Marking the legacy of Cuthbert Grant in SFX

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This article was published 23/08/2013 (4505 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg resident is hoping to give one of Manitoba’s revered Métis leaders a proper resting place.

Sandra Horyski has been quietly, and quickly, fundraising for the $1,500 needed to place a black granite memorial marker for Cuthbert Grant in the cemetery of the St. François Xavier Roman Catholic Parish, located on Highway 26.

“We’ll probably never know where his body is and we can’t start digging up a town,” said Horyski, herself a Grant descendant.

“It just sort of seems disheartening. There doesn’t seem to be that many records, or a certainty (where he is buried). ”

Grant is seen as one of the founding fathers of SFX, originally named Grantown in his honour.

He was born to a Scottish father and Métis mother in 1793 and, after a career with both the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, served as a sheriff and magistrate of Assiniboia before his death on July 15, 1854.

Though there is no record of where he is buried, there is plenty of myth — including being buried somewhere underneath Highway 26.

Horyski has so far raised $1,000 for the headstone, mainly from Grant descendants from across Canada and the world, receiving donations from as far away as St. Petersburg, Russia, and London, England.

The marker will cost around $1,500, and will feature a laser-etched portrait of Grant’s likeness and inscription about his life.

It will be placed in the cemetery next to the headstones of his daughter, Maria, and her husband, Pascal Breland.

For another $600, Horyski can have a French inscription placed on the back side of the marker.
The parish and the community is well-versed in the history of Grant and the foundation he built for SFX, said Odile Thibert, who has been documenting the church’s history for eight years.

Grant settled in SFX in 1821 after Hudson’s Bay Co. Governor George Simpson gave him 23,000 acres of land along the Assiniboine 30 kilometres west of The Forks. Grant divided the land into river lots for each family that followed him north after migrating from the United States shortly after the creation of the Canada-U.S. border in the early 1800s.

Grant, originally baptized as a Protestant, converted to Catholicism when he married his third wife, Marie McGillis, in 1823. Grant established a mission in the town that same year with Bishop Provencher, holding the first services from his own home.

The first church was built in 1828. In 1832, the second church, and where some figure Grant was buried beneath, was built and it lasted nearly 70 years before being demolished and replaced in 1900. That third building still stands today.

“We have no idea where those two churches were built before — they’re gone,” Thibert said.

Horyski hopes to unveil the marker before the first snowfall. She’s already planning for a celebration at the cemetery next July to mark the 160th year of Grant’s death, and is expecting descendants from across the country to come to mark the occasion.

For more, visit www.cuthbertgrant.ca