(7 Sept. 1799-29 May 1883), merchant. (Squire Cattanach) Born Badenoch, Inverness-shire, Scotland. Parents: Mr and Mrs John Cattanach. He was educated at the parish school, and employed in England, then came to Canada in 1826 to join his family, who had already emigrated. He settled first at Alexandria, and then in 1832 at the place on the Kenyon-Lochiel border which he named Laggan after his boyhood home in Scotland.

     There he lived for the next half century, noted for his hospitality and his natural gifts of leadership, and involved at the economic level in store-keeping, farming, lumbering, and potash-making. As a good citizen, he was prominent also as a road commissioner, postmaster, JP, municipal councillor, school superintendent, and advisor to the settlers in legal matters. Devoutly religious, he was a Sunday school teacher and Presbyterian elder. He supported the Free Church rather than the Kirk of Scotland cause in the Disruption. He was a promoter, also, of Protestantism among the French Canadians. Breaking reluctantly with the time-honoured “drinks” aspect of Highland hospitality, he turned himself into an early and vigorous advocate of the temperance cause in GC. In politics he was a supporter of the Sandfield brothers J.S. and D.A. Macdonald . Cattanach was fluent in Gaelic as well as in English. He loved music, and was skilled in the pibroch. He is said to have been interested enough in hunting in his early years to bring sporting dogs with him to Canada.

     In his old age, in 1882, he and his wife left Laggan to join their children in Winnipeg. Twenty-five carriages and 2 pipers accompanied him to the railway station. (Cornwall Freeholder 25 Aug. 1882) He died in Winnipeg after 9 months. He was an elder in the Presbyterian Free Church congregation at the West Church, Kirk Hill, but he is buried with the other Cattanachs at Dalhousie Mills, GC. “On Monday the mortal remains of Squire Cattanach, formerly of Laggan, arrived at Dalhousie Mills from Winnipeg and were laid at rest.” (Cornwall Freeholder 8 June 1883) He was married (1) in 1832 to Catharine McDonald or McDonell, widow of Duncan McMillan, (2) in 1839 to Flora McKenzie (d. 1893), the sister of James R. McKenzie, a connection, perhaps a grand-niece (Cornwall Standard 17 March 1921; MacDougald), of Flora Macdonald of the ‘45.

     His son Alexander John Cattanach and his stepson John Cattanach McMillan and his son-in-law A.W. Ross are separately noticed in this dictionary. Also, Donald Cattanach’s daughter Margaret Anne Cattanach married Malcolm Alexander MacLean, the first mayor of Vancouver. Another daughter, Mary J., married James Hoyes Panton who taught at the Ontario Agricultural College.

     Donald Cattanach’s memory will always be associated with and enhanced by the short biography of 1884, a most superb piece of writing, composed almost certainly by Mrs Margaret Dixon MacDougall. The poem at the end of the biography, presumably written specifically as a tribute to Cattanach, is a work of no small achievement., and so far as the text indicates, is also by Mrs MacDougall. His pastor in Winnipeg, who also composed a short but eloquent tribute to him (printed in the 1884 biography), was not (as has been supposed) the Rev. Daniel Gordon or his son “Ralph Connor” but rather the Rev. D.M. Gordon, afterwards a distinguished principal of Queen’s University.

     The Rev. Donald MacMillan is almost certainly correct (Kirk, 207-208, 390) in identifying Cattanach as the unnamed author of a memorable passage in the 1870 biography of William C. Burns (pp. 285-286, largely repr. in Kirk) which describes how the author “taking a powerful team of horses” brought Burns through the all but impassible roads after a wild GC snowstorm to a preaching engagement at the Congregational chapel, Indian Lands.

Mrs A. MacDougall, Friendly Reminiscences of Donald Cattanach, Esq. (1884), 16 pp. * Rose, i, 505-506, based on MacDougall but with additional information * MacGillivray & Ross 65-68, 133 * A. W. McDougald in his history of GC in Glengarry News 23 & 30 June 1933 * Dumbrille, B, chapter “The Squire of Laggan” * Cattanach gravestones, Dalhousie Mills * obituary of wife, Cornwall Freeholder 9 June 1893, from Toronto Globe * Bea Corbett, a descendant, Glengarry Life 1981 * MacMillan, Kirk: index * Butternuts and Maple Sugar 261 * Lovell 1857 100 * Alex. M’Donell (Inch) at Kenyon, GC, writes attacking Donald Cattanach for wishing to be GC’s MLA, and Donald Cattanach replies in long letter, Cornwall Observer 11 April & 2 May 1834 * marriage 1839, The Ontario Register. ed. Thomas B. Wilson. Vol. 2 (1969, 1980) 176 * life of Malcolm Alexander MacLean, Dictionary of Canadian Biography XII, and life of his wife by Beatrice Corbett, a descendant, Glengarry Life 1983 * life of James Hoyes Panton in MDict, Morgan (1898). He was starred DCB XI, 454 (“competent men, such as James Hoyes Panton”) for inclusion in DCB but omitted when his volume came up * obituaries of Donald Cattanach’s daughters Anna J., widow of E. A. Perry, GN 24 Dec. 1915, and Katherine, widow of Rev. Hugh Campbell, Cornwall Standard 17 March 1921, GN 18 March 1921