Service on the Skeena

His name was Horace Wrinch. It was 1880. He was 14 years old, a farmer’s boy from England travelling on his own to Quebec. Twenty years later, a qualified doctor and surgeon, he arrived in Hazelton on the Skeena River, in Northern British Columbia. At this time the northern interior of the province had no qualified doctors, no surgeons and no hospitals. Hazelton, still then a pioneer town, was the high point of navigation for the six months of the year that the Skeena was navigable. In 1904 Horace built the first hospital in the northern interior. Over the next thirty-six years he became widely respected as doctor and surgeon, hospital administrator, medical missionary, Methodist minister, magistrate, farmer, community leader and progressive politician. Ever innovative, he instituted a form of health insurance for the Hazelton community as early as 1908. In the nineteen-twenties, he was a two term President of the newly established British Columbia Hospital Association and a two term Liberal member of the Provincial Legislature for the Skeena riding. While in Victoria he advocated for progressive causes. In particular he championed publicly funded state health insurance, sponsoring a motion in the Legislature in 1927.  He witnessed the changes in transportation from horseback, dog sled and sternwheeler to the arrival of the railroad, the automobile and the aeroplane. Upon his death in 1939, he was called “the most influential and best liked man that ever blessed this district with his presence.”  Drawn almost entirely from original and contemporaneous sources, this is the previously untold story of a remarkable British Columbian.