A New Hochelagan Burying-Ground Discovered at Westmount on the Western Spur of Mount Royal, Montreal, July-September, 1898

In the summer of 1898, on the western slopes of Mount Royal, a lawyer and amateur archaeologist named W.D. Lighthall stumbled upon something extraordinary: a prehistoric burial ground belonging to the ancient Hochelagan people, an Iroquois-speaking nation that had once thrived in the Montreal region before European contact. This meticulously detailed report captures the electricity of that discovery, the moment when ground was broken and skeletons emerged, their bodies positioned with knees drawn upward in a distinctive mortuary tradition that spoke of beliefs now lost to time. Lighthall documents the excavation with Victorian precision, recording each artifact (a fragment of white wampum, remnants of funerary offerings) and grappling with questions of origin and cultural meaning that he could only partially answer. What emerges is more than a scientific record; it is a portal into early Canadian archaeology, when the continent's deep Indigenous past was only beginning to be acknowledged. The book carries the poignancy of a vanished world, and the hope, expressed in Lighthall's own words, that further digging might illuminate the lives of those who came before.