Mount Carmel - Legends

THE SUICIDE AT ROUND HILL

Standing at the crossroads near the point where the first Humboldt Telegraph Station was located, and looking to the north-west, one feature stands out very clearly. It's the hill known as Mount Carmel.

A hundred years ago the white man called it Round Hill. The Indians knew it by the names Spathanaw Watchi and Keespitanow Hill. This latter name appeared on an 1878 map of the North-West Territories.

The hill figured prominently in the history of the area, not only as a landmark towards which travellers worked, but because of at least one dramatic incident.

In the same year as the opening of the Humboldt telegraph station, 1878, a young half-breed girl named Henrietta MacKay or McKay, took her life while camped at Round Hill.

The 19-year-old maiden was being taken by members of her family and others from their home at Fish Creek to Winnipeg to marry a man she did not want.

Heartbroken because her lover had been rejected by her family, and unwilling to continue through with their plans, she took a fatal dose of poison while the party was camped for the night at the hill.

Another account of this tragic event made it even more dramatic by stating that she rolled down the hill to her death.

Whatever the cause, she did in fact die and the body of the half-breed girl was buried north-east of what the Metis referred to as "the Big Butte", another name given to the hill, by two members of the party, Isidor Dumas and Alexander Ablais.

There is some evidence to indicate that the cross was not erected to commemorate the death of Henrietta MacKay and that it had already been on the hill when her dramatic suicide took place.

E.W. Jarvis, a surveyor who had been appointed to make a winter exploration of the Smoky River Pass for the Canadian Pacific Railway, described the hill after his return to Fort Garry over the Carlton Trail in the spring of 1875.

About 45 miles from the South Branch (of the Saskatchewan River) we passed the "Spathanaw" or Round Hill, a conspicuous feature on the landscape with a wooden crucifix on the summitt".

It should be noted that this was three years before the suicide incident.

Another reference says: "The cross is reported to have been placed there by "a worthy Bishop" who spent a Sunday at its base".

James Throw, chairman of the immigration and colonization committee in the Canadian House of Commons, also mentioned seeing the cross on Round Hill in 1877. He was making a tour of the West to decide in his own mind its suitability for agricultural use.

"Whether there was a grave on the top of the mount or not is a disputed question. No trace of a grave could be detected when the summit was levelled and the foundation for the pedestal of the statue of Our Lady was dug in 1928. More likely a cross was on the top of the hill before the year 1886, since Lestock Reid in that year called it the 'Hill of the Cross'. On September 10, 1928, Isidor Dumas, 70 years of age at that time, stated that about fifty years ago, probably in the year 1872, a Scottish Irish Catholic girl was ordered by her parents to marry a non-Catholic man. The home of the girl was Fish Creek and her name was Hatty (Henrietta?) MacKay. In order to escape the marriage she fled from home and escaped into the wilderness. Either inadvertently or otherwise took poison and died. Mr. Dumas stated that he made the coffin for the dead girl and with the help of Alexander Ablais buried the girl to the northeast of Mount Carmel, but close by. Four or five years later the skull showed above ground, a sign that the grave must have been shallow and rather exposed to wild animals. The cross which had been placed on top of the mount and fashioned out of poplar wood had crumbled and fallen to the ground when Mr. F.J. Lange came there in 1902 in his exploration trip through the proposed Colony. He replaced it with a new cross fashioned from the same material."