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January/February 1997 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Feature: Grizzly bears Write to Know Our Home and Native Tongue

Places of the dead

When I drive along the Trans-Canada Highway from Canmore to Calgary, I pass a town called Dead Man's Flats. Can you tell me the origins of this name?
- John Lacy, Canmore, Alta.

LOOKING OVER the map of Canada, you would think there was little in the country’s past other than death and dying. There are more than 125 locations in Canada with "dead man" in their names, from Deadmans Bight, Nfld., to Deadman Pass, B.C. (plus various dead boys, dead dogs, dead horses, dead ducks, dead fish and dead falls). Nine provinces and two territories are represented with dead man place names; only P.E.I. seems to have escaped the grim reaper. Quebec is in there with Anse des Morts, Baie des Morts, Île aux Morts, and more. It seems likely that most gained their macabre names simply because bodies were found there. It isn’t difficult to imagine the kind of scene that might have inspired Deadmans Beach, N.S., Deadmans Rapids, Ont., or Deadsteer Lake, Sask.

Alberta has seven dead man locations: a pass, a gulch, two lakes and one creek, plus the locality of Dead Man’s Flats (which our Canmore reader drives by) and the adjacent flat, Dead Man Flat. According to Place Names of Alberta, the recently completed four-volume compendium of Alberta’s officially named peaks, parks, places and waterways, there are not one but two possible explanations for the naming of Dead Man’s Flats. One is that two brothers, John and François Marrett, operated a dairy on the flat until François borrowed a two-edged axe from a neighbour and killed his brother, an act that landed him a life-long visit to the Ponoka Institute for the insane. The other story is that, sometime around 1900, two or three Indians were trapping beaver in the area, presumably illegally, when a warden approached. Knowing they had no time to escape, they smeared themselves with beaver blood and played dead until the warden ran for help. Then they got up, took their beaver pelts, and went home.

Armed and identical

THE READER IS RIGHT: the pattern of the snowflake is predetermined at the centre and from the start. A snowflake is a crystalline structure. So a particle — in the case of a snowflake, a molecule of frozen water vapour — can fit into an existing particle only in a certain way. And since the original central ice crystal — the heart of a snowflake — has six identical sides, each arm grows identically. (However, while all snowflakes have a hexagonal crystal structure, not all have arms — some are flat plates, some are long and needle-like and others much more complex. Still, the most common form of snowflake has arms.)

Specific conditions of temperature, humidity and pressure determine the precise shape of the original ice crystal, and thereafter the nature of crystals ensures that all six sides will be the same. As snowflakes fall flat, and not one edge first, all arms catch new water vapour equally. What makes the original ice crystals (and thus the snowflakes) so inevitably six-sided is trickier. Something in the molecular structure of water, or perhaps the crystallographic form of ice, seems the likeliest answer. "Ice crystals just happen to be six-sided," says University of Toronto physics professor Han-Ru Cho. Another reader (and former meteorologist), Norman Thyer of Nelson, B.C., notes that the symmetry and individuality of snowflakes have counterparts in living creatures. "The left side of my body is identical to the right side," he writes, "or rather the mirror image of it, yet my body is different from anyone else’s." Just as an individual’s genetic code ordains his or her appearance, so a central ice crystal’s six similar sides determine a snowflake’s six-way similarity.

Canadian cacti

ARCHIBALD MENZIES, the botanist who sailed with George Vancouver along what is now the west coast of Canada, put ashore on the Gulf Islands in 1792 and recorded in his journal being "not a little surprizd to meet with the Cactus Opuntia thus far to the Northward." A good many other people have been no less "surprizd" to find cacti in Canada in the 200 years since. Yet at least four species of these plants so indelibly associated with deserts do grow in Canada, thriving in arid zones from British Columbia to Ontario and somehow surviving our half-years of harsh winter. There are perhaps 2,000 species of cactus, all native to the Americas from little "buttons," such as peyote, to tree-like giants 20 metres tall. Cacti are found from Peace River to the tip of South America, though it is the dry lands of Mexico where the greatest number and variety occur. They are well adapted to life in hot, dry regions, with shallow but wide-spreading root systems to sop up quick desert showers, succulent spongy tissue in their fattened stems to store water, and stiff, sharp-pointed spines to keep thirsty creatures at bay. Their flowers are often large and showy.

Three species of prickly pear (above), named for their edible but barbed fruit, occur in Canada. These are of the genus Opuntia (as the botanist Menzies noted), the largest genus of the cactus family. Generally, the Canadian species have flattened, segmented stems, and grow in sprawling clumps. One or possibly two species of "pincushion" cacti — the genus Coryphantha (formerly Mammillaria) — grow in Canada, too. They are small, ball-shaped, generally found in clusters, and covered with evenly spaced bumps called tubercles from which short, sharp spines project.

As to why these usually heat-loving plants can survive the cold Canadian winter, the key is dehydration. They dry out in fall, the remaining sap seemingly concentrating to something resembling antifreeze. In the case of Opuntia, the plants themselves often lie down flat on the ground allowing a blanket of snow to protect them from hard winds and sharp temperature changes. Come spring, the cacti swell again with the early rains and pero bueno! life goes on.

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