Susan Smith-Josephy is the author of Lillian Alling: The Journey Home (Caitlin Press 2011), a biography about the courageous and elusive Lillian Alling. Using a combination of personal documents, first-hand recollections, family tales and archival research, Smith-Josephy demystifies Alling's life and story.
Her second book, Cataline: The Life of BC's Legendary Packer (Caitlin 2020), with Irene Bjerky, about the historic "packer," Jean Caux, who arrived in B.C. in 1858 from Southern France via the U.S. and set up business getting supplies to early settlers with his pack mule train. Known by his nickname Cataline, he followed trails created over the years by Indigenous people and later by the fur trading companies, to travel between B.C.'s settlements in the rugged backcountry. Cataline was present for many of the pioneering events that shaped B.C., including the Fraser River Gold Rush of 1858, the Cariboo Gold Rush of 1862, the coming of the railway to Ashcroft in 1886, and the Grand Trunk Pacific to Hazelton in 1912. He crossed paths with significant historical figures such as Judge Matthew Begbie, anthropologist James Teit, and Amelia York, a world-famous First Nations basketmaker with whom Cataline had two children. Irene Bjerky is a member of the Yale First Nation and is related to Amelia York.
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Lillian Alling: The Journey Home
BOOKS
Lillian Alling: The Journey Home (Caitlin Press 2011)
Cataline: The Life of BC's Legendary Packer (Caitlin 2020) $22.95 9781773860244
[BCBW 2020]
+++++++++++++++++++
Cataline: The Life of BC’s Legendary Packer by Susan Smith-Josephy with Irene Bjerky (Caitlin Press $22.95)
Review by Mark Forsythe, BCBW 2020
Irene Bjerky, C’eyxkn, has been chasing down morsels of information about her family’s connections to the famous British Columbia packer, Jean Caux, aka “Cataline” since the early 1970s. Bjerky worked around the province as a boilermaker and commercial fisher, sometimes in the same places Cataline had led his mule pack trains 150 years earlier. He crisscrossed the province, fathering two children with Bjerky’s great-great grandmother, Amelia York, C’eyxkn, a noted basket weaver living at Spuzzum. Another child from a different relationship was later born at the opposite end of the province near Telegraph Creek.
Bjerky connected with Quesnel writer and genealogist Susan Smith-Josephy who did research in museums, archives, ships’ manifests, miners’ licenses, newspapers and used oral history interviews conducted by CBC’s Imbert Orchard. Seven years later, a more complete portrait of the man comes together in Cataline: The Life of BC’s Legendary Packer.
Smith-Josephy’s prose is clear and crisp—and she knows an entertaining anecdote when she finds one. Cataline’s friend, Constable Sperry Cline recounted when Cataline first met Judge Matthew Bailey Begbie near Yale: “Judge Begbie was coming up the river dispensing justice in the various camps...The newly arrived packers were asked which side they would support. Cataline coolly drew a long Mexican knife from his boot and answered, ‘I standa by judge!’”
Judge Begbie later returned the favour by declaring Cataline a naturalized Canadian citizen.
Born in the French region of Bearn in the Pyrenees Mountains near the Spanish border, Jean Caux arrived in British Columbia in 1858 during the frenzy of the Fraser River gold rush. He spoke a jumble of languages: Bearnese, Mexican, Scots, Chinook, Irish, French, Chinese and English. One story has him swearing “with great dexterity” in seven languages.
He had learned how to be a packer from Mexicans when he landed in California as a 19-year old. On the Fraser River, he soon realized it was more profitable to be a packer than to compete with thousands of gold-panners. He began working for packing outfits and by 1862, had started his own.
Jean Caux cut an impressive figure—broad-shouldered and strong, with a peculiar habit of rubbing rum or whiskey into his shoulder-length, curly hair. He kept people in line with a horseshoe at the ready and began the day with a naked roll in the snow or dip in a frigid creek. His day ended after playing fiddle by the fire and then sleeping outside on a tarp and branches.
Cataline was admired for his reliability, fairness (to animals and crews—mostly Indigenous, mixed-blood and Chinese) and an uncanny memory. Although he was illiterate, he remembered every article that his mules delivered—and the corresponding cost to transport it. He kept track of employees’ wages and expenses in his head and at the end of each season would settle up to the dollar.
Cataline built one of the biggest and most dependable packing outfits in the province; his 54 years of bone-crunching journeys parallel the development of modern British Columbia at its mining camps, telegraph lines, Hudson’s Bay Company posts, CPR and Grand Trunk railroad construction camps and settlers who were fanning out across the wilderness.
Cataline went wherever the work was, on a diet of bannock, beans, deer, rabbit, squirrel and sometimes weeds that he called, “gooda’ lettuce.” As gold rushes pushed northward, he ventured deeper into the Interior. Before the wagon roads, it could take a month to pack from Yale into the Cariboo on trails established by Indigenous peoples.
It’s difficult to truly fathom the distances travelled in often harsh conditions (maps would be a welcome addition in this book). While returning from the Omineca Country it was so cold he lost half of his animals. But Cataline recovered and eventually his packing trade took him to the far north, servicing the Yukon Telegraph and Klondike gold rush.
Cataline was also clever. Once, he had horse shoes removed from a mule loaded with eggs. “He walk easy, just like a cat.”
Smith-Josephy has a fascination with people who traverse vast landscapes. Her first book Lillian Alling: The Journey Home (Caitlin, 2011) focused on a woman who walked from New York to Alaska during a four-year quest to return to her Eastern European home. Cataline: The Life of BC’s Legendary Packer has swiftly found its way onto the B.C. Best Sellers List because British Columbians are keen to soak up compelling stories about the people and events that form the DNA of this province.
Given the vast territory that Cataline covered and his “fair, honest and reliable” reputation, it’s no surprise a school is named after him in Williams Lake, a creek in the Central Interior, a motel, and at least one rodeo horse. A statue of the famous packer stands beside the highway in New Hazelton where he retired in 1913.
A poor businessman who was, “too generous with friends and crew,” Cataline died at the age of 84 with no savings in 1922. 9781773860244
Mark Forsythe is co-author with Greg Dickson of From the West Coast to the Western Front (Harbour, 2014).
Her second book, Cataline: The Life of BC's Legendary Packer (Caitlin 2020), with Irene Bjerky, about the historic "packer," Jean Caux, who arrived in B.C. in 1858 from Southern France via the U.S. and set up business getting supplies to early settlers with his pack mule train. Known by his nickname Cataline, he followed trails created over the years by Indigenous people and later by the fur trading companies, to travel between B.C.'s settlements in the rugged backcountry. Cataline was present for many of the pioneering events that shaped B.C., including the Fraser River Gold Rush of 1858, the Cariboo Gold Rush of 1862, the coming of the railway to Ashcroft in 1886, and the Grand Trunk Pacific to Hazelton in 1912. He crossed paths with significant historical figures such as Judge Matthew Begbie, anthropologist James Teit, and Amelia York, a world-famous First Nations basketmaker with whom Cataline had two children. Irene Bjerky is a member of the Yale First Nation and is related to Amelia York.
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Lillian Alling: The Journey Home
BOOKS
Lillian Alling: The Journey Home (Caitlin Press 2011)
Cataline: The Life of BC's Legendary Packer (Caitlin 2020) $22.95 9781773860244
[BCBW 2020]
+++++++++++++++++++
Cataline: The Life of BC’s Legendary Packer by Susan Smith-Josephy with Irene Bjerky (Caitlin Press $22.95)
Review by Mark Forsythe, BCBW 2020
Irene Bjerky, C’eyxkn, has been chasing down morsels of information about her family’s connections to the famous British Columbia packer, Jean Caux, aka “Cataline” since the early 1970s. Bjerky worked around the province as a boilermaker and commercial fisher, sometimes in the same places Cataline had led his mule pack trains 150 years earlier. He crisscrossed the province, fathering two children with Bjerky’s great-great grandmother, Amelia York, C’eyxkn, a noted basket weaver living at Spuzzum. Another child from a different relationship was later born at the opposite end of the province near Telegraph Creek.
Bjerky connected with Quesnel writer and genealogist Susan Smith-Josephy who did research in museums, archives, ships’ manifests, miners’ licenses, newspapers and used oral history interviews conducted by CBC’s Imbert Orchard. Seven years later, a more complete portrait of the man comes together in Cataline: The Life of BC’s Legendary Packer.
Smith-Josephy’s prose is clear and crisp—and she knows an entertaining anecdote when she finds one. Cataline’s friend, Constable Sperry Cline recounted when Cataline first met Judge Matthew Bailey Begbie near Yale: “Judge Begbie was coming up the river dispensing justice in the various camps...The newly arrived packers were asked which side they would support. Cataline coolly drew a long Mexican knife from his boot and answered, ‘I standa by judge!’”
Judge Begbie later returned the favour by declaring Cataline a naturalized Canadian citizen.
Born in the French region of Bearn in the Pyrenees Mountains near the Spanish border, Jean Caux arrived in British Columbia in 1858 during the frenzy of the Fraser River gold rush. He spoke a jumble of languages: Bearnese, Mexican, Scots, Chinook, Irish, French, Chinese and English. One story has him swearing “with great dexterity” in seven languages.
He had learned how to be a packer from Mexicans when he landed in California as a 19-year old. On the Fraser River, he soon realized it was more profitable to be a packer than to compete with thousands of gold-panners. He began working for packing outfits and by 1862, had started his own.
Jean Caux cut an impressive figure—broad-shouldered and strong, with a peculiar habit of rubbing rum or whiskey into his shoulder-length, curly hair. He kept people in line with a horseshoe at the ready and began the day with a naked roll in the snow or dip in a frigid creek. His day ended after playing fiddle by the fire and then sleeping outside on a tarp and branches.
Cataline was admired for his reliability, fairness (to animals and crews—mostly Indigenous, mixed-blood and Chinese) and an uncanny memory. Although he was illiterate, he remembered every article that his mules delivered—and the corresponding cost to transport it. He kept track of employees’ wages and expenses in his head and at the end of each season would settle up to the dollar.
Cataline built one of the biggest and most dependable packing outfits in the province; his 54 years of bone-crunching journeys parallel the development of modern British Columbia at its mining camps, telegraph lines, Hudson’s Bay Company posts, CPR and Grand Trunk railroad construction camps and settlers who were fanning out across the wilderness.
Cataline went wherever the work was, on a diet of bannock, beans, deer, rabbit, squirrel and sometimes weeds that he called, “gooda’ lettuce.” As gold rushes pushed northward, he ventured deeper into the Interior. Before the wagon roads, it could take a month to pack from Yale into the Cariboo on trails established by Indigenous peoples.
It’s difficult to truly fathom the distances travelled in often harsh conditions (maps would be a welcome addition in this book). While returning from the Omineca Country it was so cold he lost half of his animals. But Cataline recovered and eventually his packing trade took him to the far north, servicing the Yukon Telegraph and Klondike gold rush.
Cataline was also clever. Once, he had horse shoes removed from a mule loaded with eggs. “He walk easy, just like a cat.”
Smith-Josephy has a fascination with people who traverse vast landscapes. Her first book Lillian Alling: The Journey Home (Caitlin, 2011) focused on a woman who walked from New York to Alaska during a four-year quest to return to her Eastern European home. Cataline: The Life of BC’s Legendary Packer has swiftly found its way onto the B.C. Best Sellers List because British Columbians are keen to soak up compelling stories about the people and events that form the DNA of this province.
Given the vast territory that Cataline covered and his “fair, honest and reliable” reputation, it’s no surprise a school is named after him in Williams Lake, a creek in the Central Interior, a motel, and at least one rodeo horse. A statue of the famous packer stands beside the highway in New Hazelton where he retired in 1913.
A poor businessman who was, “too generous with friends and crew,” Cataline died at the age of 84 with no savings in 1922. 9781773860244
Mark Forsythe is co-author with Greg Dickson of From the West Coast to the Western Front (Harbour, 2014).
Articles: 2 Articles for this author
Lillian Alling: Walking Home
synopsis
In 1926 or 1927, Lillian Alling, the subject of a Vancouver Opera production, began an epic journey on foot from New York to Siberia. She made it to B.C. and was jailed for her own safety in Oakalla Prison Farm in Burnaby because authorities feared she would die if she continued her trek through the winter. In the spring she walked north and was last spotted in Alaska. Quesnel historian Susan Smith-Josephy (SFU BA'88) has written a non-fiction account of Alling's life called Lillian Alling: Walking Home (Caitlin Press 2011).
[by Christine Hearn, AQ Magazine, 2011)
Lillian Alling: The Journey Home by Susan Smith-Josephy
Review (2013)
Lillian Alling: The Journey Home by Susan Smith-Josephy (Caitlin Press $24.95)
It took quesnel author, Susan Smith-Josephy, four years to research and write Lillian Alling: The Journey Home. This was a full year longer than the events described in the book of Polish Immigrant, Lillian Alling's walk across North America from New York to Alaska in the 1920s in an attempt to re-turn to her roots.
Alling crossed the Canadian border at Niagara Falls on Christ-mas Eve, 1926. What made her epic trek peculiar is that her homeland was in Eastern Europe, yet she set off in the opposite direction, walk-ing westward and north. She even-tually reached the Bering Sea in August. 1929.
As Smith-Josephy points out, the beginning and ending of Alling's life remain a mystery. She landed in New York City from Europe at an undisclosed date, and records docu-menting the end of her Journey arc vague. But once she reached British Columbia, Yukon and Alaska, on her trek across the continent, there is a pretty good paper trai1 in newspa-per articles, magazines, books and in the lore of the country.
"I love to do research,"; says Smith-Josephy who first got inter-ested in Alling's story when she came across an article about her in 2007.";So I started looking things up.";
Smith-Josephy says the more she researched the story, the more she found it engaging and the char-acter of Alling magnetic.
"Lillian Alling was intriguing, stubborn and single-minded, and I felt she deserved a book.";
Alling had little money, no iden-tification papers, and no transpor-tation when she set out on her 6,000-mile (9,650 km) trek across the continent, but she had plenty of determination. Over the three years that followed, she walked most of the way to Dawson City, Yukon, crossing North America though Canada, weathering the baking sun and freezing winter. She concluded her journey in a rowboat 1,250 miles down the Yukon River to the Bering Sea.
Less than a year after Alling set out, she was arrested at Hazelton in British Columbia in the fall of 1927 "for her own good"; on a trumped up charge of vagrancy. She was sent to Oakalla Prison in Burnaby for a few weeks and wintered in Vancouver "so she wouldn't freeze to death on the Telegraph Trail"; with the en-croaching winter.
She resumed her journey the following spring (1928) after catching a boat to Stewart from Vancouver. From there she walked south to Smithers to register with the provincial police, before head-ing up the Telegraph Trail from Hazelton to Telegraph Creek, Atlin and eventually the Yukon.
In those days the Telegraph Trail had emergency cabins 10 miles apart between Hazelton and Telegraph Creek, and five of those cabins were manned by linemen who relayed messages and made necessary repairs to the telegraph line. The head telegrapher, Ruxton Cox, tapped out a message to the linemen to keep an eye out for Alling. When she arrived, each man tapped back a message to Cox say-ing she had come and gone safely. They also gave her food, shelter and encouragement. Sometimes they walked several miles along the trail to meet her and accompany her for part of her journey.
On August 24, 1928 Alling made it to Tagish, her first stop in the Yukon.
"In spite of her efforts to keep a low profile, Liliian Alling by now had become something of a celeb-rity across the north,"; writes Smith--Josephy. "A lone woman walking to Siberia could not escape notice.";
She arrived in Whitehorse on Aug. 27, 1928 and finally made it to Dawson City on Oct. 7 where she spent the winter.
Smith-Josephy fills in the blank spaces of Alling's journey by citing the memoirs of other trekkers who hiked the same trails around the same period. Winfield Woolf, who journeyed up the Telegraph Trail a year after Alling, described the challenging river crossings he was forced to make.
"I used Winfield Woolf's articles to describe the terrain,"; Smith--Josephy says. "I found Winfield's son and he told me that his father lost his toes to frostbite and would take off his socks at family gather-ings and show people his stubs.";
In the spring of l929 Alling navi-gated the Yukon River from Dawson City alone in a rowboat. By August she got to Nome, Alaska on the Bering Sea. It was here that Smith--Josephy loses track of Alling on this last leg of her journey. There is some speculation she never made it.
She was walking to the small Alaskan village of Prince of Wales, the western-most point of Seward Peninsula where she planned to hire someone to take her the 55 miles across the Bering Strait to Siberia.
"I discovered there are just two possibilities: either she drowned in Alaskan waters or she made it safely across the Bering Strait to Siberia,"; writes the author. Smith-Josephy prefers to think she made it.
"Lordy, I hope she did. There's no record of any deaths. I believe she reached Siberia against all odds."; Lillian Alling: The Journey Home, published by Caitlin Press is Smith-Josephy's first book.
978-1894759540
Sage Birchwater