Boot Hill, BC Penitentiary’s cemetery in New Westminster, holds dozens of unnamed graves of burials between 1913 and 1968.
In last week’s blog, I wrote about my visit to New Westminster to see the buildings that once formed part of BC Penitentiary, a federal prison that operated from 1878 to 1980. The most interesting part of the day though was finding Boot Hill, the jail’s cemetery which has become part of the grounds of two large apartment buildings.
First burial was in 1913:
According to a plaque installed in 2016, the first burial was in 1913 and the last in 1968. There are none of the upright markers that you’d expect to find in most cemeteries, and that’s a bit disconcerting, but what’s really weird is that there are no names. There is just a fenced off field which contains dozens of concrete slabs with numbers etched on them, many so faded that they are completely illegible.
The numbers correspond to inmates who died while serving time and were unclaimed by family or friends. A kind of Potter’s Field but where the names are mostly known, just no one cared except maybe their fellow inmates who dug the plots, made their coffins and marked the graves.
Map to graves:
There is a map that puts names to some of the markers—close to 50 of them. There’s Gim (aka Kim or Ung Wing) who died on May 31, 1914 at age 31. A few are unknown, and some are so young it hurts. Alphonse Alvin Duquette was just 18 when he died on December 11, 1948. John Baptiste died in 1923 at age 25, and there’s 64-year-old Sook Sias, an Indigenous man who died in 1933 and eventually had his remains returned to his ancestral land.
One man died from a gunshot wound while trying to escape from prison, another was caught and executed after a guard was killed during the attempt. The most common cause of death was tuberculosis or suicide.
Not much is known about their crimes. One was an inmate who stole $15 worth of socks. Five were Doukhobors jailed for protesting while naked. A few were murderers. All were serving hard time in a maximum security prison.
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