Mystery: the fresh flowers
on Lieut. Palmer’s grave

ALEXIS CREEK —- North of here, beside a road which is
in far too good a condition, is Palmer Lake, 2 pretty place
that is destined to be littered with far too many beer cans
and Cheezie bags because — must it be repeated? — the

road is too good.
The name commemorates a re-
Paul
=
St. Pierre

markable pioneer of this country,
Henry Spencer Palmer of Her
Majesty’s Royal Engineers, one of
those men destined to shine out.
He was admitted to Royal Mili-
tary College in his native England
while under age, graduated among
the top of his class and in
September, 1858, leapt at the op-
portunity to go to the newly
formed colony of British Colum-
bia to work under Colonel R.C.
Moody, the Royal Engineer who
-had become the colony’s first
Commissioner of Lands and

to Yokohama. There were fresh
flowers on the grave.

Surely a dramatic moment to
match the one when Robinson
Crusoe found the footprint in the
sand. Who, after almost a hun-
dred years had passed, was plac-
ing flowers on his grave?

It was not the Yokohama
Waterworks Department. He had
a Japanese wife and children and
there are now Japanese grandchil-
dren who honor that caring and
able man.

The story has a happy ending.
Both sets of grandchildren are
now in friendly correspondence. It
turns out that all have thrived in
their separate careers. Whether the
official Palmer widow ever knew
before she died in Victoria is hid-
den from us.
EA 18

Es

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Works.

Lieut. Palmer was a superin-

‘tendent of the road construction

in the Fraser Canyon and did
other such works, but it was 1863,
the year of his departure from
B.C., that he firmly planted bis
name on the map.

: . It was also the year in which he
. married the daughter of Venerable

Archdeacon Wright in Victoria,

but that sort of event is usual

rather than historic. .

His historic action, the reason
-we remember Lieut. Palmer, was
his reconnaissance of the Cariboo
‘and Chilcotin, He mapped what -
“came to be called the Palmer Trail

‘from the site of modern day Bella
‘Coola to the original Caribco gold

fi elds.

. Jt was more or less the route
‘followed by Alexander Mackenzie
:75 years before, but to this day

” ‘nobody is sure exactly where
; Mackenzie’s route lies. That was

"> J "but a part of the task assigned this

24-year-old by Col. Moody.

os Among his tasks:

. Sketch North Bentinck Arm;

*. Select a town site;

Map and mark the lands ori-
‘vately claimed in the Beila Coola
valley; .

Hear disputed claims and report
upon them;

Survey a road to Fraser’s River,

300 miles eastward;

_ Lay out a townsite near where

ie West Road River debouches
into the Fraser in the vicinity of
‘Alexandria; ’: -.

Proceed to Swift (Cottonw: ood)
River and from there by the most
direct route into the goldfields;

, Mark and block out townsites
there; a

Proceed from the Cariboo gold
fields to Quesnelle Lake;

..° Map the shores of Quesnelle

Lakes’

“st Go from Quesnelle Lake to Lac
. La Hache to make a general map
of this route;

? Finally, come home carrying a

ANNOU

PAULITICS & PERSPECTIVES

detailed daily diary anda
scrupulously close account of
every shilling spent.

Although he and his smail party
were at risk from Indians in the
western region, this being the
period of the Chilcotin War,
Lieut. Palmer accomplished all
this without striking any heroic
poses or making any histrionic
statements about the vast impor-
tance of himself and his works.
Ae came, he saw, he mapped, he
kept his accounts.

In the Victoria museum is a
jackpine stump with his name and
the date carved deep into it, one
found along the Palmer trail a
generation or two after his party
had crossed it.

(We think of him as Lieut.
Palmer, but that is a typical Brit-
ish Columbian conceit. When he
left here, with the wife who was
later to bear him 10 sons and
daughters, he was a lieutenant but
he kept rising in rank and died an
honorary brigadier-general.)

He mapped the Sinai Peninsula,
designed an observatory-in New
Zealand to chart the passage of
Venus and did various engineering
works in Barbados and Hong
Kong.

His last productive years were
spent on loan to the Emperor of
Japan. He designed the
Yokohama waterworks.

He lived there while his wife
remained in England until 1913,
when she returned to her native
British Columbia. Mr, Palmer was
already dead, buried in Yokohama
in 1893, aged only 54.

Almost a hundred years later
came a surprising sequel to the
Palmer story. A grandchild, or a ~
friend of a grandchild, looked up
the old Palmer grave during a visit

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PORTEAU BLUFFS ROCK SCALING PROJECT
SEATO-SKY HIGHWAY 89

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3 Ministry of Transportation
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