M W Fifer M D

Who are the men who follow the men who grub for the gold? Doctor Max Fifer and his assistant Ah Chung, having departed San Francisco for a new life in the wilds of British North America, having set up a medical practice and a drug dispensary in Yale in 1858, at the height of the Fraser River gold rush, even before colonial status is proclaimed. Fifer survives the treacherous Ned McGowan's attempt to instigate an American takeover and weathers the colony's lukewarm welcome for non-British subjects. Although an American citizen, a veteran of the Mexican war, Fifer is elected Mayor of his bustling community at the head of navigation on the Fraser River. However, his good fortune is short-lived. The popular healer cannot save himself from the depression of the economic slumps nor from the demented threats of a former patient. Told through the grieving eyes of Ah Chung, over the twenty-four hours while the town awaits the hanging of the murderer of their beloved Dr. Fifer, Prophet, Healer, Fool is a surprising glimpse into the private and professional lives and the politics of forgotten pioneers of the fledgling colony of British Columbia.

This book makes it easy with its compelling collection of stories about the people who are buried at the Yale Pioneer Cemetery, an antique burial ground “at a stopping point between Fort Langley and Fort Kamloops,” BC. Established in 1858, the Yale Cemetery offers final refuge to some 300 souls, many of them among British Columbia’s earliest pioneers, including immigrant railroad labourers who toiled and died building the Canadian Pacific and Canadian Northern Railways. Here lies Dr. Maximilian Fifer, murdered in 1861 at the hands of a patient who felt the physician has mistreated him; Ned Stout, who, when he died in 1924, included Yale’s 1858 gold rush and the 1880 construction of the CPR among the memories of his 100-year lifetime; and the Elley brothers, three of at least eight children taken by scarlet fever as an epidemic tore through the town in the 1880s. As for the more than 200 unmarked graves in the Yale Cemetery, Hallowed Ground unearths their stories, too. “Yale is the focal point of our realistic and romantic history,” a passerby wrote the Yale and District Historical Society in 1980.

A compilation of naturalization and denization records in the British colonies in America between 1607 and 1775. Records were compiled from published literature, then expanded and improved by the examination of original source materials.