pg 640 More Bill HIll Country 2009
Charlie Pedeprat was born on March 12, 1873 in the village of Belloc in the lower Pyrenees Mountains of France. He was 11 years old when he and his 18 year old brother came to live with their Uncle Jean D’Artique on his ranch on the Dog Pound Creek, northwest of Cochrane. On the train trip from Winnipeg to Calgary, the train travelled so slowly that the two boys, for amusement, would get off the train and run alongside of it.
Charlie worked for his Uncle Jean until he was seventeen then he worked on various ranches in the Cochrane district, including Cochrane Ranche, a major operation in the area. He used to recall that on spring
roundups they would have to go as far east as Gleichen to gather cattle that had drifted before the blizzards of winter. Mr. Pedeprat worked for one outfit after anoth- er, never taking up land of his own, and as he figured the pioneering life wasn’t for a woman, he never married. Charlie was in the Forestry Corps in the First World War and spent eleven months in Scotland before going to France.
To Cochrane “Old Timers”, Charlie was a master axe man, they still talk of the way he could dovetail the corners of a log cabin. For a time he worked for the C.P.R. at Banff building the Mount Assiniboia cabins, He also built a number of cabins at Sunshine ten miles out of Banff. He once had a contract to cut 900 railway ties, he did all of the work himself, often cutting as many as 40 ties a day.
In 1953 (at the tender age of 80), pneumonia forced his retirement. He lived with the Steele family of Cochrane the last twenty four years of his life.
Charlie Pedeprat passed away on Sunday, May 2, 1965 at the age of 92 in the Colonel Belcher Hospital after being in the hospital for only two days. He is buried in the Field of Honour in the Burnsland Cemetery in Calgary.
Deep Dive
- Charles is mentioned often in our blogs for his skill with an axe. Pedeprat search of Blogs
- Jean Dartigue
- Forestry Corp
