of them. She was buried in Edmonton in 1937. I don't think it's odd at all. I think she read the memorandum. The Force put a marker on him in 2009, ninety years late, over an objection that by then had no one left alive to make it, and I've stood at it, and it's a good marker, and it says nothing about any of this. {{< asterism >}} By 1920 the thing had stopped being about two graves and had become something the whole city was doing to itself. In 1919 the Privy Council confirmed that Alberta's courts could grant divorces, and the Supreme Court's Calgary docket for 1920 and 1921 filled up faster than anyone had planned for. Most of the petitions use the usual grounds, adultery, cruelty, desertion. But in eleven cases, the lawyers plead a ground which the clerk abbreviated in the register as "comp. w. dec'd," and which the pleadings spell out as "unfavourable comparison with the deceased." Mrs. Ellen Grigg of Bridgeland deposed that on the anniversary of the storm her husband had said to her, across the supper table, that "at least Tawse never had to see her get old," and that she had understood him to mean her. Mr. Justice Pellew dismissed every one of the eleven: "The Court cannot be asked to find that a marriage has failed because it has not been struck by lightning, as that would be true of all of them." With this troubling ruling, the city had discovered that every marriage in it was, by the standard of Lots 1 and 2, a failure, and it did not like the discovery, and in 1922 City Council did the only thing you could reasonably do to correct course. By-law No. 2104, "A By-law to Declare the Domestic Contentment of the Citizens," deemed every marriage solemnized or registered within the City of Calgary to have been "a happy one as of the date of passing of this By-law," and made it an offence to assert the contrary in any public place, in print, or "in the hearing of a spouse." The fine was fifteen dollars. It passed nine to two. Fergus Tait, the widower, voted against it again, and the minutes give his reason as "that I was happy, and I should like it to remain my own business." You'd expect a law making everyone happy to make everyone quieter, and for about a year it did. Husbands and wives stopped speaking to each other in public almost entirely, because anything said could be reported, and the fine was a week's wages. The Police Court took 314 complaints under By-law 2104 in 1923, most of them laid by one spouse against the other, and the magistrate, in a phrase the Herald put in a headline, called his courtroom "the only place left in Calgary where a married couple can have a conversation." Couples began to come in together and plead guilty, so that they could say what they meant in front of a witness and pay the fifteen dollars on the way out. {{< img src="city-hall-1918.jpg" alt="Crowd before Calgary City Hall, November 1918, with effigies on a scaffold" width="75%" >}} {{< caption >}} Citizens before City Hall, Calgary, Armistice Day, November 1918. Photograph by Grant. {{< /caption >}} {{< asterism >}} And underneath all of it, every year, on the twenty-ninth of April, people went up to Union Cemetery and stood around Lots 1 and 2. They didn't bring flowers. That's in the superintendent's daybook, which carried on after Robert Haig into the thirties under a man named Ingram, and which notes the crowd in a single line each year: "Usual attendance at D-12, no disorder." Nobody brought anything. They stood on the grass, married couples mostly, a little apart from each other, and looked at the two bare lots, and after a while they went home. I don't know what they were looking at. A love that never had to learn anything, maybe, or just two bare lots that had somehow become the only ones in the cemetery you'd want. I've stood there on the day myself. I was alone. I couldn't have told you what I was doing there either. In 1926 the daybook says: "Usual attendance at D-12. Disorder." What had happened was that couples had started asking to be buried unmarked. If the City wouldn't give May and Charles a stone because they'd been happy, then having no stone had become a kind of proof, and in 1925 and 1926 the cemetery office received forty-one requests from married couples for adjoining lots with "no marker of any kind, as at Block 12." The Committee saw at once that the two graves it had left bare out of spite had become the most fashionable address in the city. And on April 29, 1926, a man named Leonard Hosie, a clerk at the CPR freight sheds, was arrested at about seven in the morning digging in Lot 3, which belonged to Mrs. Emily Hunt, for himself and his wife, and the people standing around D-12 took sides, and there was disorder. The Committee's answer, in By-law No. 2290 of 1927, was to require a headstone, at the family's expense, on every grave in every municipal cemetery in Calgary, "with the exception of Lots 1 and 2, Block 12, Section D, the status of which is reserved." You can see the problem. You can't mark them, because a stone would honour them. You can't leave them unmarked, because by now bare ground honours them too. And you can't make an exception for them, because an exception was what they'd gotten from the sky in the first place, and the whole purpose of the preceding twelve years had been to make sure they never got another. By-law 2290 made them the only grave in Calgary that the law required to be unmarked, which is the most distinguished condition a grave can be in, and the Committee spent the next three years trying to undo it, and couldn't, and more or less stopped functioning in the attempt. The minutes for 1928 and 1929 are hard to read. Walter Crouch, who had by then been on Council for fourteen years and married for thirty-one, moved on four separate occasions that the matter of D-12 be "referred to the Almighty," and the third time the motion carried, and the City Clerk was instructed to draft a letter. The draft is in the file. It's addressed "To the Creator of Heaven and Earth, care of the Dean of the Pro-Cathedral of the Redeemer," and it represents that "on the 29th of April, 1915, an exception was made to the ordinary course of life in favour of two persons not residents of long standing, without notice to this Council or to the ratepayers; that the said exception has caused a great deal of dissatisfaction among married persons of every ward; and that the Council would be obliged to learn the grounds upon which the exception was made, and whether any application by other citizens would be entertained, and if not, why not." The Dean declined to forward it. The Clerk, who seems to have been a literal man, sent it by telegram to the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa, as the nearest federal office with any responsibility for the sky. {{< img src="dominion-observatory-1925.jpg" alt="The Dominion Observatory dome in snow, Ottawa, about 1925" width="75%" >}} {{< caption >}} The Dominion Observatory, Ottawa, about 1925. {{< /caption >}} The reply is pinned to the draft, and it's one line: WIRE RECEIVED NOT UNDERSTOOD PLEASE ADVISE. By 1930 Council was meeting in two rooms. The aldermen whose marriages were going badly sat in the Council Chamber, and the four whose marriages were going well, or who said so, were made to sit in the committee room across the hall and send their votes in by messenger, on the ground that they had "an interest." Fergus Tait was in neither room. He'd died in 1929, and he was buried in Union Cemetery under a stone, as By-law 2290 now required, and the stone gives his name and dates and one line: HAPPY, AND MY OWN BUSINESS. Leonard Hosie and his wife never got their lot. They divorced in 1931, on the ground of cruelty, and her petition says the cruelty was that he'd wanted to be buried like Charles Tawse, "and not once in nineteen years did he want to walk out with me in the rain." {{< asterism >}} In March 1931 City Council resolved to stop. The resolution isn't in the published minutes, and I'm not going to quote it, but it ended the matter of D-12 as a matter of Council, and it instructed that it was "not to be raised in Council again, nor in the hearing of a spouse." The caveat on Highbury was never lifted. The Assessor's projection was never destroyed, only moved. The letter to God stayed in its folder with the telegram pinned to it. For sixteen years a city on the edge of the prairie had organized a good part of its civic life around making sure that two dead people never got a second piece of luck, and it had failed, and it had been seen to fail, by Ottawa, and so it did nothing, for eighty years, which was the first thing it had tried that worked. And then the centenary came round. By then the question of the bench had become mine, and I'd stopped pretending otherwise. The Parks memorial bench program has no record of one at Section D; I asked. I phoned the cemetery office often enough that the woman who answers knew my voice, and had started saying "the bench" before I could. I filed a records request that came back "no responsive documents," and then a second one, worded differently on the advice of a friend who does this for a living, that came back with a single page. In November 2014 the Parks department asked, through the proper channels, whether a marker was now permitted at D-12-1/2. The answer was that By-law 2290 had never been repealed, and that the status of the lots remained reserved. Parks installed a bench. The memorandum, which is the last document in the file, specifies "standard cast-end seating, black, non-commemorative, no plaque, oriented so as to serve Block 12," and it places the bench by survey, with coordinates to the centimetre, so that a seated adult's heels rest on Lots 1 and 2. It was set on April 29, 2015, one hundred years to the day. No ceremony. Two men from Parks, a truck, a level, a bag of concrete. The cemetery daybook for that day reads: "Usual attendance at D-12. Seating installed. No disorder." {{< asterism >}} I sat there for a long time. It was a dry afternoon, the coldest of the week, and the clouds were building over the mountains the way they do in this city in the fall, from a line of white in the west to a wall in about an hour. There was a couple at the far end of the bench when I arrived, in their sixties, with a thermos, and they got up and left at the first thunder, walking quickly toward the gate, a good arm's length apart. The bench isn't a memorial. The City has been careful, in writing, to say so. It's a place for ordinary couples to sit on a Sunday with their sandwiches and their phones and the quiet argument about whose turn it is to pick up the kids, and to rest their feet on the one love in Calgary that never had to find out how it ended. The City couldn't mark them, or unmark them, or get the sky to explain itself, or take back what they'd been given. What it could do was sit on them, and arrange for a hundred years of marriages to sit on them after it, a few hours at a time, pressing down with the weight of everything the lightning let them skip. I stayed where I was, with my heels on May and Charles, through the first of the rain and a while after. I'm not married, and nobody has ever repealed By-law 1873. When I got up, the ground under the bench was wet, the same as everywhere else, and I stood for a minute looking at it, and then I walked back to the gate the way they'd been walking, up the hill, in the ordinary way. {{< img src="secret-histories-logo.png" alt="The City of Calgary Secret Histories" fallback="png" style="border:none; width:55%" >}} # Acknowledgements This piece owes most of itself to the microfilm room on the fourth floor of the Calgary Public Library's Central branch, where the Morning Albertan survives, and to the staff there who never asked what I wanted with the summer of 1915. Thanks also to Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary, which keeps the Glenbow's archives now, the Oakes field books among them; to the Provincial Archives of Alberta; to the City of Calgary cemeteries office, which answered the phone every single time; to [Peel's Prairie Provinces](https://peel.library.ualberta.ca/) at the University of Alberta and the [Internet Archive](https://archive.org/), which between them put the Edmonton Daily Bulletin, the Vulcan Advocate and a decade of Henderson's directories within reach of anyone awake at the wrong hours; to Environment and Climate Change Canada's historical climate archive; to the RCMP Veterans' Association, Vancouver Division; to the volunteer genealogists of WikiTree, who found May first; and to Deb of Find a Grave, whom I have never managed to reach. And to Guy Maddin, archivist, Calgary Public Library, who threaded the August reels before I asked, and who has his own ideas about what a city gets up to when it believes no one is reading.