The word ‘cairn’ is a of Scottish origin. A cairn is a pile of stones, usually made as a memorial to some significant event. The story is told that in olden times the warring clans of Scotland, before going into combat, took the time for each warrior to gather a stone and throw it onto a pile.
After the battle was over, each survivor returned to the pile and removed a stone. The pile remaining was a memorial to those who had fallen and the size of that pile was evidence of the significance of the conflict. Thus a cairn is a fitting marker for the places of battles during the conflict of 1885 in western Canada.
When I came to Calgary, to the new regional office of Parks Canada in 1965, old files had been moved from Banff National Park and stacked in a storeroom in our office in the former Customs Building.
Researching background for my historic sites work, I often searched those old files. One of the interesting items I found, was the origin of the monument in Saskatchewan marking the site of the Battle of Fish Creek on April 24, 1885.
The old report on the construction of the cairn detailed the gathering of the stones which had marked the graves of those who lost their lives during the battle. The stones were then reused to form the new memorial.
The stones in that cairn had significant historical background, being the original grave markers of those of General Middleton’s North West Field Force killed in that conflict.
Sadly those stacks of old files were taking up space in our office, and bothering the Regional Director, a man who had little interest in ‘human’ history when Canadian Parks in the west was, at the time, so focused on ‘natural’ history.
A clerk, who had no experience with the preservation of archival material, was given the task of sorting and disposing of all of the ‘useless’ files. The report of the construction of the monument at Fish Creek was destroyed, along with, who knows, what other valuable documents.
It was probably the only written record that existed of the cairn’s historical significance.
*Published in The Senior Paper January 2017