William and Bertha Cowan

Among the more noticeable markers at Revelstoke’s Mountain View Cemetery are two fairly similar red granite gravestones that are just across the service road from each other. William Cowan, who lived from 1855 to 1926 is buried just behind the maintenance shed, at the edge of the main cemetery. The road next to the shed marks the boundary between the Protestant and Roman Catholic sections of the cemetery. The Catholic section opened in 1906, and one of the first to be interred there was Bertha Beatrice Cowan, the young wife of William. Bertha was born in 1880 and in 1903 married William Cowan, who was 25 years her senior. The fact that theirs was a “mixed marriage” between a Protestant and a Catholic was also unusual for that time.

Bertha and William had a son Patrick, who was born in 1904, and two years later, Bertha died in childbirth with their second child, who also died. Bertha was buried in the Catholic section, next to the service road. William had an elaborate red granite marker placed on her grave. At the time of Bertha’s death, a non-Catholic could not be buried in a Catholic cemetery, so William obviously did the next best thing, and purchased the plot directly across the road from Bertha. William died in April of 1926 in Rochester, Minnesota, where he had gone seeking treatment for an illness.

William Cowan was one of Revelstoke’s most enterprising pioneers. He came to Revelstoke in 1885, where he built the Victoria Hotel on Front Street. He was one of the partners in a steamship company that saw the building of the S.S. Dispatch and the S.S. Lytton from a small shipworks at the south end of Front Street. Cowan had the first telephone in town, with a line between his hotel and the Canadian Pacific Railway station. By 1896 he had incorporated the Revelstoke, Trout Lake and Big Bend Telephone Company Ltd. and established a telephone exchanged in a building at the corner of Third Street and Charles. He formed the Revelstoke Water, Power and Light company that constructed the first water system in 1896 and the first electric power plant on the Illecillewaet River in 1898. The company was sold to the City of Revelstoke in 1902.