Second of two parts
Last week we began looking at new details about some of those buried in the lost Cody cemetery near Sandon.
On September 23, 1897, Mrs. L.N. Remillard died of “puerperal mania,” otherwise known as postpartum psychosis, and became the fifth person buried at Cody. I have finally learned her full name, after stumbling across her husband’s obituary in the Slocan Valley archives.
She was Frances Gillingham (Fanny) Watson, born in January 1875 in Belper, Derbyshire, England to John Samuel Watson and Maria Gillingham.
In 1882 or earlier, she emigrated with her parents and siblings to Manitoba, where two more children were born before Fanny’s mother died sometime between 1888 and 1891. By the latter year, the family lived at or near Innisfail, Alta., close to the homestead of Napoléon Louis Remillard.
In 1893, Napoléon and Fanny married. They had two daughters, Louise and Edith May, and around 1896, moved to Sandon. Not much is known of their life there, but Napoléon was listed on a voters list as a merchant and mentioned in newspaper accounts as belonging to the local curling team.
The Remillards soon relocated to Cody, where a third child — whose name and gender go unrecorded — was born in July 1897. Fanny died two months later age at 22 and her infant survived her by only a few months: the baby suffocated on December 19 and became the Cody cemetery’s last known burial.
The grief-stricken Napoléon and his two daughters moved again to Slocan City, where Louise was recorded attending school in 1899. Napoléon is nowhere to be seen on the 1901 census, but the girls were staying with another family. Soon after, Fanny’s father and siblings also moved to the Slocan, settling at a place then known as Watson’s Siding, but today called Lebahdo.
Their sadness was compounded in 1903 when Fanny’s sister Amy drowned in the Slocan River. She was in a boat with her brother Walter and two other men, crossing to their home on the river’s west bank, when they were caught in a “heavy swirl of the current.” The others narrowly survived, but Amy was sucked under.
Despite an extensive search, her body wasn’t found for more than three years; her remains were ultimately buried in another lost cemetery at Winlaw, although she was apparently reinterred in Nelson, where there is a grave marker for her, although deep snow prevented me from finding it.
Amy’s brother Alfred named his youngest child, born in 1932, after the sisters he’d lost. Amy Jane Frances Watson was a frequent letter-writer to the Nelson Daily News until her death in 2007.
By 1910, Napoléon and several partners were involved in extensive placer mining operations on French Creek in the Big Bend district, 75 miles north of Revelstoke. He spent the next 25 years developing his properties, occasionally earning a mention in the annual Minister of Mines report.
In his declining years, Remillard spent most of his time in Vancouver, where he died on April 4, 1939, aged 76. An obituary in a Revelstoke newspaper stated: “Old-timers who learned of his passing expressed their sincere regrets and mourned the passing of another of their stalwart, persevering type.”
Soon after, topographer N.E. McConnell suggested a mountain be named after him in the general vicinity of his placer properties. Remillard Peak was therefore christened, and a nearby glacier also bears his name.
Napoléon’s daughters appear to have been sent to boarding school in Minneapolis. A 1905 state census finds Louise and “Mary” Remillard attending Our Lady of Lourdes, while in 1910, Louise is still in the city, staying with a cousin’s family and clerking in a dry goods store.
May graduated from nursing school at Sacred Heart Hospital in Spokane in 1919. The 1921 census finds her back in BC at Lakelse Hot Springs near Terrace, where her maternal uncle Walter ran a hotel.
During much of the time that her father placer mined in the Big Bend area, Edith was said to be the area’s only medical resource. Sadly, she died only a year after him, passing away in Vancouver from complications of breast cancer, age 45. She never married.
Around 1917, Louise married construction foreman Frank Crane. They lived in Chicago and had a son and two daughters. Louise died in Florida in 1983, age 91.
Today Napoleon Remillard is regarded as a founder of Innisfail, where his original cabin has been preserved as an historic site. His name is also remembered in Napoleon Lake, on or near his former homestead. A few photos survive of Napoléon and his daughters, but none of his wife or youngest child, whose graves remain lost.