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]

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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).