Author of the article: Beth Wilkins
Publishing date: May 10, 2021 • 1 day ago • 6 minute read • • IMG 0506 – Scrip Commissioners (Seated l-r) J.A. Walker and Jean Jean-Léon Côté and Scrip Commission Secretaries (Standing l-r) J.F. Prudhomme and Charles Mair. Photo from David Leonard’s book Delayed Frontier, The Peace Country to 1909, and Saskatchewan Archives Board Photo by SUPPLIED
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We leave David Thompson, who we and Charlotte accompanied across Canada in his surveying, map-making, and boundary pursuits. As you will recall, he died in 1857, age 86, destitute. Wife, Charlotte, age 72, mother of their 13 children, followed three months later. They were buried in the family plot of daughter Eliza’s husband, Dalhousie Landall, in Mount Royal Cemetery, Montréal. Although, initially in an unmarked grave, their site was, in 1927, recognized with a white Grecian-like column upon which was a brass sextant – later removed “for safe
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The most recent Ponderings ended, not only with word of the death of George Yeoman a.k.a Baldy Red, Feb. 14, 1936, according to the Western Producer of June 24, 1976. There is, at least one other source, that suggests his death came in 1941. Regardless, the Western Producer wrote: “When George Yeoman passed away some 50 years ago, the Peace Country bade farewell to one of the most colourful pioneers and certainly one of its most prodigious pranksters.”
For her part, Jean Cameron Kelley, herself, as we will see, a Peace River culture-bringing character wrote an ode – a ballad to Baldy Red’s memory, which ended: