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This article contributes to the sociology of vital statistics by examining the understandings of infant mortality which circulated in Alberta in the early 20th century. In those years, infant mortality came to be represented as an unnatural and unacceptable diminishment of Alberta's population and an appropriate object of political concern. This paper deals with the ways in which infant mortality became saturated with symbolism, even before the full emergence of policies and programs for reducing it. Using a database of 73 digitized Alberta newspapers, I identify the dominant metaphors for infant mortality as economic inefficiency and military defeat. I also set this concern for lost infant life within the context of other population anxieties, including xenophobic fears about "unnatural increase" through immigration and fears about "population quality" which culminated in calls for eugenic sterilization. I argue that infant mortality is a unique form of population process in that it temporally fuses birth and death, creating, in the collective imagination, a spectral collection of those who might have lived, had they not been deprived of life unnaturally soon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]