Mount Leval
Feature Type:Mount - Variation of Mountain: Mass of land prominently elevated above the surrounding terrain, bounded by steep slopes and rising to a summit and/or peaks. ["Mount" preceding the name usually indicates that the feature is named after a person.]
Status: Official
Name Authority: BC Geographical Names Office
Relative Location: On BC-Alberta boundary just N of Height of the Rockies Provincial Park, NE of Invermere, Kootenay Land District
Latitude-Longitude: 50°45'22"N, 115°26'14"W at the approximate centre of this feature.
Datum: WGS84
NTS Map: 82J/14
Origin Notes and History:

Adopted 23 February 1918 by the Geographic Board of Canada, as labelled on BC-Alberta Boundary sheet #11, surveyed in 1916, published in 1917.

Source: BC place name cards, or correspondence to/from BC's Chief Geographer or BC Geographical Names Office

Named in 1916 by interprovincial boundary surveyors, after Gaston de Leval, the Belgian lawyer who (unsuccessfully) defended Edith Cavell, the British nurse shot by a German firing squad in October 1915. ["Edith Louise Cavell (1865-1915), a native of Norfolk, was a matron of a Belgian Red Cross hospital in Brussels to which many wounded allied prisoners of war were sent. She was also a member of a group engaged in aiding some 200 allied soldiers trapped behind German lines to rejoin their armies. Under German martial law this activity was regarded as treason and punishable by death. When Edith Cavell was captured and tried she made no attempt to deny her activities. Her defence was simply that as a nurse it was her duty to save lives. The lives of these men, she declared, would be forfeit it they were caught so she helped them to escape and this, in her judgment, was saving lives. She was accordingly condemned to death and executed by firing squad on 12 October 1915. The first suggestion that a mountain be named after Edith Cavell is attributed to Sir Richard McBride, then-premier of British Columbia, who proposed the loftiest peak in Canadian territory, Mount Robson, be [re-]named in her honour; others in the Rockies and near Quebec City were also suggested. With this strong support Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden asked the Geographic Board of Canada to deal with the proposal. A mountain near Amethyst Lakes in Alberta's Jasper National Park was selected, and officially named Mount Edith Cavell in March 1916." (Place Names of Alberta, P. M. Holmgren and E. J. Holmgren, 1972).]

Source: BC place name cards, or correspondence to/from BC's Chief Geographer or BC Geographical Names Office