Catherine MacPhearson MacDonald Hughes Kaslo City Councillor
The story of Catherine MacPhearson MacDonald Hughes (born January 1, 1863) and her husband Angus MacDonald (born about 1846) begins in the craggy western highlands of Inverness-shire and Argyll, the borderlands of Scotland around Loch Shiel. On February 7, 1881, at age eighteen, Catherine, the daughter of mason Hugh and farmer Isabelle MacPhearson married Angus MacDonald of nearby Dorlin. His home in the Ardnamurchan and Moidart region of Scotland was considered geographically and culturally remote.
The inhabitants north of the River Shiel were primarily Catholic speakers of Gaelic. In 1881, six out of ten inhabitants of this region were Gaelic speakers. In fact, “After the 1829 [Catholic] Relief Act [of the British Parliament] there was a serious outbreak of church building among Catholic congregations.”1 Angus and Catherine were part of this Scottish Roman Catholic population. The births of all five of their children, born between 1882 and 1888, are recorded at the Shrine of Our Lady of the Angels in Mingary, Inverness-shire, the little Chapel where Catherine and Angus were married. They brought their Catholic traditions with them when they immigrated to Canada, settling in what was then called the Northwest Territories in the spring of 1889.
Undertaking such a demanding and dangerous venture required family support for the young family. It is generally acknowledged in the family lore that the first MacDonald or McDonald to take up homesteading in the Cochrane area of the then Northwest Territories (now Alberta) was Angus William (A.W.) who arrived in the foothills of the Rockies in the summer of 1881. He established the Glenfinnan sheep ranch (named after his wife’s home in Scotland) at Ghost River near the future Cochrane, Alberta. His family joined him in 1886. Angus and Catherine do not appear, , in recorded history or documents of the “Big Hill” ranch land near Cochrane, but succeeding generations of MacDonalds (sometimes spelled McDonald or Macdonald) accept that they had taken up an invitation from other Inverness-shire born relatives and embarked with their young family of three girls and two boys
