Jean ‘Cataline’ Caux lived a full and varied life in the new province of British Columbia. After running pack trains up and down the province for more than 50 years, Cataline retired to Hazelton to live out his days.
He had many friends there, and they looked after him. These were the days before pensions and universal health care. However, Cataline was lucky to be in Hazelton because there was a subscription service (a form of health insurance) to the Hazelton Hospital.
A new book, ‘Service on the Skeena: Horace Wrinch, Frontier Physician’ by Geoff Mynett mentions Cataline (page 250):
“The old packer Cataline died in 1922. He had always said that he did not like hospitals and that people only went there to die. Despite such talk, though, he had in fact contributed to the hospital’s appeals for donations over the years. He had resisted going there for as long as he could. His friend Sperry Cline took him eventually, grumbling, and groaning an, and there he did die.”
“They buried him in the cemetery on top of the bluff. Horace and Cataline were hardly friends, but Cataline was a link to the distant pass, to the days when Hazelton was cut off from the outside world for four or five months of the year. H was, moreover, a link to the gold rush days of the middle of the previous century.”
Find A Grave, an online collection of gravesites and cemeteries, has a listing for Cataline. He is buried in Gitanmaax Cemetery in Hazelton, British Columbia.
SusanSmithJosephy 