An 1852 Citizen news item may have solved burial grounds mystery
Discovery in old Citizen story may have ended puzzle over aboriginal cemetery
A brief news item serendipitously discovered in a 164-year-old edition of the Citizen may well have identified a previously unknown aboriginal burial site in Ottawa — and solved a long-standing mystery in the process.
The 111-word item in the June 26, 1852, Citizen reported that men quarrying for the foundation of a house at the corner of Wellington and Bay streets found the bones of six to eight adult human skeletons — chiefly jaw bones — in a rock crevice “not far from the old carrying-place past the Chaudière Falls.”
Carleton University journalism professor and former Citizen reporter Randy Boswell spotted the news item while researching his recent book on the history of the Lord Elgin Hotel. He was randomly scrolling through microfilm from 1852 when he landed on the page containing the report.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Boswell exclaimed. To stumble on a new archeological record in that way “was almost miraculous.”
It was all the more astonishing because the item “essentially unlocked” an enduring mystery about the location of aboriginal burial grounds near the Chaudière Falls.
For more than a century, the archeological community in Ottawa erroneously believed that Dr. Edward Van Cortlandt, an antiquarian and leading amateur archeologist of his day in Ottawa, had found a communal aboriginal cemetery in 1843 near Bay and Wellington streets.
But Boswell and Jean-Luc Pilon, an archeology curator at the Canadian Museum of History, demolished that myth last December when they published two studies in the Canadian Journal of Archaeology that established beyond doubt that Van Cortlandt’s so-called “ossuary” was actually across the Ottawa River, at Hull Landing — the current site of the Canadian Museum of History.
The discovery of the 1852 Citizen item — which Boswell and Pilon wrote about in an unreported article last fall in Arch Notes, an Ontario Archeological Society newsletter — provides a “clear and quite plausible explanation” for the confusion over the ossuary’s location, they said.
The notion that Van Cortlandt’s ossuary was at or around the intersection of Bay and Wellington was popularized by T.W. Edwin Sowter, who produced many valuable early records of archeological sites in the region in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“He was so sure,” Pilon said in an interview. “There was no ambiguity. The certainty was so great that everybody picked it up and said, ‘Yes, there was an ossuary there.’
“Somehow,” said Boswell, “Sowter was told there was an archeological discovery at Bay and Wellington and he made the assumption that it was the Edward Van Cortlandt ossuary. That seems to have been what happened.”
The discovery of the 1852 Citizen news item “really does explain why there was 140 years of confusion about this major burial ground, and it also adds this additional record of a potential archeological site at Bay and Wellington,” Boswell said.
Because the bones recovered from the Bay and Wellington site have long since vanished, it’s impossible to know how old they were or even be certain they were of aboriginal origin.
“But importantly,” Boswell said, “it does add to a fairly scanty record of human remains, in this case possibly aboriginal and possibly very old.”
For his part, Pilon thinks the skeletons were most likely aboriginal and were “secondary burials” — meaning they were moved from another location and redeposited in crevices, probably along the edge of the cliff behind the presentday Library and Archives Canada building.
From that location, there would have been a “perfect view” of the mighty Chaudière Falls, considered sacred by the Algonquin people, before it was dammed and diminished.
“Four hundred years ago, when you were standing on that promontory in the springtime, it must have been an incredible thing to hear the voice of those falls,” Pilon said. “That they would place those remains in proximity to this place ... would be no surprise at all.”
If the skeletons were aboriginal, it would be only the fourth native burial ground identified in the National Capital Region, Pilon said.
They are unlikely to be the remains of canal workers or early settlers, he said, because they were invariably buried in cemeteries in the typical way.
Could the bones have been placed in the crevice by Van Cortlandt, who lived nearby and kept a wellknown “curio cabinet” of archeological objects and specimens in his home and medical office?
That cannot be ruled out, Boswell and Pilon admitted. But given Van Cortlandt’s possessive attitude toward his archeological specimens, it’s a doubtful explanation, Boswell said.
“He was the community’s museological curator for decades. It would seem very unlikely that he would dispose of or store this sort of material open to the weather.”
At the very least, the discovery of skeletal remains so close to Van Cortlandt’s home “constitutes a remarkable coincidence,” Boswell and Pilon’s Arch Notes article says.
It’s impossible to know for sure where the bones were found. It’s conceivable, Boswell said, that the site might have been near the current Garden of the Provinces and Territories, where the federal government proposes to build a scaled-down memorial to victims of communism.
Before the government proceeds with projects in the national capital, it typically does a careful study of the site’s cultural heritage. That should happen on the site selected for the planned memorial, Boswell said.
“When you create something that’s going to be lasting in a place as symbolically important as the national capital, you want to know the whole story. You want to know all the associations of that place with different periods in the past.”
Importantly, it does add to a fairly scanty record of human remains, in this case possibly aboriginal and possibly very old.