ERIC JANZE
My grandfather MacIntosh carne from Scotland where he was
a lawyer. He carne to Montreal first to work with his brothers
who had large department stores in Montreal. But he was too
adventurous for that so he carne out to British Columbia in 1860
and went up to Matson Creek on the Gold Rush. Then he was a
fifty niner~ He gave up his law business just to corne here.
He did very well in Matson Creek and he went back to Scotland
to see his mother. In those days when he carne out to B.C. he
had to corne all the way around the horn. By the time he was
able to go back, his mother was dead so he just stayed there
a short while and carne back to B.C.
When he went back to Matson Creek he'd known my grandmother
before he left. He'd met her before and so when he got back
they got married.
Then he went to work for Hudson's Bay. He was at Fort St.
James and some of their children were born there. My Uncle
Angus was born at Fort Fraser and the rest of them were born at
Babine at the fort there.
My mother and her sister were born here in Hazelton. My
mother was born in Hazelton in 1898. He went back to Matson
Creek. After they settled in Hazelton for a few years he did
short stints for the Hudson's Bay Company. He quit the Bay
Company and then moved back here (Hazelton). He was fur
trading and he knows everything about furs. He died in 1922.
He was 86 years old when he died. I just remembered, he was a
very short man with long whiskers. He led a very interesting
life.
I guess the adventures of this country must have been something altogether different.
He never gave up his old w~
~well, he dressed for dinner. I can remember evenings, he
lived with us on the ranch and when he carne horne for dinner he
would put his jacket on and his tie, too. He never gave up even
though he'd lived most of his life out in the woods. He was
very set in his ways.
My father carne to B.C. He carne to Canada in 1905 and I
think he arrived in B.C. the same year practically. He made
his way looking for land then he went across Canada searching
both north and south in each province. He and my Uncle Ernest

2

and my Uncle Charlie had been out in Kispiox the first
year they were here and looked it over and they couldn't get
it out of their minds, it was such a beautiful place, so they
came back. Because I know the first records of them being up
in Kispiox Valley or I mean in the stories they were telling, was
in 1908, and, of course, there were no roads. Even a few years
later they had to take their equipment up the river in rowboats
right up to the Kispiox. I thought they would have come here
by steamboat and I believe they could. I imagine they went as
far as Kispiox on the opposite side of the river by wagon, and
across the Skeena at Kispiox. There was no bridge at Kispiox
then and there was no bridge across the Bulkley Canyon.
I think the first bridge built across the Skeena was 1912
or 1913, I'm not sure.
They went up with pack trains, horses and across the river
at Kispiox and the horses had to swim. I think it was 1913 when
they put the bridge in, and something I found out yesterday
that the Skeena bridge was the third bridge out here at fourmile. The first one went out about a year later in the high
water. It's hard to believe the water was that high. Mind
you, it was much lower than the present bridge. Also, it was
very very difficult to build it up because the land was very
awkward. Well, even in 1936 the water was very close to the
old bridge. That I remembered because the houses, when we were
coming down from Kispiox, were just swooping underneath it.
We used to go out there and watch the houses coming down.
They were comtng down in tact, you know, just floating right
along. They'd go under the bridge and through the whirlpool
and when they came up they were just matchwood. It sucked
them right under, kept them down there for two or three minutes
and then spew them back up and they were just a mass of broken
lumber. Some people were flooded underwater, but I don't
believe they lost any houses. They raised cattle up there, my
father and my uncles. My Uncle Charlie didn't spend as much
time up there as the other two. He'd go away and work different
places then he finally went and worked at the telegraph line.
ou mentioned something about your
soldier.
\

~.

ERIC JANZE
Oh, yes! It's a French name although it came from
Sweden. It was from the days when Sweden was making a big
bid for power and they were hiring alot of armies from other
countries. And there's still quite a few French names in
Sweden. Even the king's name is French because they got rid of
their king and took the French General and made him their king
and that's why the names are still French. In 1908 the Janze's
farmed at the Carlson Place and the one up there at Pitsman's was
ours.
They used to pole the boats when you travel on the river
with boats going upstream. You used poles going upstream and
push them up. In some places they have to have a man on the
bank with a rope to keep it in a line and to prevent it from
getting away and tow it as well. Downwards you row. They just
turn them loose right to the middle of the river and then
they used oars. On rowboats or canoes they used paddles. I
can remember them standing in the canoes going upstream, and
I can remember them standing using poles. They would use the
bank, I guess, literally, or just anything that was under them.
They put the poles in the water. If they were close to the
bank they would take advantage of it so they wouldn't get stuck
in a soft spot. Then, of course, after that was the big Paddle
Wheel Era. I don't remember them either because they were upriver for six years. When I was born in 1912 The Inlander was
the last boat to operate on the Skeena, that was just prior to
the railroad. Really, it was a big boom for the boats because
of the railway building. Previous to that the freight was
coming up here to be distributed like for Hudson's Bay from
here almost as far as Prince George and then the other way to
Matson Creek and, of course, Babine. Before that their freight
had been coming up by pack train or someway through the Cariboo
and this made it much easier and shorter so they finally had
the boats down to a round trip in less than 48 hous, from Port
Essington up here, back down again. At one time it took them
about six days to get back down again. Then they built more
large and powerful boats.
I never rode on one because they were off the Skeena
although after I was grown up, I repaired the engines on one

3

4

in Prince Rupert. It operated on the lower Skeena. I overhauled the engine.
They used to carry about 200 passengers and 300 tons of
freight. They averaged 125 fee{long and 25 feet wide; that was
the average. Some were longer and some were shorter. The
tram-line went from the top of Rocher de Boulle Mountain down

,

to the radroad and the Rocher de Boulle ~ine was a copper mine.
It would be about three miles, I imagine. It operated about
45 years.
I guess Dorothy Allen must have had pictures of the horses
taking the tram-line up to the tip. I guess it had connected
up about two loops to each mule. It had two loops on each side
so that it would balance. Old Dave Wiggins told me about that
because he worked on that drive. He told me that they had the
mules stand in a long line and they had a mule stand between
the loops at each section where it was looped. Then they had
a man or two men (I don't know how many men) for each loop, so
that when they loaded, they loaded them all at once. Otherwise
if there had been just a few men working the first mules would
have been tired before they got finished so they just loaded
them all at once. They had special pack saddles and they loaded
them at once and got them away right away. I can remember when
pack trains were working, there was still quite a few of them
working when I was working up at the telegraph line doing
geological surveys, forest surveys and mining camps.
Hazelton was weU established before Prince Rupet. Prince
Rupert wasn't even thought of. This was a supply centre.
Prince George had beginnings about this time because it was on
the trading trail. They even brought freight in by steamboat,
Port Essington received the larger boats and then transferred
the freight here.
It was almost like a western waterway. Mining played a
great role and then, of course, the railroad.
Silver, copper and tungsten were taken out of here but
not much gold. The Red Rose Mine had alot of tungsten and in
the Second World War for a while it was the only major supply
for all of the western provinces. There was a smaller mine in
southern B.C., but it was just a very small one. This is a huge
mine and there's a huge bed of tungsten in there. And it's still

ERIC JANZE

5

operating. Yes, because it was re-opened in the Korean War.
In Korea they have huge deposits of tungsten and it's open pit so
it's mined much cheaper. When those supplies were cut off they
had to open the mine again. Tungsten is used for hardening
steel.
It's used in the steel to make the filament hard so it
doesn't burn. There's huge mounds of it, but it's too expensive
to take or mine out. Right now they could probably get men in
Korea for less than one dollar an hour and then it's open work.
Then there were Belly Dum~ very heavily constructed ore wagons
pulled by horses used at Silver Standard Mine.
Placer gold comes in it's pure state and then it's washed
out of the gravel. Sometimes you can even fill up the gold
pans with gravel, put it in the creek and wash it around until
all the gravel is gone. But in Matson Creek most of it was done
by these huge hydraulic monitors where they were just like big
huge fire hoses which would stay behind and was trapped the same
way as Barkerville did it. They literally washed away mountains
of gravel, the water ran in flues and the lighter material
travelled on while the gold was trapped the same way as Barkerville
did it.
There's been so much to learn in the last 50 years that
a lot of events have been crowded out of your mind because we
have had to consume more information in the last 50 years than
people 50 years before us. That's why when young people tell'.me
they have a hard and difficult life to live in this world, I
remind them that I had to live through from a very simple life
to this complicated life and change my ideas all the way along.
Anyone at all who is 50 years old has to do the same thing.
The first radio I can remember was in the old Omineca
Hotel, that's on the corner where the laundromat is. It had one
of these big horns on it. The next radio I can remember, Mr.
Cox, who is the telegraph operator in the telegraph office in
Hazelton, had one, but it had earphones and you had to take turns
listening to it.
Do you know that I had been around airplanes before I ever
saw radio, because George Burns had an airplane around here and

6

was flying big game hunters long before the radio was made.
Cataline died after I was born so I don't remember him,
but I do remember Dave Wiggins. He was quite a man. He was
born in the state of Washington and he ran away from home when
he was nine years old and he found work on the lower Fraser
working with a packing train loading in the Cariboo going up
through the Cariboo and I imagine that's where he met up with
Cataline and gradually moved north. Cataline was teaching him
everything he knew.
The great old man knew when he was very old when the government brought in the pack train here just after the Second World
War, and they went north to work with the geological surveys
and they had their horses there by Marshall Brothers and they
.were fitting out the harness. Of course, they had manufactured very fancy looking harnesses and old Dave was sitting
on the sidewalk watching. He was watching for days and never
said a word. I came along and sat down beside him and said,
"What do you think Qf it, Dave?" He didn't say anything and
after awhile he said, "No britching." There was no straps
that went around the rear of the horse to keep the packs from
sliding ahead when they went down a steep hill. The harness
was designed for relatively level ground like packing. Pack
saddles were designed for level ground the way they fastened
them. They took off with them that way and when they got up
aro~nd Blackwater they were just having an awful time so they
flew Dave in there and Dave spent all summer with them. He
didn't work. He was too old to work then, but all he did was
mend equipment. He took up enough leather and that to remanufacture their equipment.
Donald MacIntosh, my uncle, worked for Cataline for many
years. He also worked allover the province with survey crews
because I remember him talking about being on survey crews on
Vancouver Island and then inbetween times, if he wasn't doing
that, he and his brothers would get on horses and they'd ride
horses all the way to Ashcroft, then they'd work on cattle
ranches around there for the summer and drive a few head of
horses or cows backup here again in the fall to sell them.

ERIC JANZE

7

Mind you, they were still doing that until ab~ 1938.
In 1938 there was Chuck Walker, Harry Petro .... about five of
them. They'd go to bring horses up from Ashcroft and they'd
break them so whe~ver you want a horse broken just go and tell
them what you want them broken for, harness, etc.
Arthur Hankin may have been in the Cavalry or not, I don't
know. I know he was in the same outfit as my uncle in about
1855, the beginning of the riverboats.
That was when the first riverboat attempted to come up
the Skeen a and I think he got as far as Kitseguekla. It was
underpowered and it couldn't get any farther. They were built
with a very flat bottom so they don't draw water. They burnt
wood in their boilers. The smaller ones didn't need much water
at all. The large boats that were fully loaded needed about six
feet of water. When the smaller ones go up the river and are empty
they only need about 2~ feet of water and the large ones need
about 5~ feet of water.
Charlie Janze was a deep sea captain before he came to
Canada. He was a captain for a number of years and he was also a
pilot taking excursion boats up on the river there when he was
14 years old. That's how he put himself through university. He
worked in the summertime and that was when he was young.
My grandfather was a lawyer. I re~/ly don't know what
Charlie had taken in university, but I do know that he was the
captain of a passenger ship. He came to Canada in 1905 and
then in 1917 he went up on the Yukon Telegraph Line and that
was it. He spent the rest of his life up there in 8th cabin.
He didn't change. He liked the life up there.
He was a telegraph operator in 8th cabin. There were two
men in each cabin; an operator and a lineman, but they both had
to do line work. They patrolled a certain amount of area but
each cabin had to have a man who was an operator.
They didn't live in the same cabin. They had separate
cabins, separate sheds for their food,you know, what they called
caches, built up on lumber so there would be no friction between
them you see, because they have been there for three years.
They had separate quarters.

8
They were on permanently, but they only got holidays
every three years. And then they got three months holiday
which was paid. Their furs were over and above all their
wages because they all had a trapline alongside the trail.
That would be about 200 miles from here. It's half way
to Telegraph Creek.
He also went to Chicago World's Fair. He came out in
1930 and bought a car. Then when he came, he gave me his car.
When we were on the farm, that was my real father, and
after we'd been in town about two years and my father died
when I was goi~ on to nine years old. Then my mother married
again a couple~years later. Then my stepfather had the garage.
We moved in 1924 and my dad died in 1926.
We really didn't miss the farm that much. It was all
different, see with my father gone. It would never be the same
and my stepfather was a mechanic and his name was Martin. The
reason he came to Hazelton was to overhaul George Burns'
airplane. He was an airplane mechanic in the Royal Air Force
in the First World War, so he came here and then he stayed
because there was no one here to repair cars if they broke down
and if it was anything more than the very minor thing then
they would just push it off into a field somewhere and go to
buy another one. So he had quite a bonanza for the first year
or two. He was here repairing all those cars and some of them,
you know, he would have them in the garage for half a day
and they were ready to go again. I started working in the garage
when I was eleven years old, after school and holidays. My
uncle gave me a car at twelve. I've had cars ever since then.
I just parked the car when I went into the army and when I came
home it was waiting for me.
My youngest full brother was killed at Anzio and Marie
Wilson was overseas for almost four years. She was a QuarterMaster Seargent Major at Aldershot.
I didn't get to England. I spent most of my time instructioning in Canada and then I was on my way to India and I got
sick and that wound up my army career and I spent the rest of
the time in the hospital. I was discharged as an absolute wreck
and I couldn't walk. It was heart problems. They never did

ERIC JANZE

9

reoJly pin the problem down. I spent 26 months laying on my
back and I couldn't even feed myself. I couldn't walk when I
came home. I stayed in the house all the time and if I had to
go anywhere they had to bring the car right up to the door.
For six years I was like that.
Two years ago I went down to Vancouver and they took my
heart right out and peeled it all and tucked it back in. I'm
a new man altogether. Not being able to walk was an after
effect. They never really did find out what the problem was.
I sure was disappointed because all . my friends had left and
it was two days before I had to get on the train to go to
India.
It was pretty well over in Europe and they started to ship
Canadians to East Asia. Then they were sending a bunch of
officers and N.C.O.'s ahead of the army to pave the way for the
Canadian Army. I was a seargent at that time and I was just
on my way and I got pneumonia and I went from bad to worse
.and that ended my career right there.
Uncle Ernest stayed right on the ranch there until he
died in 1948. Then we disposed of the cows and horses and
sheep and Charlie stayed up there for a year longer and then
he moved downtown in 1949. We had 25 head of cattle and all
kinds of horses and we wintered them on the ranch by Ted
Campbell's house. That was before we moved into town. But
the horses that they raised, they kept them separately. They
kept them up on the upper ranch. They were real expensive work
horses.
My father gave me a horse when I was 4 years old. It was
a little pinto, but I can't remember it's name.
I trapped with my Uncle Ernest and later years my Uncle
Charlie when he quit the line. He had a trapline down close
by the two ranches and the little branch line where we trapped.
And so there was just all kinds of animals there. I had
this rooster and I called it Petty. We slept with the window
open and he would come in and get on the beds. One morning
I couldn't find Petty and searched allover for him and I never
did find him. It wasn't until I was grown up that I had found
out that we had eaten him for supper. My mother didn't have

10

the heart to tell me ••
She was
quite an unusual person.
the chickens when she went on the farm.
My dad was 6'4".

She was afraid of even
She was only 4' 11" .

When the bridge to South Town went out, they were blasting
rocks and they loosened one section of it so it couldn't be used
and somehow, water (I believe it was that year or maybe the next
spring) the highwater took out the bridge at Smithers so the
Depatment of Highways came down and asked permission to dis,mantle that bridge and move it up to Smithers, and then when
the war was over they'd put a new bridge in for us down here.
We used the Hagwilget Bridge after they took this one apart.
We were never without a bridge and they forgot about it
conveniently.
P. Burns Company had a packing house on Mission Flats.
Do you know they're a big outfit now? They drove cattle out
here and they had a slaughter house at Mission Flats. They had
their own paddle wheeler or stern wheeler and they distributed
meat to all the construction camps on the railroad all the way
down the river from here, and that same rule applied to the
gold fields. I guess that would be pretty well after the gold
fields.
He had been operating a certain amount of the prairies
before that, but this was his first big contract which he got
started. He came from Calgary, but it was a very small company
until he got this contract to supply the camps on the Skeen a
River.
There were black bears around then and we used to sneak
along the trails and get as close as we could to them and then
jump up and bound and shout and holler to see how fast they
could run.
Sheep were kept here and naturally they were kept for wool
and stuff like that, and the main reason was to keep the brush
down. You know how brush will crowd in on a farm? Well, that
was the reason my uncles kept them up there, but mostly it
was to keep the brush down. They kept about 60 head of sheep.
There have been many changes in the past 50 years. The

ERIC JANZE

1
1

biggest change has really been since the Second World War,
because of communications. People can travel so much faster
and easier now. I can remember when you got on the train at
Prince Rupert in the early evening and you didn't get to
Hazelton until about 5 or 6 o'clock the next morning. Of
course, that was the only way to travel. You could travel
back and forth by train. After the war, they built that road
to Prince Rupert.
That was for the protection of Prince Rupert and also
for moving troops and that like u.S. Army troops. They wanted
a way through before they got the Alaska Highway, they were
working on the Alaska Highway at the same time, but they got
that road open so they could use it right away. You know it's
sad and rather interesting how it has to be wars and gold that
does fantastic changes in the world. It does a lot of bad
things, but at the same time, it seems to just burst things
wide open.
Speaking of the Second World War, I was in Alberta same
as you were here. Young men haven't been out of their community
in a lifetime. They were allover the world all of a sudden
and saw places which they thought they would never see. So it
just seems that man has to have a little piece of dynamite to
send him into orbit once in a while.
I suppose the opening of Hazelton as we know it has such a
terrific center with all the pack trains and with all the gold
and the hospital and all kinds of things which just seem to
hinge on these particular things such as the Telegraph Line.
The gold rush, the gold field, Matson Creek Trading,
of course, and the other thing too was the people moving into the
Bulkley up in that area. They all came through this way.
I guess one of the really exceptional things of this area
is that the variety of people over her~ see they weren't all
just farmers and they weren't all something else, they were
just everything - everything you could imagine.
George Burns used to go flying big game hunters up north.
It was a German Army plane, or I mean a German Army Air Force
plane. It was a big B-1 PLane, if I can remember correctly,
but I don't know how many passengers it took. I can remember

I2

that, whether it was 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6. Whatever it was,
he used Mission Point down there as the air field, and he had a
big shed out there and it had finally gotten to the point where
the engine needed overhauling and that's how my stepfather
got into business.
I think he carne from California at that time although he
was a Canadian, but he worked allover North America. He
liked to travel so he just worked allover and somehow or other
they got ahold of him in California and he carne up.
I guess those were the days when men were very sharp
because of so many things happening.
I think we're going to see some terrific changes in
Hazelton. Just the sheer pressure of population is going to
force it, 20 years from now you'll hardly recognize this
country.
The climate here is good and there's still many open
places in British Columbia, but they just haven't had the
climate we have and it's very close to communications.
CommunicationS, transportation, everything is good here.
It's just that you can stop it for a little while, but
after awhile it can't be held off any longer. (amalgamation)
There's a handful of individuals that can't see for the good
of them.
Well, this country's primarily for growing food and
recreation. Now I'm not talking about cattle ranching. As far
as I'm concerned it's not a cattle country, but for growing
vegetables and that;I don't think there's no place in the northwest that's any better. With the food shortage there is now and
with imported food and we import so much in the winter time that
I think we're going to start producing it and preserving it right
here in British Columbia.
Don't forget about the tourist industry. That's got to
be a fantastic thing.
The Alaska highway is cut, it's shut down. It's because of
washouts. They have them every year, but before people were
just tied up and they couldn't move. Now they can corne down
here and go to Kitwanga and go through. There was just a steady
stream of cars on the highway just bumper to bumper on the way

ERIC JANZE

13

to Kitwanga. It's been like this every year for the last three
years.
Of course, it's verykautiful up north. They say Watson
Lake and the totem poles are just spectacular because a man who
puts out the green book, you know, B.C. Tourist Guide, came to
see we had just come back from that country. He said that
road would be paved long before the highway because the Alaska
Highway was just over, you know. It's got nothing compac~d to
what this highway has.
I was talking to a truck drive that had just ~from
Alaska. I was talking to him in Kitwanga and he said as soon
as the road was upgraded there was no way he'd drive there again.
In the first place, it cuts, 400 miles off his trip.
Going to Kitwanga to Alaska, they go and then they go up to
Cassiar Road and get the Alaska Highway there, you see, but
even at that distance it cuts off 400 miles.
You can always use roads, you can always use loops. That's
what I say~ they'll build essential roads first and then build
all kinds of roads after.
Yes, I've moved out two or three times. I've also been
back every time. It's a fantastic country.